How Death changes things

Writing this is just therapy for me, I suppose. If it gets read a lot it’ll be employment because it attracts eyeballs, and they’re worth money. Anyway...

So who else has lost their job or had to move because (respectively) the big boss or the landlord died? In the latter case my wife reports that when the ownership of an apartment she rented changed hands, her rent was hiked and she had to move. You know, there’s something you can do to prevent change from happening (where you don’t want it to) after you’ve, oh, um, left the premises (without a forwarding address). It’s called a will.

My grandmother died without leaving one, so it’s really anyone’s guess what would have been the best thing to do with what she left behind at the time she departed. One can only see so far into the future when making life-altering decisions, and even though hindsight is twenty-twenty, you can only act based on what you know how to do, that is, within your character desription at any specific moment.

Suppose you’ve never invested in stock, and then you suddenly come into control of enough money to do so with reasonable security, but since the idea is foreign to your past experience, you pass up the opportunity. Three years pass and you see that it would have been a great move if you’d only thought of it, and you’d now be in much better control of your life. There seems to be a paradox at work here that says:

Hindsight may be twenty-twenty, but it’s color-blind.

By this I mean that, if you are able to look back at your life realizing there are life-actions that you have yet to experience or learn to do yourself, better to learn them as soon as possible in some way before you might actually need to do it.

Zen is, I understand, a way of living out the Boy Scout motto: “Be Prepared”. I was actually a Boy Scout, but apparently the motto didn’t sink in right. Better the motto should be: “Know How You’re Not Prepared, Then Get Prepared.” You get the idea.

By the way, anybody find my compass? Seems I’ve needed it for the past fourteen years.

(enough for now, must check on the baby)