"Did you ever have to make up your mind"

When the Lovin' Spoonful sang that ditty while we Last Quarter types were young, John Sebastian was thinking, I suppose, about two lovers: "Did you ever have to make up your mind ... to say yes to one and leave the other behind." It musta been around the year M and I got married ... 1965.

Choices. We never seem to get away from the need the World shoves in our face to make choices. Oh, there are all those we made in the past -- choosing schools when we were still bopping teeners and, then, a career ... or, at least, a first career. There were the relationships aborted and those we pursued. Then, typically, there were the children not aborted. Would I really have been happier with a 1967 Lamborghini Miura than with my 1966 and 1967 model-year kids ... or with my younger one that appeared when a used Miura might have been $-wise in my reach?? I dunno. I have long found such remorseful looking back of little value. Hell! I made the decisions I did and they are not reversible. Anyhow, however one feels about abortion, in general, and late term abortions, in particular, aborting 48 and 49 year old kids is arguably out of the question ... and just might run counter to those kids' plans for themselves.

Still, there are times when I wonder. Some months ago, there was a clip with Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld driving around in Jerry's Miura ... just for a moment:

Geez!

And, then, there's Jay Leno who may have 2 or 3 of that vintage Lamborghini and another 100 cars, to boot. Most of us who made decisions to live life and raise kids don't have the option to own more than one or two cars ... to raise a multiplicity of families ... to order 3 choices from a dinner menu and a variety of wines ... to move to a different one of our houses while the cleaning staff is cleaning the one we just messed .... or even to entertain every one of our interests.

So, what does it mean to be satisfied with my choices, especially, perhaps, choices that I make now that are, indeed, irreversible? Years ago, Levinson and Gail Sheehy explored men and women in their 40's mostly. They found that -- among just a few others -- two differences seemed typical of those years. 

One had to do with beginning to count backwards ... in quiet reveries thinking more of how many years were left to us than how many we had successfully traversed ... or thinking about: "When I get to be 65, I'll have my knee joint replaced ..." has a different tone than "When I get to be 14, Mom and Dad will let me go to the movies alone" or "When I'm just a little older, I'll fall in love." 

Another difference they noticed was that enough time had passed that people began to recognize that if they had had a Dream when they were Second Quartered of how things would be/turn out, chances are pretty good that life hadn't been a by-the-script production. With the dashing of that dream, two paths, indeed, seem to have opened up, with one being a dead-end (... a cul de sac, I suppose, if one's earlier dream was reasonably well-planned for). This first group of folk tended to be prone to ongoing disillusionment and depression.

Another group/cluster seemed to accept that the dreams were not fully fulfilled and chose to edit or to rewrite the dream. Those of us who chose this latter path made an implicit decision to see the dashing of the dream of the Second Quarter as an opportunity to enter a new adventure. That group, itself, tends to divide into two subgroups: those who need to throw out the Old in its entirety and those who choose to tweak what there was in order to make room for the revised Dream.

I don't rightly know (maybe Levinson's  "Seasons of a Man's Life" or Sheehy's Passages have figured this out and I've forgotten) what variables decide what path someone will take. For myself, I have found a number of ways of taking in the World helpful and think of them as contributing to which fork in the road I follow. I'm thinking of the following:

Gratitude for what has been and for what is and a hopefulness for what may still be;

A Presumption of Good Intentions in those near and dear to me;

A recognition of the sanguine value of the Big Two Emotions -- Glee and Sadness;

The possibility of and wish for New Experience;

The pursuit of Mutuality ... of recognizing playmates as Subjects in Their Own Right.

These thoughts seemed to follow my early rising, today, wondering about the translation of the so-called Golden Rule, as presented in its Leviticus XIX form:

ואהבת לרעך כמוך

I've seen many translations ... most having the tone of "And you will/should love your friend, as yourself." I wondered about the similar: "And you shall/should do to your friend as you would have them do to you." 

In that hypnopompic stage between sleep and wakefulness, I fascinated about another more modern line, too:

Who loves ya, Baby?

Translating from one language to another or to one's emphasis in thinking is, at best, an ambiguous project. Literally, the text ואהבת לרעך כמוך reads: 

And you shall/should (offer) love (to) your friend as (to) yourself.

That doesn't sound-out well ... a rough read. Translation is tough. But I wondered, shall I:

Love my neighbor as they love me?

which lends itself to the joke about "do unto them BEFORE they do unto you," or, else, shall I:

Love my neighbor as I love myself?

I came downstairs with GuntherDog, thinking that those last two loves -- love of Other and love of Self -- must be cut from the same fabric. I know, I know. I have abandoned the five categories I listed as central to recasting the early dream into one more suitable for the Second Half of Life. Maybe the next five days will give me time to riff on and fascinate about them.