The meaning of life revisited?

By Dan Barber

People have been searching for the meaning of life in many different ways for eons.  Before the creation of civilizations with societal rules, one of our ancestors discovered that they could use a rock as a tool to crack open nuts and smush up fruit, vegetables and berries for the toothless old clan grandpa… the birth of the stone-age.  

Then someone got tired of just eating veggies, nuts and berries so they added meat to the diet. If anthropologists have it right, this act caused our ancestors brains to grow a bit larger... life once again got a little easier. A new method of food preparation probably happened when someone accidentally dropped the leg of Ground Sloth into the boiling hot springs outside the cave. By the time they found a stick big enough to scoop it out of the scalding water the meat was cooked, and it tasted better after soaking in the hot springs.  

It was then discovered that you could tie the rock tool to the big stick to give a little more power in cracking bigger nuts, and cooked sloth bones to retrieve the high protein marrow. The larger brain led our ancestors to invent even better tools with the sloth bone splinters, and according to the experts in evolution, our ancestors were now able to speak, and started thinking in the abstract… life again got a little easier.  

Then we started speeding along the evolutionary path through the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Middle Ages, Dark Ages etc.

Presently we are in the Silicon Age… I don’t know if life got any easier, but definitely more complicated.  In my humble opinion, life is ever evolving in many different ways in every second of every minute of every hour of every day. 

Some might define their existence by the quality of their life… they measure their meaningful being by their skill in obtaining money or material things. Others search out the spiritual or mystical meaning of their birth by meditating or attending church or participating in retreats in the desert for only $800 per person per day, where they can wallow in a mud puddle with other naked people… or they might even pay a motivator thousands of dollars to guide them to a better understanding of themselves… hopefully without dying in a sweat lodge in an Arizona desert.  I might even start my own motivating business if I could figure out a way to get people to pay me to chase them around the block with a stick to motivate them into doing something. Also, I would need a business license so I wouldn’t get arrested for assault.

Uncountable generations of people have hoped for something better than just life since our first ancestors climbed out of the mire of ignorance or the community mud puddle and started to think perhaps there was something better than just living.

Maybe what we have is the best there is… Didn’t God create the heavens and earth?  Maybe when we die we get to replay our earthly experiences over and over again in the realm that God created.  Look around you, what you see could be your heaven… or your hell.  We do have free will to live our lives as we wish -- good or bad. Maybe we should strive to live everyday as if it were the last… sooner or later it will be.  What will your inventory of life experience hold?

      

Those with inflated egos might believe that their life has to have a mystical meaning. They probably can’t or won’t grasp the thought that their parents just had sex, which resulted in conception.  Most of us, me included, just don’t want to dwell upon that disturbing scenario.

My advice…when your children, who believe they are the reason for the universe, grow up, and they try to blame their neurosis on you, just tell them “Your problems are due to a genetic disorder that you inherited from your birth parents”… then walk away.  That bit of information will probably keep them occupied for a while, and they might leave you alone, if that’s what you wish.

      

Even the government is increasingly trying to improve our quality of life or maybe even attempting to define life by telling us what we should or shouldn’t do… from who we should fall in love with (now resolved for the most part except for the legalization of polygamy... the next civil rights case) to what we should eat or drink (still being debated).  

If we were born sometime before 1950, the chances are, our mothers drank and smoked while pregnant with us… most of us turned out OK.  Some of us even went on to become productive citizens who put man on the moon, and discovered that mothers who smoke and drink during pregnancy are potentially harming their unborn children.

We improved society by inventing cable TV so the children of the future wouldn’t be deprived of unlimited cartoon channels like we were… we invented computers and video games so children also wouldn’t have to use their own imaginations for entertainment purposes.   We even created fruity breakfast cereal without even having to use one bit of fruit! We invented fast-food and quickie-lube places for our fast-paced lives and instant gratification.  We even remodeled the old movie palace with the seats covered in plush red velvet into the multi-plex theater complex today, where several shoe-boxed shaped black boxes offer several of Hollywood’s latest releases and endless sequels of past hits, instead of the regular double feature.

     

We cemented in the dangerous creeks running through our neighborhoods and turned them into storm drains to prevent flooding and to keep children from drowning in their favorite swimming hole… they were becoming way too polluted for fishing or swimming anyway.  In their places we built huge water parks with death defying slides with young lifeguards, earning the minimum wage, hanging around talking to other young men or women and waiting to save a child from drowning… all of this for only a nominal entrance fee.

