“How You Doing With the Dying Thing?”

“How You Doing With the Dying Thing?” –by Jim Nolan

Nobody talks about getting older, and what kinds of inner monologues rumble through our days and consciousness about that inevitability. The younger ones do not think on it much, and we elders have some kind of less-than-conscious agreement not to bring it up, for the most part.

At work, we generally act as if the really mundane minutiae of our job descriptions is the meat and taters of life, although in some other crevice of our consciousness, we know in a profound and lonely way it is not.

People of our age cohort die all the damn time, if they didn’t already drop bones years ago. We are all pop-ups in the shooting gallery of time, and we talk about gluten, or keto, or a problem student, or the TV series we have been binge-watching. Maybe we pretend the government shutdown is a big deal, though that has happened eight times since 1976, and who the hell remembered THAT?

I don’t recommend we over-focus on it, but would it be too much to say, from time to time, “How you doing with the dying thing? Any new thoughts on that one?”

I, for one, would appreciate that conversation, now and then…it helps me live the Life Thing a lot more intentionally, and robustly…

Jim

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