The Three Quarters Club and Memento mori.

This month I joined a new club, its membership as inevitable as the changing of the seasons. The Three-Quarters Club: seventy-five years of being awake and aware of the world around me, although ‘awake’ isn’t quite right, of course: for 25 of those years, I was asleep. Talk about a layabout.

When I wasn’t sleeping, I did what most of us do: achieved, failed, loved, learned, and loved learning. I did good, and I did bad (but not too bad); I had good jobs and not-so-good jobs, like (literally) breaking rock 4000 feet underground in a nickel mine, or struggling through the mind-numbing repetition of working on a car assembly line, your world reduced to a simple imperative of labour every 56 seconds. Jobs like those tend to focus what you really want to do with your life.

And what do you do with that life, especially as it gets shorter and more defined the older we get? Everyone who has lived through the better part of eight decades will tell you the same thing about how time collapses. How is it possible to have crystal-clear memories of people and places and events that happened fifty or sixty years ago? How do all those significant times in your life still resonate as if they happened last week? 

And that’s the cliché, of course: as you meander down the pathway of life (or whatever metaphor you want to use), the more you are aware of that pathway, past, present, and future. There’s a fascinating balance between being aware of a good life and wondering about the rest.

The great Latin phrase memento mori captures the essence of that thought. Loosely translated, it means ‘remember death.' Although it sounds morbid, it’s actually an affirmation: memento mori doesn’t mean dwelling on death; it means focusing on life. Life is richer because of the perspective death gives it, and the older you get, the more perspective you have. You appreciate the vitality of life and your place in it, and you tend to live more intentionally.

Sometimes you don’t realize the importance of loving relationships—including friendships—until you’ve been in them for awhile. I had a steady, nurturing upbringing, which I didn’t fully appreciate until I was an adult. I’ve been blessed with good friendships, the love of family, the love of a life partner, the love of a daughter and son-in-law, the heartbreaking (in a good way) love of wonderful, funny, curious grandsons (‘the felons,' as their mother sometimes calls them). If there’s one thing I could instill in them—beyond the simple but profound admonition to do no harm to yourself or others—it would be to have curiosity, about everything. I try not to pontificate too much to anyone younger, especially friends in their 40s and 50s still enjoying the glow of their callow youth. My poor daughter, in her 30s, bears the brunt of my ‘received wisdom,' although a roll of her eyes can cut those conversations short.

As for regrets, I casually wish I could have been more relaxed about the flow, about living life as it comes. Any real regrets are mostly about not doing things, rather than regret for something I’ve done. If you’ve been paying attention to your journey—and you do more of that the older you get—you understand that most mistakes aren’t regrets; they are learning experiences.

And importantly, the older you get, the more you understand the difference between life-span and health-span.

I’ve enjoyed relative good health, notwithstanding double-membership in another group, The Club No One Wants To Join, aka The Cancer Club (cue Groucho Marx: "I don't want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members"). There are things you can do to increase the odds of having a long, healthy life, but it’s often the luck – good or bad - of the draw. Will random synapses start to misfire; will those ‘crystal-clear memories’ fade? Will membership in that other club flare up again?

And will all the philosophizing make one whit of difference, because in the blink of time we will be gone—although that’s not quite true. This is not a philosophical thought, it’s simple science: the atoms that make us the individuals we are will continue to exist after we are gone, rearranged in some form or another, as they have forever, and as they will forever.

Which is to underline—and you know where this is headed—the importance of paying attention as you meander down the pathway. Because what’s left is your whole life, for however long that will last. Love, friendship, being aware, living intentionally.

As for legacy? To have done good in the world, hopefully. To have loved and been loved, certainly.

Tom New

Gatineau , Quebec