      

After Vietnam we eliminated the draft so now there is no need for junior to move out of Mom and Dad’s comfortable home and seek a deferment from the draft by going to college… after all there are over 100 cable channels to choose from and a multitude of video games to play, and thanks to our lawmakers junior can even stay on his parents health insurance policy until he reaches 26-years of age. Jobs are also plentiful, if junior attended a four-year college. There are the water park life guard openings, lube technicians, or at one of the fast food places on darn near any corner of any city in the country, of course the minimum of a Bachelors degree would be required to compete for those entry level jobs.  Life’s not so bad, is it?

       

Many find life so enjoyable they want to extend it for as long as possible by only eating a healthy diet of uncooked fresh vegetables, fruit, berries and nuts smushed up by an electric food processor into a smoothie, "no meat please!" Also no teeth needed to enjoy this modern meal... in addition it can be consumed at a clothing optional restaurant somewhere in the Bay Area of California.

On Leadership from my viewpoint of being bass ackwards

By Dan Barber

There seems to be a lot of poor management problems throughout our society and government today. The stuff really does roll down hill when it comes to blame and usually sticks to no one who deserves it, but can hit the innocent.

However, those on top of the heap and responsible for the stench will eventually be remembered for the rancid legacy they leave behind.

There are so many of our government leaders and celebrities today who got where they are because of nepotism or the old Faustian tale of selling their soul for fame or fortune. Many times those individuals will eventually have hell to pay when the debt becomes due, we see that in the news all of the time.

When we look to those leaders or celebrities to display any talent to justify their existence in our lives they can disappoint us because they lack the ability to deliver or their soul is actually gone. Throughout my life I have been able to view some political leaders and celebrities from afar and up close. Many times I thought, “Wow, that individual seems to be distracted, afraid, egotistically driven, or just plain absent from the moment.”

Although I have met some really great people who have genuine character and talent.

What can go wrong if we allow people without talent to entertain us, probably nothing because they will eventually just go away? What can go wrong if we trust someone without character who can affect change to our lives without consequences, maybe a horrendous catastrophe?

My view comes from my perspective while serving in the United States Navy, first as an active duty sailor for 20 years, then for another 20 years as a civilian employee with a civilian company for a couple of years.

As an enlisted sailor I was at most a lower-level manager with set but limited responsibilities. If I failed my mission then I would be counseled and any chance of promotion to the next higher pay-grade could be forever be hampered. However, if I worked hard to reestablish my credibility with my chain of command I might be able to reverse my earlier failure. You might think this to be a difficult job, maybe. But it taught me self respect and self discipline. The experience taught me to trust those officers appointed over me… to believe that their mission was my mission. Everyone I worked with had the same set of values.

When I retired from active duty I got a job with a civilian company. I brought my loyalty, skills, self discipline and self respect with me to the job. I contributed a great deal to that company, but alas, 2 years later I was told that they could no longer afford me as a salaried employee with benefits, but asked if I could stay on as a contract employee, in other words doing the same job without having to provide the added cost of the benefits. I declined. I had no need for health care coverage or retirement. I had already earned those from the Navy. I declined because the company didn’t respect me enough to demonstrate loyalty to me. Maybe the company was loosing revenue and needed to cut costs. That would have been understandable, and I would have stayed. But what I witnessed was the boss driving her very expensive luxury car to work every day, leaving the office for expensive hair/makeup/nail appointments and frequently entertaining friends at high-end restaurants. To me that demonstrated character, or lack thereof, after being told the company could no longer afford my services. Perhaps she earned the right to all those things. But the key word here is “earned.” I bade her farewell and good luck.

If I can apply the cliché “hind-sight is always 20-20,” why do we allow history to repeat itself? Is it because we buy into the false charms of the politicians or employers? Is it because we have a short memory? Do we believe that we are immune from past disasters? Or do we put blind trust into people who promise us abstract ideals like hope and change?

When a leader answers a question with the question, “What difference does it make now?” regarding the death of four people who were serving us, the people of the United States, I pay attention, because that is a matter of character.

The Cycle of Life

By Dan Barber

Everybody knows that once you’ve learned to ride a bicycle you never forget, but that can be a dangerous thing, especially for an old man with a 20-year old mind set.

A few years back the United States Navy thought that it would be a good thing to send me back to school a couple of years before I turned 50. This wasn’t a standard military school it was at the University of Oklahoma. Several people were picked each year from all branches of the military and other selected government agencies like the IRS, NASA and the CIA to attend and study communications theory. Each class of students numbered about 20 people.

