This Is 63 : Against The Wind
This week I answered
’s excellent Oldster Magazine Questionnaire, available below. Like any superb exercise in self-discovery, her deceptively simple questions get to the heart of who I am. I spent a lot of time thinking hard about my answers. So they have the virtue of being both honest and short. 1Not only do I recommend subscribing to
to learn how people of different ages and backgrounds respond to the questions, I also recommend taking the questionnaire yourself for your own private use.2 I plan to retake it at regular intervals to see how my answers change as I grow older. It’s great to have a baseline set of answers. 3Click here or below to read my answers to Sari’s questionnaire.
Question for the comments: In one of my answers, I cite two of my favorite “anthem” songs about aging, both by Bob Seger: Against The Wind and Night Moves. These songs get to me every time I hear them. Do you have favorite songs about aging that get to you?
I’m going to seize this opportunity to correctly attribute the saying about not having enough time to write a concise letter. It was Blaise Pascal in 1656:
"Je finis enfin cette lettre, qui est plus longue que je ne l’avais pensé au commencement ; et je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte."
"At last I bring this letter to a close, which has turned out longer than I had expected at first; and I made it longer only because I did not have the time to make it shorter."
Please respect the proprietary nature of the questionnaire.
Perhaps around every birthday that ends with an eight or a three. Five years feels like a good cadence. And no expectation that
would publish any of them!
I love Susannah McCorkle’s ‘The Waters of March’. I enjoy the lyrics from the original Brazilian version better, but her poetic musical interpretation is just lovely. I want to embrace all of life inside of this song, even at the end of the road.
I appreciate the Blaise Pascal quote - it is very true, its much harder and more time consuming to write short, pithy, meaningful text vs spewing a stream of consciousness and writing it down. Although most good texts DO start as a stream of consciousness - that gets whittled down and refined over serial edits.