I am not a number

L to R: Rover and Number Six.

Wie geht's?

Visiting a dementia unit is a sobering experience in many ways.

Dementia is a catchall term for when the brain undergoes a progressive decline in memory, thinking, and reasoning skills. That decline changes a person's life quite profoundly. 

Certainly, life as an independent person is no longer possible. Driving, living alone, paying bills, organising food for yourself - all no longer possible.

We have a loved one - Patrick McGoohan (not his real name), in that situation. He's suffering from vascular dementia following a stroke. Patrick is an exceedingly bright man who spent a lot of his working life as an engineer working out solutions to complex problems on oil rigs and operating highly technical submersibles that checked on deep water cables. Like my brother, while doing this work his brain operated like a circuit board solving problems with logic.

I have a lot of respect for that ability because I have a very limited capacity to do that. In Robert Pirsig's great book The Art of Zen and Motorcycle Maintenance he categorises people as either Romantic or Classical. 

These are not opposites - just two types that represent two different ways of making sense of reality. It does often mean that people struggle to communicate with one another or see another's point of view.

Romantic describes people who look at the world by immediate appearance, emotional experience, feeling and then overall appearance rather than looking at the underlying rules or inner mechanics of things. This is how I see things for the most part.

Classical describes people who see the underlying form, order, and rational underlying structure of things. They look past the superficial to understand how the components fit and function together, then use logical step-by-step problem-solving to diagnose and fix mechanical issues. This describes my brother, father, and is definitely how Patrick used to operate, and still does from time to time.

That must be hard. It's difficult to know. 

Visiting the dementia unit (or 'the prison camp' as Patrick refers to it) means also seeing others in various stages of Alzheimer's Disease, vascular dementia and other types of mental change. 

It's a tough place to go for us Romantics, easier, I imagine, for the Classical types. 

Love and peace - Wozza

Life is 10% of what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it (Charles Swindoll)

Wie gehts?

Big thanks to the blogosphere and the interweb (primarily TheFacebook) for all the birthday wishes from hither and yon.

I had a great birthday - buying a few records* from a new record shop in Waipukurau, and enjoying a day out with Jacky.

Jade made me a scrumptious cake (mmmm banana) plus Ross and all the kids gave me a call. Love it - thanks team!

The girls won the annual Happy Birthday renditions, but Greg gets a special bonus point for the horrendous polka version.

Love and peace - Wozza

* Jacky did an eye roll when I played my new purchase of The Sound of Dinah Lee - a mint copy. She said, "How old is this????" To which I replied - "1965 - you know - when you were a baby". You guessed it - another eye roll.

You could have it all, my empire of dirt (Nine Inch Nails)

Wie geht's?

Seems like the whole world is nostalgic for the Barack Obama years. The coolest man on the planet is everywhere, including the message board at Iona College (that mic drop was Friday's feature image).

Is it any wonder with the embarrassing situation in America these days. It's like a slow motion train wreck unfolding before our eyes on a daily basis.

America has transformed into an empire of dirt and a nightmare that the world's population is powerless to wake up from. Trump's insatiable need to create chaos and confusion has meant vast repercussions for the whole planet. He himself is a case of the more you talk the more stupid you look.

Let's take a look at the two contrasting legacies of Obama and Trump for a sec.

• One inspired a global message of change and a deliberate shift toward multilateral diplomacy, international cooperation, and a strategy of military restraint.
• One positioned the U.S. as a collaborative global partner (rather than a unilateral bad actor). 
• One orchestrated the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, uniting nearly 200 nations in a global commitment to reduce greenhouse gas.
• One helped secure the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal to curb Iran's nuclear capabilities and restored formal diplomatic ties with Cuba.

And the other one is Donald Trump.

I could go on but you get the idea. Hence America becoming an embarrassment, and the global nostalgia for when calmness, order, and sense prevailed.

Love and peace and mic drop - Wozza

We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun (Terry Jacks)

Wie geht's?

I once wrote about my life in 1974 as a watershed year. During that post I explained how my parents sheltered me from a lot of family news and decisions. I can't recall any instances of being included in their decision making. And I seldom had an issue with that, but family dynamics have changed since then generally.

