Day 93 – Mystery Package

March 12, 2015

(This is part of a 365 project during my 70th year where I write and illustrate a blog on each day's gift.)

Today in the mail, I received a package from China that I had not ordered. However, it had my name and address on the padded manilla envelope. I opened it to find a small plastic “lens” that was actually a cup the right size for a shot glass. The return address says it is from Gong Lu and that it is a DSLR kit. There was no note or packing slip included. The return address indicates that it was sent from the Nanshan district of Shenzhen, which is in southern China’s Guangdong Province with a population of 15 million and just north of Hong Kong. 

What a small world it is when I receive a surprise package from the other side of our planet.

I’ve been writing about gifts that each day brings. Sometimes the day brings a surprise such as the otherworldly patina on a tiny piece of metal I found. Sometimes it brings a mystery that makes me wonder, such as the curled beech tree leaves that refuse to let go when other trees are relinquishing all of their leaves. Day 93 has brought me a literal gift that makes me smile and wonder. I know the answers to what, when, where and who (at least the name of the Chinese sender) but I do not know the why. A surprise, mystery and unanswered questions bubble to the top of my day. 

My gift today is a question.
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> DAY 94 Fun-A-Day

You can read my other posts on this project here:
http://bjschupp.blogspot.com/2014/12/365-gifts.html

Time, Numbers, Lists and Questions

A few days ago, on August 28, 2013, I calculated that I have lived for 25,098 days.

This number, 25,098, sparks some questions. What if I were to live as long as my mother did and no longer? My mother lived for 28, 259 days, the last several years of her life filled with the challenges of living with diabetes and Parkinson’s.

How much time might I have left if I were to follow my mother’s path? My sloppy math suggests that I have approximately 3,161 days left of my life. That translates to 75,864 hours. If I assume that I will sleep eight hours each day, then that leaves me with 50,576 waking hours or the equivalent of 5.77 years of wakeful time left. 

Wow! That’s not long at all. How am I going to spend that time? What do I want to accomplish yet before my footprints fade?

Hmmm. I think about how many hours our TV runs all day and night. Let’s just say that I will watch four hours of TV a day. Or maybe two hours of TV and two hours checking on my Facebook friends, reading e-mail and learning new things on the computer. That will leave me with roughly 4.33 equivalent years to fill with other things. 

Then I continue thinking about how I want to be as happy as possible for my remaining days and also maybe leave some part of me behind. Every five years or when I feel my life is out of balance, I make a list of what I need to be happy; it helps me to see what I need to adjust. My most recent “happiness” list includes these multi-faceted elements: love, creativity, adventure, connections/acceptance, solitude, learning, independence, beauty, dreams, balance/stability.

More questions invade my thinking as I envision the hands of the clock whirling faster and faster.

How much time each day do I allow for the things that make me happy and for the dream of leaving behind an important part of myself?

How much does television and social media contribute to my happiness?

Do I want to spend these last precious years accumulating and dealing with things? What things, literal and figurative, can I discard that clutter my life? (I should have added to my happiness list that I need space…not a lot but enough to feel I’m not being invaded by stuff. This will allow more metaphorical space to open up which nourishes spirit.)

And one final question--how much time have I taken to contribute to someone else's happiness? 

Thinking on the Edge About Privacy

Danny Hillis (photo from Wikipedia)

Just thinking...

Want some thought-provoking reading? Try Edge (http://www.edge.org.) You’ll find lots of questions and many different takes on possible answers. The latest group of essays deal with the issue of privacy, a current topic of interest in light of Wikileaks.

First a little background:The Edge Organization is a science and technology think tank of intellectuals...some of the most interesting minds in the world. According to its Web site, its purpose is “to promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society." It was established as a nonprofit foundation in 1988.

A part of this foundation is “The Third Culture” which consists of thinkers who address the meaning of life and how we define ourselves.

Among the brilliant minds in this group is  Danny Hillis, born in Baltimore, who used to work in imagineering at Disney. He also founded the Long Now Foundation which proposes a project to build a clock designed to function for millennia.

Danny Hillis has recently asked a question that many of us have been thinking about lately:..the issue of privacy.  “The question of secrecy in the information age is clearly a deep social (and mathematical) problem, and well worth paying attention to. When does my right to privacy trump your need for security? Should a democratic government be allowed to practice secret diplomacy? Would we rather live in a world with guaranteed privacy or a world in which there are no secrets? If the answer is somewhere in between, how do we draw the line?”

Go here to read responses from some interesting thinkers: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/hillis10.1/hillis10.1_index.html

You might also try answering this question for yourself. Maybe you'd also like to think about some of the annual questions that have been asked in the past.

2005 "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?”

2006 "What is your dangerous idea"?
2007 "What are you optimistic about? Why?"
2008  "What have you changed your mind about?"
2009 "What will change everything? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"
2010 "How has the Internet changed the way you think?"

Just thinking...
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Friday and Heaven's Pearly Gates

Heaven ©Bonnie J. Schupp

Today? How can it be Friday already? I blinked and another week passed!

I’m in the third quarter of my life, or the fourth quarter, depending on how long I might live. Days no longer stretch out like forever long strings of taffy as they did when I was a young child. Now the days remind me of my 5-year-old self who would begin running downhill and eventually the run grew out of control and my legs couldn’t move as fast as the hill was descending. Of course, I’d eventually fall. It was inevitable.

Eventually my taffy strings will break, my “legs” won’t be able to keep up with my subjective time and I’ll fall.

At age 65, with a time perspective different from that of my childhood, and as I experience the death of family members and friends, I sometimes  think about my own departure from the life I know now.  As a child, I learned that we live a good life today and then in the next life there will be a good life in heaven—forever.  

That was comforting but very distant. Today I realize that nobody knows the “beyond” answers. And, really, I don’t care if there is a heaven or not. I  live the best life I’m capable of living—now. Afterward, as the old song says, “que sera, sera.”  

I don’t dwell on the beyond but today I read two thought-provoking discussions of heaven and death (unusual day to begin my day, right?):

One makes the case that even if there is a heaven, it might not be so great.

http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/pearlygates.html

The other talks about how atheists might find it easier to cope with death than those who believe in an afterlife.

http://www.alternet.org/story/148825/why_atheists_are_better_prepared_for_death_than_believers?page=1

Interesting...but now it’s Friday and I have a lot to do...

© Bonnie J. Schupp

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