While at the university we all were required to live in student housing. Two students were assigned to each two bedroom, two-bath apartment. The apartment complex was located in Norman, Oklahoma adjacent to the campus and the Sooners baseball practice fields. Each of us was lent a bicycle to use during our 3-month stay and a bus pass so we could access all facilities on the campus, and in the near by town of Norman. Some of my fellow students had cars I was one of the students who opted not to bring mine. The entire area of Norman and the university is mostly geographically flat so I used the bicycle for my transportation around the campus and into town.

I became more physically fit than I had been in many years. I used my bike to go to class, to go to the movies in town, the library and just for the fun of riding around the campus and in town. Some of my classmates were younger military guys who thought they were already physically and mentally fit so their pastime was to visit a local bar to work on their class assignments, drink beer and watch “South Park.”  I never enjoyed sitting in a bar, for me it was very boring and I out grew watching cartoons when I started Junior High School. I also knew that it wasn’t possible for me to grasp the complexities of communications theories while setting in a bar sipping on a beer in front of a TV with the channel tuned to cartoons.

During that time I was an old man who was being re-energized physically, spiritually and mentally in the world of youth. My atrophied muscles were growing stronger from use. My brain was actually growing new ideas that hadn’t seen the light of new knowledge in years, but this is where my analogy of bike riding and being old with a youthful mind set comes crashing together.

My roommate was a Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant who worked in the Commandant of the Marine Corps office. He was always running where ever he went. Marines are like that because I think it is a requirement that they run so many miles each day. I tried running with my roommate, but I almost died before I got out of our apartment complex. I even went to the gym with him once, but was too embarrassed to try to lift any kind of weight. But on a bicycle I allowed myself to be transported back in time. I must have looked the site, an old grey haired man peddling around the school like a damned fool, but I didn’t care.

It was a beautiful warm day with the campus full of young people as I was headed back to my apartment on my bike with an arm load of books and a curb in front of me… I remember being able jump over just such a curb many times before…when I was a kid!

Communications theory sometimes has to leap over decades before an old man can understand that just because he could jump a curb on a bicycle as a child doesn’t mean he can still do it.

The battle of positive thinking vs. negative thinking

By Dan Barber

Now that I’m retired I find it more challenging to keep my mind from drifting toward sadness. We all experience sadness, it is part of our existence. We all grow old and experience the loss of physical abilities as well as mental ability. We also experience the loss of loved ones who we miss dearly, but what give us comfort are our memories. If we can overcome the negatives and only remember the positives then we might be blessed with peace.

When my abilities of multi-tasking at my work declined I became concerned. To counter my lost productivity I established a set routine to ensure I completed my assigned tasks, but when that routine was somehow interrupted, I would become agitated. The interruption would cause me to repeat my routine so I didn’t miss anything. This only led me to discover that I was repeating easy tasks over and over again… I have always prided myself on providing the best services or counsel to anyone requesting my help. Being friendly, organized and a good manager of my time at work was very important. I did not want my agitated state to be foisted on anyone seeking my assistance, so I decided to retire from a job I really loved.

I write about this now, not because I am seeking any pity… that would really upset me. I am writing to exercise my brain and to maintain my positive outlook on my life and to counter the negative aspects of growing old by turning it into a positive.

I really enjoy the company of family. I enjoy just sitting back watching for any opportunity for something new to write about… for those family members reading this, don’t worry because I will only write positive things.

Part of my morning routine now is waiting for my 2-year old grandson to deliver the morning newspaper to me. I have to leave it laying in the driveway until his Mom brings him over for his morning visit so he can personally deliver the paper with, “Ers (here’s) yer (your) paper Pop Pop (grandpa).” We visit for awhile which might entail me watching an episode of Curious George with him and when he’s ready to head back across the street to his house he will announce, “I want to go to Mom’s house now,” and, “got any canny (candy)?” I have pointed out to him that “Mom’s house” is his house too. But he insists that, “No, it’s Mom’s house!” I counter with, “Does Mom let you live there also?” He replies, “Yes, but its Mom’s house.” I guess that it’s a good thing that he believes that Mom is in charge of her house. This 2-year old is a good Muse for his grandpa’s ramblings.

If I appear grouchy at times, please excuse me. I may appear that way because I’m distracted, I’ve got gas, I am trying to remember where I put my glasses, keys or coffee… or I’m trying to remember how to spell a simple word. I really enjoy making fun of myself, and if that offends someone I’m really sorry.

Life is so much better if you can fill it with laughter and positive thoughts.

Here's a rerun from last year...What effect will evolution have on us?