That's partly because of the expanded means of communication available to parents and children in the 2020s.These days children have phones for staying in touch. There are so many social media platforms, it's dizzying.

My own children's awareness and need for information is light years beyond what mine was back in the day. They would have been part of the decision and interested in what was going on in terms of family decisions, where I wasn't, I guess.  

These days, I sense that family relationships are much more open because modern parents are much more open with their children, as opposed to parents from the suitably named Silent Generation (who produced Boomers, like me).

I wonder what Asher, Ivy, Billie, and Poppy will be like as parents.

Love and peace - Wozza

 

Look out child it look like something be coming, it be coming the long way around (Chris Whitley)

Photo by Mehdi Mirzaie on Unsplash

Wie geht's?

I wish there was another word for 'retirement'. Those terms like 'third act', 'withdrawal from the workforce', 'retreat' leave me a tad cold. Nor do I like 'semi-retired', 'scaling back', or worst of all - 'downshifting'. Shudder.

The key driver: I need my purpose to remain strong for as long as possible.

If you retire from football, you stop playing at the same intense level, but you keep playing. At age 39, Messi has retired from playing for Argentina, but not his club side. He'll eventually stop that too but will presumably remain an active footballer for some years to come.

I played football into my forties and then loved playing indoor football, and fun football after work on Fridays. After a while, my knees couldn't handle too much of that. These days, exercise is down to a brisk walk whenever I get a chance. The point being that my intensity level for football peaked early - aged 19, but I have never actually retired from physical activity - it's just changed as I've aged.

Maybe that's how I need to think about retirement from full-time work; it's a change of intensity (but not a slowing down). A reorientation of priorities.

Maybe it's obvious, I've been thinking about this for a while. I'll turn 70 next year and while I still want to teach and preserve my purpose, maybe it's in a new direction, a new format.

At this point - I don't quite know what that means. Which is a good thing, is it not? The path has not yet revealed itself.

Love and peace - Wozza

The first meditation

Photo by Emma Simpson on Unsplash

Wie geht's?

This one is about sleep and walking. Seemingly, two distinctly different activities. Not so.

Haruki Murakami says: 'Sleep both calms and provides a discharge for thought circuits...Sleeping is an act that has been programmed, with karmic inevitability, into the human system, and no one can diverge from it, the person's very "ground of being" would be threatened'.

Last night's sleep was restless and fitful. I couldn't get comfortable at all and this morning my back is sore. My 'ground of being' was disrupted and jolted.

The remedy, according to me, is a long walk.

Gary Snyder says: 'Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance of spirit and humility.'

I hear the magpie walk calling me.

Love and peace - Wozza

Like the sun through the trees you came to love me, like a leaf on a breeze you blew away (Justin Hayward)

Joan and Gregarious

Wie geht's?

Sadly, the three amigos (that's me plus long-standing mates - Kev and Greg) have come to the end of an era with last week's passing of Joan Knowles, aged 101.

When Greg and I were at Mt. Albert Grammar in the mid-seventies, we would often visit each other's houses. Conveniently close to town, his home was in Shackleton Rd, Mt Eden, and mine was up Dominion Rd. to Ramelton Rd in Mt. Roskill South. The purpose was often to listen to loud rock music or a Friday night stop-off on the way home from record buying adventures. Joan and Harry Knowles and Graham and Dulcie Purdy put up with a lot!

Top left, bottom right

I loved visiting Shackleton Rd. because Joan was always very welcoming, and tolerant. It was a warm, cozy, happy place to visit. She definitely made me feel special and that's a great personality trait to have.  

Greg's loss means that all three of us (plus our siblings) are on our own now, as our parents have all pre-deceased us. It's a sobering feeling, being an orphan.

Last year we created a playlist called WTWMC - Loved Ones that celebrated our parents and our spouses with a selection of 15 songs per loved one that we thought reflected each of their musical tastes. 

Because of Joan's passing, I've been listening to it again. It's a very poignant, but, ultimately, joyous experience. I find it particularly uplifting because it was made with love for our loved ones. 

Given the age range from spouses to parents of around 40 years, the styles and genres of music vary tremendously, so it's fun to have it on shuffle and work out which loved one the song is for.

It was a labour of love that I will listen to again and again to remind myself of our key origins.

Love and peace - Wozza