Two articles this past week struck a chord for me. Both featured people much older than I am who are living life well. Makes me think.

ABQJournal Online » Climber Still Rocks at 95 By Ryan Boetel / The Daily Times on Thu, Sep 27, 2012

[T]o celebrate his 95th birthday on Monday, John Rusen reached the top of the 30-foot climbing wall at the San Juan College Health and Human Performance Center.

Rusen has a 5-year-old tradition of climbing to the top of the climbing wall for his birthday.

“I was a little rusty,” he said after his climb. “It was a little bit harder up there than it used to be. But that comes with age, I guess.”

Rusen said he’s been fascinated with rocks and climbing since childhood. He’s summited several 14,000-foot peaks in Colorado and started technical rock climbing more than 40 years ago…. [mjh: when he was just a few years younger than I am now]

Rusen said he works every day to keep his mind and wiry muscles in shape. He takes his dog for a walk each morning, golfs twice a week, even in winter, chops wood, dances, hikes and skis.

“I don’t do structured exercises, but I do something every day,” he said. “I have a yellow Labrador and she insists I go walking every morning. That gets me ready for the day.”

A retired engineer for Schlumberger, Rusen said he reads two books a week and takes courses at San Juan College to work out his mind.

He’s currently enrolled in a mineralogy course.

“My idea is that you have to keep learning,” he said. “You’re dying unless you’re growing and you’re growing when you’re learning.”

ABQJournal Online » Climber Still Rocks at 95

A Candid Conversation With Sandra Day O’Connor: ‘I Can Still Make a Difference’ | Parade.com by David Gergen

Today at 82, [Sandra Day O’Connor] hasn’t changed a bit. Slender and fit, she still has an adventuresome spirit—the same confidence and drive that propelled her from the high desert to the highest court in the land. …

By this stage in life, most people would put their feet up and say, “I’ve had a good run. Now I’m going to rest and enjoy.” But you—
I had a good life, and the reason it was a good life is because I stayed busy doing the things that mattered to me. If I stopped doing that, I think my whole life would disintegrate. I want to feel like, to the extent that I’m able to, I can still make a difference.

A Candid Conversation With Sandra Day O’Connor: ‘I Can Still Make a Difference’ | Parade.com

Wait, that would be crazy and uncivilized.

I think it’s time to abandon the Muslim world, to withdraw from any territory that is majority Muslim unless they can show some restraint. This is savagery. Until they emerge from their own Dark Ages, to hell with them.

Not at all a surprise. The surprise is that any real scientist thought it was junk in the first place — what arrogance.

Breakthrough study overturns theory of ‘junk DNA’ in genome | Science | The Guardian

Long stretches of DNA previously dismissed as "junk" are in fact crucial to the way our genome works, an international team of scientists said on Wednesday .

Breakthrough study overturns theory of ‘junk DNA’ in genome | Science | The Guardian

Each of us marks time in our own way. Days can drag on and decades can fly by. As of today (8/29), we’ve been in our house 25 years! We were both in our early thirties when we moved in the day Merri’s mom turned 60, just a few years older than we are now. It’s one thing to look at someone who was the age I am now but is so much older: it reminds me that a lot can happen in the next 25 years, should I live so long. It’s another thing to see our friend, Maddy Mullany, head off to college. I think about what my heading off to college must have felt like for my parents and their friends – was it like this? Did they look at me and think of how much they had lived since they were the age I was then, the age Maddy is now. Do the young remind the old of their own youth or of the years since? I’m thinking about being 18, about being 39 (as I was when Maddy was born – she attended my 40th birthday in Chaco), about being 60, 85. I’m always thinking about being gone forever. That’s not morbid, although it saddens me. Everywhere I look sends me time traveling.

One theory of time is that all time happens / is happening at once. Perhaps we are all proof of that: the world is born and dying every second.  Live now, while you can.

We’ll never see the smallest nor largest things. There are things we’ll never, ever know. Period. Which is not to say we shouldn’t try.

And for god’s sake stop dumbing it down as the “god-particle.”

I read everything by Hesse in college, all in English, most in German. The one exception was his magnum opus, The Glass Bead Game — I just couldn’t get into it in either language. As for many, Siddhartha and Steppenwolf moved me deeply. (I can wait and I still taste the mix of blood and chocolate and see myself in shards of a broken mirror.) One can hardly imagine more different books, except for Hesse’s conflicted outsider fixation.

Everyone should think about how Hesse’s work came to mean so much decades later. We toss a stone in water and never see all the ripples. _mjh

New England Weather by Archibald MacLeish | The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Today is the birthday of Hermann Hesse (books by this author), born in Calw, Germany, in 1877. In 1911, he took a trip to India and started studying Eastern religions, and ancient Hindu and Chinese cultures. His travels inspired his novel Siddhartha, about the early life of Gautama Buddha. It became popular among the counterculture movement of the 1960s, more than 40 years after it was published.

He said: "The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment, every sin already carries grace in it."

New England Weather by Archibald MacLeish | The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor