“What’s happening?

“Nothing much. Same old.”

I cringe.

Folks I love share a trait: they are always doing something. Even when doing “nothing” – sleeping, lolling, maundering – they’re doing something. Intent on living, they count their moments and make their moments count. Idling, they’re recuperating, recovering their strength, readying themselves for their next grapple with being. By valuing their time, they increase the value of mine. Intention equals intensity. Their eagerness ignites life and makes it glow.

Plenty of folks simply are. They drift through life like flotsam on the tide, same old, same old. Encounters with them dismay, even if amiable. Their indifference to life makes it sag like a popped balloon. It’s not what they’re doing that drearies – they may be very busy – but the spirit in which they’re doing. They make life seem a chore, which makes me love mine less. Why bother?

I know you are not of this tribe of sadsacks because you are reading these words. Whether delectable or dull, these words are eager, trying to make something of our hour. Even when grim, they delight to strive. In my present Trollope listen (one may listen to Trollope a lifetime and never be done – how in heaven’s name did he write so much!), there’s a glacially beautiful, utterly impassive character, Lady Dumbello, who chills any scene she enters, like a whiff of death. Obtuse men slaver after her exquisite looks, but our author loathes her, for her beauty petrifies like the basilisk’s gaze.

Eagerness differs from intellect. Plenty of smart people are dull. It differs from curiosity, however curious. Our word enthusiasm comes closest. To ancient Athenians, enthusiasm meant having a god (theos) inside you, a dangerous fervency which Plato likens to poetic inspiration. Enthusiasm may get you into trouble, for it approaches existence as an opportunity to embrace not a chore to complete. It sneaks a whoopee cushion onto Lady Dumbello’s chair to vanquish “same old.” It challenges complacencies and defies tyrants. It exhilarates, even while it exhausts.

You and I are enthusiasts. I know because these words have no purpose except to celebrate being. I write not to convince, instruct, recruit, but to have fun together, convivialize, crack the egg of being and enjoy the joke (yoke). However horrifying our moment we seek to sniff out hope, beauty, grace, decency, good reasons to strive. Hamlet nails it – “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” – so (he eventually concludes) let’s make life good, even if it costs me my life. That our lives lack evident purpose is a blessing, not a burden, for that means our lives are what we make of them. Let’s make something grand – never “same old” but “always new”.

At the heart of Morality pulses the question, “Am I making the most?” Am I doing my best, giving my all, making my presence a gift to those around me? Am I treating others – all others – as I’d wish to be? Is my life kindling life in others – or snuffing it?

Children work hard at being for they’ve a lot to learn to become “grown up.” Too many, arriving at the condition of grown-up, put their lives on autopilot and concern themselves with their own satisfaction. Maybe the most pernicious question ever posed in American politics was “Are YOU better off?” Wrong question! The only question to be asked is “Are WE better off?”

I urge myself to be with the zest of a child, to make the most and then more. Never same old! Plenty of time for that when I rejoin the dust.