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Living 200 Years and Knowing the Date of Your Death

If you had the choice to live to age 200, would you take up that blind offer?  My beloved wife Janna would not.  She’s perfectly content with her life and, if she died today, she would feel satisfied with the accomplishments of her life.  I, on the other hand, would love to live to age 200 if, of course, there were no sort of Twilight Zone curse involved where I was confined to a bed in a coma for 125 years, or I became a pack mule in the Himalayas for a century, or if I had to live in an active sewer and never see the light of day for 110 years.

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Being Fined for Poor Hiking Preparation

Being ill prepared usually brings about it ill consequence, depending on what is being done — sometimes disastrous, even. There are not too many examples I have seen of people being fined by the police for being poorly prepared for something, however — until I came across an example of exactly this. A gentleman in Victoria made plans to go on a three day hike and only took the most paltry of provisions — potatoes and naan, to be exact.

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The Dead and the Scared: How Sandy Hook Stood Up to a Gunman

I’m not sure if there’s much more left to to say in the wake of the Sandy Hook killings in Connecticut that hasn’t already been shot to death before — except that it was excellent how, together, teachers and students faced down death that day — while our politicians will never be similarly brave because they are more terrified of the long and ugly shadow of the NRA than they are of dead children.

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At Night, I Get Scared

Today is the third day in a row I’m writing about the death of the great author and teacher, Dr. Howard Stein, because I just can’t get his life out of my mind.  Every time we’d meet or speak on the phone, I would take copious notes because I didn’t want to forget anything he told me.

Every conversation was ripe and ready for memorialization in a blog post or in a future thinking endeavor.  Howard Stein was always teaching, and when you had his attention, you were the most important person in the world to him.  He was staunchly rational and fearless almost up to the end; and I say “almost” because during the last few months of his life, he confessed to me that, at night, he would get scared.

http://boles.com/called/12/scared.jpg

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Life is Loss: We are Our Deficits

As we continue to mourn the death of Dr. Howard Stein, we are left to ponder the joy of knowing him and, in missing him, we begin the healing process by remembering the important lessons he taught us.

One of the most poignant conversations I had with him in the last few weeks of his life dealt with age and growing older.  Howard reversed an important expectation for me, and I appreciate the reality of that sobering.

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