Ambitions

[poliphilo]

I've been looking for a line (I think it's from the Ingoldsby Legends- but deuced if I can find it) which declares that a man has fulfilled his duty to the ages if he has

1. Produced a child
2. Written a book
3. Planted a tree.

I've done all three- the first in triplicate. So, please sir, can I be excused, now?

When I was a very small child I wanted to be a farmer. Well, having just spent an hour mucking out the rabbit and the guinea pigs, I reckon I've fulfilled that ambition too. P.S. There's a reason why guinea pigs are called "pigs" and it's not just because they squeak.

Do I have any ambitions left? More pertinently, is it proper for a person in their mid 50s to still have ambitions?

Except to grow old with dignity and grace- and not to hang about too long.

Comments

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

We've been watching documentaries about life before the dinosaurs and life of humans in the early days.

It's hard to see The Meaning of Life back there, and it feels like hubris to force meaning into our lives now.

God, what hard lives we live when it's all about predator or prey. And everybody's muddy and covered with flies.

I wonder if anybody ever cried. How to choose what to cry about? Life was so awful, just finding a mudhole or not getting gored to death meant a good day.

And I complain because I don't have a new sofa. Sheesh.

Ambitions are, I think, a way to force us to feel we are doing something for the hive. Just being--as you say, with dignity and grace--is surely enough.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't know, maybe early humans led full and meaningful lives. They had art and story-telling and religion- and disposed of their dead with respect (which implies belief in an afterlife....)

We assume the past must have been worse in every way- but it ain't necessarily so. For instance I was reading the other day that our image of medieval peasants having bad teeth is simply not true. Some archaeologist who specialised in medieval peasants was saying that s/he had never found a medieval peasant with even a single dental cavity. They didn't have access to sugar, see....

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

What you say has a nice ring of truth to it, and is rather comforting.

Of course people found meaning in their lives. They loved their families, they had celebrations when they got a musk-ox or whatever, and they probably had many good days.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I guess people a thousand years from now may look back and think, "how on earth did our ancestors cope with life back in the 21st century?"

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I wonder myself how we cope here in the twenty-first century. I'm hearing right this minute on the news that "the wagons are circling around the Bush administration" as they yell ever louder that they refuse to give up their right to torture prisoners!

God.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That a modern administration should have the gall to demand the right to torture- it beggars belief.