shapes across the Earth

Plans and being old

I have not so much thought my way through life as done things and found what it was and who I was after the doing. Each tale was a way of finding selves. Each self found each day slightly different from the one found twenty-four hours earlier.

                                                                                                                                            Ray Bradbury

I was talking to my friend recently trying desperately to express myself of how I felt about making plans in my life, but I only made words slip around not hitting the point. Later I was trying to put it right again but instead was called as someone who probably has no clue of what to do whilst accepting everything that comes along without much of the real choice. There is perhaps some truth in it, but not entirely. And so I found it today, the perfect description, it is right above in italics, to express how close it leans to what I was trying to tell. It is funny how some things come so unexpectedly, so strikingly correct in such simple lines.

Lately I was also wondering how it must feel to be old and what would make me feel good when I get to this point. How to be in peace, calm of unrealized desires, satisfied of the lived life, the taken risks and choices made or missed, the effort put in keeping the important things and knowing what to let go.

When I asked my 90 years old grandfather what he thinks of his own life, he simply said: - it is good, I am not angry.
Not to be angry. I was astonished of this simple answer. Not to be angry I repeated to myself.
He also said that we do make choices around the daily routine, but what happens in cosmos is not under our control and so we live with it. As he lived his youth years through the war hiding in bushes and stacks of hay. Not to get angry about it..
It was only this Christmas that I dared to ask him these questions: how he feels about life, religion, new technology and flowers. And though he talks very little (everything for him always was and still is  said by my grandma) - this was one of those conversations to remember when I will be 90.

I don't know how I got from Bradbury to my grandpa, but this is how it goes, how the world have started in the first place - chaotic.