death

After yesterday's putative programme title, The Art of Living, regular reader James of Scotland, one of the few to have mastered the surprisingly tricky comment function on Blogger, offers information from work with the elders in Newcastle upon Tyne in North-East England ... though without hyperlink, a function your technophobic blogger has discovered here ... good old google search unearths many references to "The Art of Living", the most resonant being from Epictetus, since current reading mentions him and current collaborator, Andreas, proposes bringing Ancient Greek philosophy into focus ... though why it is not filosophy into phocus is a semantic mystery ...

While you ponder this, dear reader, a diversion into the murky world of google, windows and yahoo ... another mystery here ... google ("do no evil"), having become a verb, offers a "free" platform for this would be writer .. who, seeking a publisher, is already publishing ... readership varying, though not insignificant (if the stats are right) ... yet, google declines to make the comment function on blogger user-friendly ... perhaps they have a wiki function to sell? Windows, the Microsoft programme running on the newly acquired laptop (due to your blogger's ineptitude on operating open source alternatives) allows yahoo (another search engine) to arrive uninvited and unsupervised by Macafee or whatever was recommended to keep this laptop safe from cyber-attack and inveigle its way into the daily life of a simple blogger and browser, hoping, naively, for an experience designed to be easy for the end user ... windows, meanwhile, has a hair trigger design, which manages to offer ads you didn't ask for .. genius! Please be aware, that free lunches are rare ... so we pay in the end ...

Meanwhile, back to the Filosophy .... and The Art of Living must encompass the Art of Dying ... a part of Life often feared ... the vague boundary between the two unrecognised as health technicians carry on as if immortality is possible in this 3D world ... intervening to prolong the dying period as if longevity was desirable at all costs ... and since it is a target against which performance may be measured, what else can we expect?

As noted before in these pages, a rehearsal is always helpful to allay fear ... and everyone's dying is unique ... for this blogger the brief flirtation with it was wonderful, though unsought ... and suggested that dying well was just as important as living well ... and in the end there is no separation one from the other ...

More practically, end of life research reports that regrets are mostly for things not tried and not things tried which did not work out ... no problem there then ...