What's Left?

I don’t come from a line of long-livers. Neither side produced any genuinely old people, and I’d be surprised if I have more than about twenty years left. I’ve no doubt they will pass very quickly, so I could do with finding some profitable way of using them.

This has been much on my mind recently. What to do with the time there is left?

Finding a hobby won’t do; learning to grow big vegetables won’t do; gathering together a community of friends won’t do; seeing the world’s great tourist sights won’t do. Having my novel read by a lot of people would be nice, but that’s out of my hands and is passive anyway. I think the clue lies in a recent post; the only thing that is ultimately meaningful in life is experience, because that’s the only thing we can take with us when we go.

So does this mean I have to consciously do something to get it? Maybe not, since I’m the sort who can gain experience from watching a leaf flutter in the breeze. It’s simply a matter of making connections and seeing the layers of meaning. Furthermore, I’ve found that the most rewarding things in my life have come not from deciding what I want and going for it, but through chance circumstances and encounters. In that sense at least, I’ve always been an opportunist. It seems, therefore, that:

The watchword must be vigilance.

The keyword must be experience.

The process must be instinct.

The only problem with all this is that I’m impatient, and I would rather choose the experiences than having them handed to me un-vetted. Tricky!