Goodbye cruel world.
Or maybe I should go out of this lifetime, like my Dad left about thirty years ago. On the day he died, he went to work as usual as a dentist fixing teeth. Then he came home -- (while I was gratefully at graduate school wasting my time on a degree in something or other. Oh yeah, it was a computers degree, when he died in 1981.)
So Dad comes home and has a cup of hot tea. He walks into the kitchen to put the cup in the sink. He gets as far as the kitchen table and drops on the floor and dies of a heart attack. Later, we realized he had said his last words earlier. They were posted on the kitchen fridge erasable slate. He must have wrote them shortly before he died. It said - "I quit".
I guess sometimes ya' just know when your done and I'm done with this blog for now and maybe forever. I've got nothing to say and no desire to keep writing.
I bet my Dad felt like he wasted his life towards its' end. I sure feel like I wasted my time writing these blog entries.
It's not depressing, but maybe my vision is too narrow, just like my Dad's was back then. My cousin took over his dental practice after he died. It's still shocking to me how almost 30 years later how revered my Dad was for doing dental work. As the dental staff that work there tell me stories about my Dad told to them by current patients that are kids or grand-kids of the same patients my Dad treated so many years ago.
I remember a year or so before my Dad died, I was talking to him about dentistry that never really interested me. He could see I was set on starting my path of wasting ten years of my life doing corporate computer work, that was only a glimmer in my eyes in graduate school. He told me something shocking. He said, he always wished one of his kids grew up to be a dentist and take over his practice, but none of us did. I said, "I never knew that. Why didn't you tell me this when I was younger." He said, "None of you showed any interest in it". His wise look told me, that he never wanted to force us into something we had no talent in and no desire in doing.
I am now in Chicago staying at my sister Carol's house for about a month and a 1/2. I watch her kids who are forced to study stuff during the school year, that they have no interest in learning. As a result, neither kid is surprisingly at the top of their school class food chain.
But you get these kids on a bike and they are in their element. Something in them comes alive. Just last night, on our way to a Chinese restaurant for a family dinner plus me in tow, the clouds were getting very dark and the lightening was electric. The kids were enthralled. Not distracted like they are when attempting to do their homework. I thought about how we force people into roles they are ill suited for. These two girls love nature and last night was just the latest example of it. I love Chinese Medicine and I often wonder what my life would have been like, if I started learning Chinese Medicine at their age which is 7 and 9.
I'm not cut out to be a dentist or a Chinese Medicine doctor who sees a lot of patients. I'm not a Forest Ranger in training. I wanted to turn the masses onto Chinese Medicine and this blog was my attempt to achieve that end. Just like my Dad needed to step back and to see the value of his life, when he thought he was wasting it. I needed to step back for the last month or so to realize that perhaps this blog wasn't a waste at all. Maybe it was to document a few high quality pieces (with many silly pieces in between -- like my Dad always had time for a few laughs with his patients in between the drilling), that reflected what Chinese Medicine could achieve. And these blog entries will always be here for the foreseeable future to show interested parties down the road, while I take things into another direction.
