Still More Pondering . . . .

Today I am beginning the rest of my life . . . now as a card-carrying senior citizen.  I rise out of bed early each morning, brew a pot of coffee, and stare out the kitchen window considering the weather and what I really need to accomplish before I pull the plug on yet another building block in the evolving edifice that is my past.

I am going through old files, keeping a few and dumping a lot (many of them I have not looked at in this millennium); drafting a couple new blog postings and making up for the unusual silence since the New Year; watching German television news about another terrorist act, this time in Belgium; writing a few letters; reading and taking notes; beginning to work on the taxes; mapping out some research projects I must deal with in the coming days; eyeing a possible trip to Florida this spring to meet up with college chums I have not seen in over 40 years; or, perhaps, a return to the western North Carolina mountains of my childhood to attend a literary conference and renew old personal and professional acquaintances; and, finally, champing at the bit to get back up to the lake cottage in Maine and put some physical and psychic distance from the routines of the rest of the year and the growing insanity surrounding this year’s election cycle.

Just pondering in general.   Life is full of random impulses to do this and that.  I wake up each morning and see what the day will bring.  As a friend in Berlin wrote to me this morning in the wake of the terrorist onslaught in Brussels . . . “we go on living. That is where the strength is.”  I could not agree more.

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