By Dan Barber

When I was a very small child the sounds of pigeons outside of my grandparent’s house scared me to death because I thought the cooing sounded like ghosts saying “boo, boo, boo.” My grandmother told me they were really angels trying to talk to us, so I had to listen really close to hear what they were trying to say. From that moment on the sound of pigeons and doves cooing, has always been reassuring to me.

I recall when I was attending Rowland Elementary School a teacher told me that if I didn’t use my mouth properly in pronunciation when I spoke then in the future my mouth would shrink up to a little hole. That scary image is still rattling around in my head.

When I was at Alvarado Junior High a girl told me that I sounded like a donkey when I laughed. I am still self conscious in how I sound when laughing out loud. I spent many years suppressing my laughter so people now think that I’m just an old sour puss with no sense of humor.

When I was a teenager in Rowland Heights I learned how to drive and do all kinds of repairs on my car… it was necessary because I was a teenaged boy in Southern California’s “car culture.” Now I worry about dying in this “car culture.” While teaching my granddaughter how to drive recently her cell phone started ringing while she was behind the wheel and she made a grab for it; my heart skipped a beat and we used that experience as a teaching moment! We also had a discussion about “just because you can’t see a red light, doesn’t mean it’s not there!” or “pay attention to the road instead of the boys walking down the street!” I mistakenly thought that I could spoil my grandchildren and then send them home to bug their parents. But that didn’t work out because my daughter learned the phrase, “go ask grandpa!”

Now that I am an old man, I worry about the younger generation evolving into something they’re not, because they worship some entertainer behaving badly and trying to emulate those bad behaviors. I learned at a very young age that I couldn’t do what my heroes did on TV. I discovered the painful lesson that I couldn’t fly from the top of my grandparent’s staircase with a towel as a cape! I recall my mother telling me while patching me up from that experience that she was not going to buy me a “real” cape because they weren’t real!

I really enjoy watching my grandchildren learn… I also get a kick out of their weird habits. One day I saw three of my granddaughters and one grandson all sitting on the couch with the TV blaring away, but they weren’t watching the TV, they had their faces buried in their smart phones, portable gaming thingies or whatever it was that lit up their faces. Some children are now learning the complicated world of computing before they learn how to pull up their pants, tie their shoes or ride a bike! I see these kids walking down the street now constantly tugging on their drawers that are hanging down to their knees and trying to keep from tripping over unlaced sneakers while staring at an electronic device with wires sticking out of their ears. It’s probably a good thing that they aren’t riding a bike…

There are some good things about today’s advancements. My granddaughters have learned to type faster then me with just their two thumbs on a very small keyboard that I have to squint to see, and when my stupid computer freezes up I can always call upon my young grandsons to fix it for me.

Maybe like the old Army recruiting slogan says, “Be all you can be” perhaps we are already there or not. If there is any justice in the future, my grandchildren will tell their children, "go ask grandma!"

The hazards of retirement

By Dan Barber

One of the hazards of retirement is losing track of the days of the week. I woke early this morning in a minor panic thinking that I had forgotten to set the clocks back an hour last night! When my wife got up she asked me “why are all of the clocks set to the wrong time?” Aha, I thought I had one over on her. I told her because we were supposed to set the clocks back an hour Saturday night before we went to bed! She informed me, “It is Saturday morning, dork, we are supposed to reset the clocks tonight!” “Well then,” I replied, “I don’t have to worry about it tonight then… we just have to add an hour to the time today.”

This is just one sample of our conversations these days.

I have so many more opportunities to get in trouble now that I’m home all the time. For example, I am no longer allowed to keep track of my tools because when my wife asks me to take care of some minor repair around the house, I was always asking her if she knew where the tape measure, screw driver, hammer, wrench, etc. was located. She is now the owner and keeper of the tool box. When I am assigned a task to take care of, I have to check out the tools from her and when the job is done, return those tools to her so I can be excused. Only then, am I allowed to take a cat nap on my couch in my den!

In an attempt to keep from getting bored I have developed an interest in cooking, so I have started collecting recipes. But, it seems that whenever the recipe calls for the use of flour, my wife has decided that I need close supervision in the kitchen! I can also get into trouble for using so many of our pots and pans that it takes two dish washer loads to clean up everything!

I can never guess what my wife is talking about most of the time because she can carry on a conversation about the same subject over several days, so when she asks me, “are you going to take care of that thing I asked you to do?”  I give her a blank stare, which is my question of, “what thing?” Keep in mind, that my wife will ask me this question on Thursday, for example, about the conversation we had about the “thing” which took place back on Monday!

She is off shopping today and I can’t find the darn remote control for the TV so I think that I will take a cat nap…