A cool epitaph!

Everyday, our walk zigzags for 1,430 feet inside the Park City Cemetery and we enjoy the calm away from the heavy morning traffic. Many times, I’ve thinking about epitaphs and why not, one that could be perfect the day I might need one! 

That’s how I got hooked into a few lines of a French song by Georges Moustaki that goes like this: “Nous avons toute la vie pour nous amuser, nous avons toute la mort pour nous reposer." It roughly translates into “We have a whole lifetime to have fun; we have all of death to rest.” 

I find that it possesses a disarming simplicity. Moustaki knew how to wield: a naked truth, devoid of pathos or grand rhetoric, but offering almost a philosophical smile at the human condition. "We have all of life to have fun, we have all of death to rest." 

As an epitaph, it is remarkably apt. It conveys three essential things: A trust in life: as long as it’s here, one must live it, savor it, and embrace it as a playground for learning and connection. A peaceful acceptance of death: not as a threat, but as a natural, inevitable, and almost gentle rest. 

A philosophy of lightness: no tragedy, no drama, just a way of saying, "I’ve done my part; I’ve lived; now I rest." It is neither bleak nor fatalistic. On the contrary, it is a way of saying that some of us chose to live fully, to enjoy life, learn, and love, and that what follows is merely a return to stillness. 

It seems to be tailored-made for me, who love to reflect deeply on life’s trajectory, on aging well, on continuing to grow, and on turning my remaining years into a crescendo rather than a decline. It makes this sentiment rings true and it says I’ve played the game to the very end! 

Who wants another leak?

Just ten days after my nice new fence around my backyard was completed my next door neighbor to the west sent me a pretty rough text message telling me that my contractor and his crew must have had disrupted his irrigation sprinklers line and the a leak that he directly attributed to their negligence during their work had developed on his property. 

When we met, he sounded clearly convinced that his sprinkler underground line has been disturbed by the post excavation work and I realized that he may be right to be suspicious, but I wasn’t 100% convinced. 

This originated from the fact that even though the area is located on a 5 to 10% slope, it seemed quite odd that the water didn’t go into a sloped (diagonal) trajectory, but for strange reasons that disregarded the basic laws of hydrology and gravity, it would have chosen to flow across the fall line, and when we tested the line, the water was gushing out six feet away west from the post and the presumed breakage area when it should have manifested itself near the fence post. 

As a follow up to our in-person meeting, I offered to dig up around the corner post, near the fence, but level with the observed leak, to examine if, and where, there’s a break or fracture on the PVC pipe causing the leakage and the area was bone-dry. 

Either way, I promised to keep him posted. The next day it took me about one hour and a half to dig a hole that was a couple of square feet in surface and about one and a half foot deep. 

I finally come in contact with the white PVC pipe, except that unlike what my neighbor had told me it wasn’t in a straight line, it branched out on a T connection to the leaking area six feet away and 18" deep, a place where none of the fence workers could have disturbed the line. 

Thanks to my calm, patience and personal handy work, I clearly proved to him that his premature conclusion was dead wrong. Saying that he was embarrassed was an understatement!

When age enriches us

As I have evoked the idea several times on this blog, the aging process can take us into several directions depending on what we let it do, and this true independent of our particular situation having to do with our economic, social, physical or mental health status, or a combination of either of these factors.

So, all things being what the can be with us, we can see the “aging glass” either half-full or half-empty. As I’ve also said, aging is quite brutal a stage in life, it’s not for “sissies” and the way we want to steer our attitudes, our expectations and our objectives demand a strong determination. 

The alternative to this, I found, is a “crash and burn” approach that is not palatable for me, so I see my advancing into time as a continuing adventure where I have no alternative, but embrace ideas, projects and actions that force me to get out of my shell, re-invent me and in the process – almost always surprise me as much as they regenerate me. 

The end of the road transforms itself into an apotheosis, when I’ll have done everything that was possible given my abilities and for as long as I could muster the energy to accomplish it. What a superior way to embrace old age and make the best out of our last Act!

Céline Dion’s Paris concert

While Dion’s return to the scene was preceded by a powerful and sleek marketing job, we managed to watch her two hour concert on September 12 on YouTube via large screen TV. It had been shot by fans in the audience, commonly referred to as "bootlegged" or user-generated content, rather than an official broadcast. 

The clip was filmed at the Paris La Défense Arena. We weren’t too crazy about the star’s choice of dress (there were at least 5 changes) and hairstyle as a bun did give her a severe look and wasn’t in my opinion helping her facial features. While taking into consideration the amateurish quality of the transmission, we found that Céline Dion’s attempts to engage the crowd were stilted and didn’t encourage what should have been a more enthusiastic audience support. 

