Live until you die.
Lions and tigers and bears, Oh My!

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Is that it? Is that all you give us for a blog?

Well, no. Although, like anything, there’s always more. A pithy aphorism should start a train of thought that leads somewhere, gets somewhere.

But I’m too much aware of all the little quotations people post. They’re like “words to live by,” like they’re a “big deal.”

The audience that takes one-liners as a full meal, those easily-filled shallow stomachs, I very much am afraid do so often go no further than the quotable cliche. What should prompt further thought, in too many cases is as far as they go. They repeat the phrase as if it’s the be all and end all. They are the reason civilization has not progressed. They are the reason civilization is in decline.

All those years I taught students in the classroom, I tried to get them to see more. Their first draft essays went through revisions, real thinking about means and ends, corrected versions leading to a second draft, then the polish of completion to a third and final draft, sometimes a fourth.

My students got very good at thinking. They liked it. The world made sense. Their lives became full.

Yes, “live until you die.” They are, they do. They know life is not subsumed by platitudes or cliche, life is in the living of it.

All of us can learn. All of us have needs for more. I tried to help my students fill those needs, keep their minds awake, live the words democracy, equality, love thy neighbor, do no harm.

I had students in Pasadena who had never been to the beach, and it’s only twenty miles away.