aging

We are the sum total of our experiences. Those experiences _ be they positive or negative _ make us the person we are, at any given point in our lives. And, like a flowing river, those same experiences, and those yet to come, continue to influence and reshape the person we are, and the person we become. None of us are the same as we were yesterday, nor will be tomorrow.

Europe, the land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts. The land where the economy gets to stagger all over the continent.

Here's to another year and let's hope it's above ground.

We start our sometimes tedious, sometimes exciting, often times sad and stressful march to the grave the moment we're born, so it might as well be a march worth remembering.

In childhood we inhabit a world of wonderful contrasts that later we often come to see as bizarre and do our best to rearrange, with everything in its 'proper' place. Unusual juxtapositions we label surrealistic. Yet what is surrealism but a second childhood with Freudian overtones which we have to be re-educated to enjoy? -- part of the tragedy of growing up

Laughter is a threat to aging.

Health makes good propaganda.

THE FOUR HEAVENLY FOUNTAINSLaugh, I tell youAnd you will turn backThe hands of time.Smile, I tell youAnd you will reflectThe face of the divine.Sing, I tell youAnd all the angels will sing with you!Cry, I tell youAnd the reflections found in your pool of tears -Will remind you of the lessons of today and yesterdayTo guide you through the fears of tomorrow.

MAGISTRATEDon't men grow old?LYSISTRATANot like women. When a man comes homeThough he's grey as grief he can always get a girl.There's no second spring for a woman. None.She can't recall it, nobody wants her, howeverShe squanders her time on the promise of oracles,It's no use...

Aging and the prospect of dying by no means enhance the attractiveness of fictitious comforts to come in paradise, or the veracity of malicious myths about hellfire and damnation. Fear and feeblemindedness cannot be credibly pressed into service to support fantastic claims about the cosmos and our ultimate destiny.Whether one would even consider turning to religion in advanced years has much to do with upbringing, which makes all the more important standing up to the presumptions of the religious in front of children. One would regard the Biblical events _ a spontaneously igniting bush, a sea__ parting, human parthenogenesis, a resurrected prophet and so on _ that supposedly heralded God__ intervention in our affairs as the stuff of fairy tales were it not for the credibility we unwittingly lend them by keeping quiet out of mistaken notions of propriety.

The joy of reading with our children doesn't stop as they, and we, get older; it simply changes.

In the end, the slow decay of the body didn't matter. We all continue on, renewing ourselves, through our offspring. They are what matter. They are what survives.

Arthur said, You must know that you don't love children for being good or bad. I know you know that.Why do you love them?Because you do, said Arthur. Because they don't know what's coming and maybe you do.

In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future of the city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where note even the ashes of his glory would remain.

All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, __h, why can__ you remain like this for ever!_ This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.

It is my opinion that enjoying yourself in the present and loosening your definition of time slows the aging process.

I used to dream of true love; now I'm open to false, but convincing....

Marriage is like a series of opposing reflections, inverse images getting ever smaller like nesting dolls, each one of your trying to squeeze yourself smaller to fit inside the hopes of the other, until one of you cracks or stops existing.