Keeping At The Work of Living

I am 61.  It is 2:02 a.m. and I am not asleep.  What do I know?  Not much.  For 61 I know a lot but in relation to all that can be known, I know very little.  The older I get the less I know because I am more aware of how much there is to know.  I am not talking about what there is to know about physics or brain surgery but what there is to know about things that are a part of my own particular-ness. I have made a fair swipe at the ball, a good attempt and have kept at it fairly well.  Keeping at it, at being in a relationship with God, at loving Betty, at fatherhood and now grandfatherhood.  I also try hard to be a good teacher, I realize how much there is to learn and how quickly you can fall behind if you don’t really work at it diligently.  As a beginning teacher, I was trying to build a program.  The best way I saw to do that was to make my students be really good at what my program was about.  The key was just plain hard work.  At 61 I seem to spend most of my time trying to convince my students that life is so profoundly meaningful but only if you are willing to work hard at living.  61 would be so much lesser than if I hadn’t worked so hard to get here.  Working hard always pays off with you being better than you would have been.  Many people will read these last few sentences and say I am too focused on working and need to learn to relax and the second sentence above may be their proof.  But I would say they would be wrong.  When I say “work” I mean those things that I expend a great deal of energy on because they are so meaningful to me; loving God, loving Betty, being a good patriarch, artist and teacher are not jobs or work, they are who I am, who by Someone else’s unfathomable grace and kindness I have been gifted enough to be.  That’s not called work.  It is called living.