Acceptance

Every day I find more and more things that are less and less important to me. That’s such a negative admittance, isn’t it? But you’ll notice I said “things,” not people. The people I care for are still important to me. It’s the “stuff” of life that I’m pushing away. Thoreau, from the very beginning, never let his life be weighed down by possessions. I’m only now, late in life, finding the truth in what he preached. “Our life is frittered away by detail,” he tells us. “Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.” Well, I’m getting down to just a thumb-nail. All the books I brought with me from New York, the books I had when I was teaching English, the books I loved for all my life, are now gone. Nearly all the books I now have are the latest by thriller authors I read as they write them,-- buying them, reading them, then passing them on. After Rosalie finishes with them, I give them to friends who just love free books. All the music I collected and put on my hard drive is now gone. I saved all the tracks on mp3s, but when I try to download the music onto my new computer, it accepts only part of them. And I don’t even care. There are now so many different avenues for listening to music that one doesn’t need cds. I have music channels on tv; I have Spotify on my computer; I have countless internet radio stations. I feel myself pulling away from the things I used to love, especially golf, a game that dominated most of my life. Now that I can’t play it the way I once did, I don’t seem to care as much and I find it easier and easier to stop playing. Sounds like a slow slide to oblivion, doesn’t it? Friends from the past, friends I’ve made here in Arizona, are all moving to the background, either through their deaths, their failing health, or a discontinuance of what brought us together in the first place. And I don’t seem to miss them. My mother told me a year before she died that virtually all her friends or people she ever knew were dead. Some relatives still around, yes, but no one else. She was ninety-three then, legally blind, living alone in a small apartment with Meals on Wheels delivering most of the food she needed. Her life diminished more and more with every passing day. I think she was more than ready to die when she finally gave up the ghost at ninety-four. No Dylan Thomas raging, just acceptance. I’m beginning to understand that attitude.