When you are young and strong and smart and beautiful and lucky, it’s very easy to think that you’re the master of the universe or, at least, master of your fate. You can write, as I recently read in a post from a prominent blogger:
Moreover, as a class, the old and sick have some culpability in their ill health. They didn’t eat right or excercise; they smoked; they didn’t go to the doctor as often as they ought; they drank to much, or took drugs, or sped, or engaged in dangerous sports. Again, in individual cases this will not be true; but as a class, the old and sick bear some of the responsibility for their own ill health, while younger, healthier people have almost no causal role in the ill-health of others.
If you’re very, very lucky you may continue to believe such things throughout your life. Some of those lucky few are foolish enough to believe that they deserve their good fortune.
But for most of us things happen. We’re infected with a microbe contracted from a passing stranger in the street. We’re struck by an automobile driven by a careless driver. The stock market crashes. We’re robbed. The industry that we’ve been working in simply disappears. The genes we’ve inherited mean that a heart or liver deteriorates. Or we’re wracked with pain, with barely enough strength to rise from our chairs and barely enough energy to leave bed every day and go on and not even the cleverest physician knows why.
…the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
There is no amount of providence, no amount of caution, and no amount of prevention by which we can avoid bad things happening to us. It’s probably not a coincidence that every wisdom tradition of which I’m aware teaches that compassion is the highest of human faculties.
It’s charitable, perhaps even compassionate, of you, not to name that “prominent blogger.”
I wish there were some way to mail that post to him or her, scheduled to arrive on his or her, oh, let’s say, 75th birthday. It’s too much to hope that s/he will spontaneously remember and regret that callow callousness.
Hang in there man. You’re a rock.
The industry I was working in when I got married has completely disappeared, but on the other hand, the industry I work in now didn’t exist back then so it all works out.
Amba, there’s a good chance that whoever wrote it won’t even make it to their 75th birthday. One has to be lucky enough to live long enough to regret those mistakes of callow youth….
My son is 28. I know there is something he did as a callow youth which he now regrets.