On the pleasures of a quiet life
So a quarter of a century ago, Al and I went to a Justice of the Peace and got ourselves married!
The passing of time is amazing…we’ve weathered a few storms but damn it, if we’re still here. Living a good, quiet life together…
It's amazing how something someone says sends you off on a string of thoughts and associations.
As a much younger man, I had fantasies of adventure. I would be a world-changer. I would win a Pulitzer. I would win a Nobel. I would have no fixed abode, because I would be traveling the world.
Life, though, has a strange way of not taking into account your desires, and instead, inexorably, leading you to what you need.
Maybe I just didn't have the desire to do all the work it would take to achieve those young man's dreams. Or maybe the universe had other plans for me.
One of the things that my wife has always told me is to stop worrying, things always work out. I can't tell you how against my grain that went. Life was a constant struggle, peppered with disappointments. But the thing is, as I look back on my over half-century on this earth, things did always work out, a combination of fortune and work.
As I've aged, I've come to a conclusion which would have startled me at age 20: the quiet life is something to pursue and cherish.
One changes the world every day by what one does in it. You don't have to man the ideological and metaphorical barricades to do so. You can change the world by being kind to another human being. You can change the world by doing your job so that you affect someone's life in a way she needed.
Living a quiet life does not mean living an uneventful life. It means having a place of succor and calm from which you can face the challenges of life.
Sometimes a life of quiet is impossible. Sometimes injustice precludes quiet. You have to leave the pleasures of home behind, because the world has to be set to rights. But I trust a man who has left his home to fight for the good more than a man who lives to fight, no matter the cause. One man fights to preserve that quiet, to return to it, and to make sure everyone can enjoy it. The other is at a loss with no dragons to slay, and will invent them, usually with disastrous consequences.
Creating the conditions for quiet and peaceful lives, lives of human fulfilment and justice, should be the motive force of any decently organized government. To the extent that a government doesn't bring the greatest good to the greatest number of people, it has failed. To the extent that a government values the powerful few over the powerless many it has failed. To the extent that a government focuses on matters which don't enhance human life, it has failed. We see too many of those governments, both abroad and here. That's when we fight, so that we can enjoy that quiet afterwards.
Our species is still too consumed with war and anger. It is too consumed with power and wealth. None of these things brings peace or joy. And there are those in power who foment that anger, that quest for dominance at the expense of others, in order to maintain their positions. It's the only way they can, because they bring nothing of value otherwise, and would be jettisoned if the scales fell from the eyes of those they trick.
But I have every faith that we are at the cusp of some change for the better. We may finally—fitfully, grudgingly—be growing out of our adolescence. We may be on the verge of saving ourselves from our own foolish desires. We are valuing what we need rather than what we think we want. Because as my wife says, things always work out.