ADVICE FROM A "HOARY HEAD"

(From Facebook.)

The week is off to a good start. I got a few things accomplished today but mostly took it easy.

Taking it easy is pretty much my motto anymore, even when I'm busy at something. I used to be so full of nervous energy that I literally found it hard to sit still for very long. I miss it, but there's no remedy.

Kids, use that hormone generated energy. You can't save it up, and if you don't utilize it, it will be gone forever. Now, I know what they really meant about the "juices" drying up. At the same time, try to be wise in how you use it. I'd still square dance up a storm if I could, work night and day when I needed to and reach for every goal I could reasonably reach for if I had it to do over.

I think of my grandchildren often and wonder what their dreams are, what they yearn to do in life, etc. I remember well my own dreams and aspirations, some of them based on delusion and false premises. I'd like to save them some of the disillusionment and disappointments I've gone through, and I hope my being honest about my own life will help them in that department. Don't discount the lessons this old hoary head passes on to you.

If I had been more aware of and listened to the great thinkers of the past, like Ingersoll, Mencken, Mark Twain, Thomas Paine, and a host of others, I could have saved myself a lot of false forks in the road. As an aside, I knew Thomas Paine was a great thinker and founding father, but I never read his book until I was past seventy and didn't really know he was an atheist. For some reason I'll let you speculate on, that fact about him isn't emphasized by very many people.

Read, dammit! Think -- don't assume or take some blowhards word for it! Wear out those search engines! Knowledge has never been this accessible before. I had none of those modern (and often free) tools at your ages -- not even in middle age!

Assume nothing to be true until you exhaustively investigate it and consider contrary opinions in their entirety. That's science. That's true reasoning. Anything else courts disaster, and I've suffered through a great deal of that. It's no fun and it's better to avoid it.

I had no idea I was going to say all this a few minutes ago. Just flows sometimes.