Quote:
Originally Posted by nezlie
What are the most important things in life?
Each of us travels down a different path in life, and from our individual experiences we can look back and make some conclusions about the things that have been meaningful in our lives. What is important to you may not be on someone else's list. Write down one or a few of the things that have been most important in your life, and let's see where this goes.
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My answer about now, at almost seventy-six, would be something that is a mixture of appreciation/balance/ contentment.
In my late forties and fifties volunteering with seriously/terminally ill people and writing were my most important activities.
I was also became interested in Brazilian music and literature.
I became interested in Buddhism, was a member of a center for a couple of years, then of a small informal group that met with a Burmese monk.
And I emigrated from the U.S.
My thirties and forties were heavily about socializing, dance clubs, drugs and sex.
The other side of me enrolled in courses that would be of interest to no one I knew, visiting museum shows, enrolling in courses at the Jung Institute, the Gaelic Society, etc.... discovering classical music, and always reading...usually old literature that I had missed, off-beat stuff I heard about, history, mythology, religion, psychology, etc.
In my twenties was desperately interested in being liked, being popular and having the best time possible (though I was never sure whether I had come close or not.)
I was a voracious reader of all those books that everyone else seemed to have read long ago, and I had not, and of anything off-beat that I had not heard of but sounded interesting.
In addition to the black popular music I was already interested in, I became interested in what is now called "world music."
Having moved from a small town to NYC, I was fascinated by all the different types of people you could meet, and as a result started meeting people of many different ages, races, backgrounds.
Interests that began in early childhood and developed during adolescence were reading, music (though I have no musical ability) and curiosity about people who were different from those type of people I usually knew...or were approved of by my parents.
My parents were both very uninterested in ideas of any sort, their opinions already encompassed anything they would need to know about life; and they were mocking, fearful, intimidated and essentially hostile to anything that was beyond the range of their experience or that conflicted with their opinions....as their disposition toward life (or perhaps better, against life) became obvious to me even while in grade school. And I realized about my parents too that they were unhappy people, I think they had the effect of sending me in the opposite direction...and for life.
From adolescence until my forties my life always had two distinct sides. One was devoted essentially to sensation, feelings, emotion; the other was quiet, bookish, very curious always involved in obscure personal projects and inclined to connect with unusual people in casual on-going acquaintanceships, which were entirely separate from my usual social life and friends...nothing on this side of my life seemed to be dependent upon or necessarily well connected with the other part. However, I never felt this two-sidedness as a problem.
It is tempting to see these passing decades as evolutionary in a prosaic way, but my life involved really major dislocations, which I think kicked any "evolution" in the ass very hard numerous times.
Volunteering in close contact with terminally ill people - along with aging - certainly abraded the sensation-oriented side of me, as well as turning that energy in the direction of hard work. That other - what was more private side, probably finally took over, though with emigrating from the U.S. just after age sixty it has tended to assume an aspect of quietly re-examining much of the intellectual territory covered over the previous decades...and enjoying how different much of it looks from this vantage point.
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