Please Happy

My Mom would have 59-years-old today. That sounds old!
I haven’t done anything yet today in her honor. This morning, my dentist recommended two gold (yes, gold) crowns for ground-down molars. Stress, he said, will eventually cause me to wear down all my teeth. Gold Mouth Whaley coming your way. I’ve spent the rest of the day in Lightroom and Final Cut Pro and Adobe Audition, listening, cropping, cutting, overlapping. Drank a lot of seltzer. Ate some yogurt. I’ll run in her honor as the sun sets and look out over this crazy city I now call home. Breathe in and out because I can. I always do that in her honor.

Also, I wanted to post this, from the final book in the Ender series. Jake and I only have a few more chapters left.

Excerpt (conversation between brothers) from Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card:

“But part of the purpose of it is now, is the moment. And part of it is the web of connections. Links from soul to soul. If the purpose of life was just to continue into the future, then none of it would have meaning, because it would be all anticipation and preparation. There’s fruition, Grego. There’s the happiness we’ve already had. The happiness of each moment.The end of our lives, even if there’s no forward continuation, no progeny at all, the end of our lives doesn’t erase the beginning.”

“But it won’t have amounted to anything,” said Grego. “If your children die, then
it was all a waste.”

“No,” said Olhado quietly. “You say that because you have no children, Greguinho. But none of it is wasted. The child you hold in your arms for only a day before he dies, that is not wasted, because that one day is enough of a purpose in itself. Entropy has been thrown back for an hour, a day, a week, a month. Just because we might all die here on this little world does not undo the lives before the deaths.”

Grego shook his head. “Yes it does, Olhado. Death undoes everything.”

Olhado shrugged. “Then why do you bother doing everything, Grego? Because someday you will die. Why should anyone ever have children? Someday they will die, their children will die, all children will die. Someday stars will wind down or
blow up. Someday death will cover us all like the water of a lake and perhaps nothing will ever come to the surface to show that we were ever there. But we were there, and during the time we lived, we were alive. That’s the truth– what is, what was, what will be– not what could be, what should have been, what never can be. If we die, then our death has meaning to the rest of the universe. Even if our lives are unknown, the fact that someone lived here, and died, that will have repercussions, that will shape the universe.”