Even though she was quite emotional and touching at times, she fell into the trap of taking herself and her act a bit too seriously. As for the quality of her performance at that show, the English language songs were generally great, particularly “All by myself”, while Jean-Jacques Goldman’s French songs had a much tougher time in comparison both in their content and delivery. 

My wife enjoyed the show a little more than I did, but both of us wouldn’t have been sold on attending one of her following live concerts if we had happened to be in Paris at the time and able to get tickets. On September 14, the video was no longer available on YouTube... 

The 9-11 unasked question

When I learned about the September 11 terrorist attack I was having breakfast in Vail, Colorado, following my morning run. In hearing what was happening in New York City, the first thought that came to my mind was “Years of humiliation and punishment brought against the Palestinian population is the root cause of these attacks”.

By and large America didn’t perceive that angle of the devastating attack. Fueled by its righteousness and its ingrained sense of exceptionalism, it became self-indignant saying “How can someone attack us in this manner, this is totally unfair, we absolutely didn’t deserve that kind of treatment.” Nowhere, have I heard “Why did someone inflict that horrible punishment to us?” 

True, asking WHY would have made sense, but remained conspicuously absent from our national response. At least that’s how I understood it. Absolutely no comprehensive post-mortem, but instead a “well-deserved”, twenty year war of vengeance against Afghanistan first, and almost simultaneously another one, almost as costly in lives and resources, against Iraq. 

A tragedy for all that is also a powerful reminder, that in order to learn from a catastrophe we should always get to the root cause of the situation by asking a simple “Why?”

A satisfying day!

My adventures in Spanish began in 2015 but were quickly abandoned because of my flimsy commitment, but July 2024 and the prospect of a trip to Andalusia restarted them, this time very seriously. The tool was Duolingo, a system that left my Assimil methods of my youth for English, German and Italian literally in the dust... 

Last July, I graduated from Duolingo into TalkPal, an AI system powered by Chat-GPT. Fast-forward to a few days ago and I was frankly astounded by my progress in conversation that confirmed, if needed, that I had made the right choice.

Sure, the new method is much easier on an old brain like mine, but it still can’t quite compress the assimilation and learning time as fast as we could wish. 

It’s comparable to growing vegetables, time shortcuts are very hard to come by or have consequences, and for language learning as well, the information needs to settle and slowly percolate before revealing its wonderful results. 

That way of taking its time to coalesce into a satisfying result is precisely what happened to me a few days ago. This was just a fantastic differed gratification making me both proud and happy!  

The curse of the “Night-Person”

As we were walking against the heavy traffic coming to town at about 7:55am, I was thinking about all these folks that are not early risers and are struggling every morning to get to work at an ungodly early hour on time. What a torture! 

An early bird myself, and as a young executive I dreaded that 4:30pm meeting that would extend late into the evening when my brains had become totally useless. As a form of reciprocity, when I became a boss, I was the one having early morning meetings to the damn of my night owls associates… Talk about a total lack of memory and compassion! 

Some people (including me) would believe that “Morning Person” vs. “Night Person” is a 50/50 distribution, but this isn’t true at all. In reality, about 15% of people are morning people, 15% are night people, and the remaining 70% fall somewhere in the middle. 

Morning folks (often nicknamed larks or lions) make up one out of six or seven people. They wake up easily and reach peak energy early in the day. There’s the same proportion of night people (owls or wolves) who prefer staying up late and reaching peak alertness at night. 

Then there’s the rest, the so-called intermediate types (sometimes called bears or third birds) that represent the balance or seven out of ten persons (or over half, depending on the specific classification model). They follow a more flexible middle ground aligned with standard daylight hours. 

But these categories aren’t set in stone, as the preferences change significantly over time. If only about 7% of young adults are morning larks (less than the 15% of the general population), by age 60, the vast majority shift toward becoming morning types, so the landscape is a moving one. In fact it’s amazing how age and gender are able to shift these numbers. 

While genetics establish our baseline, our internal clock naturally evolves as we age. There is a distinct biological shift toward late-night wakefulness around age 20. Roughly 32% of teenagers qualify as night owls. On the other hand, as they age, adults see their internal clocks naturally shift earlier. By age 60, over 63% of people identify as morning types, and only about 7% remain night owls. 

As far as gender differences are concerned, large-scale genetic studies note that more women (48.4%) identify as morning people compared to men (39.7%). Our natural sleep timing (what’s called a chronotype) is largely dictated by our biology and internal clock rather than a conscious choice. 

Now that you’ve read this, you no longer have any excuse for not treating your fellow workers, friends and family according to the requirements of their chronotypes!