When I Grow Up

I want to be like Cleo Kocol or Neil Diamond. Cleo’s recent picture (above) shows her joie de vivre. She gave a presentation, which she does a variety of regularly, about Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson. Cleo’s 88 and I can barely keep up with her. Her novel, The Good Foreigner, was named one of the best books of 2014 by Amazon. I must say I agree with them, I love that book. Cleo always has a project or event she’s engaged with.

Neil Diamond: I still swoon listening to ‘Play Me,’ and sigh when I hear ‘Morningside.’ Neil’s music changed the world, or perhaps more accurately, how we moved through it, for millions of people. He’s 74 and off on a world tour. Mercy, I think I’m all that when I make it to Seattle and back, which is an hour away.

Finding our way in the world is about choices. Another one of those concepts which I understood the words yet the real meaning only settled truly into me within the last few years as I started to connect what I had done ten, and twenty, okay thirty years previously with the circumstances I currently had. The Good Foreigner also showed me the consequences of choices, so many irrevocable. Most of mine have been irrevocable, too. I sure did not think about that at the time I made them.

I want to move through the world with energy and grace. Hope and optimism. Kindness and compassion, and releasing the blame. Rejoicing in the gifts of age, and accepting of it’s limitations.

As Neil sang in 1969, “And the seed, let it be filled with tomorrow.”