The day comes when we look around and realize the world has passed us by. Our sensibilities and worldview are not those of the younger people around us. Our attitudes and outlooks are relics of a bygone era. So much of the world we suddenly no longer understand.

How did we get here?

Simple. Our desire, our will to explore our world, to learn new things, falls into as much of a death spiral as our bodies. Only so much one can do with creaky joints, but we’ve the power to do something about our creaky minds.

We must choose to become The Seeker again: that young person we once were, for whom curiosity and the desire to learn was as natural and commonplace as breathing. Diving back into the waters of knowledge at this point may be a frigid shock to the system, but we can do it.

How?

Choose to learn again. Become The Seeker once more. Whatever you least enjoy about this life, whatever you least understand, seize it and make it your own.

Can’t stand reggae music? Loop a music stream of Shabba Ranks for the next 30 hours. Just listen to him.

Can’t stand country western? Go back to its roots. Listen to the social commentary embedded in the songs of Woody Guthrie, whose legacy Joan Baez carried forward. Slide over to Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson. Fast-forward to Garth Brooks. Slide sideways to Big & Rich.

Perhaps you love those but cannot stand or appreciate classical music. Reach into the trove of the great artists of their day. Invest countless hours listening to arrangements of their compositions.

Perhaps all you read are cozy mystery stories. Pull out a horror story, or something considered modern literary writing, or perhaps the entire library of Louis L’Amour.

Becoming The Seeker requires immersion in what you decided long ago you do not like or appreciate, in what you have long since abandoned as the young person’s domain.

Choose to learn again. Not at all comfortable at first, this learning, as it’s very much like physical exercise. Exercise, counterintuitively, damages our muscles. Our bodies ready themselves for the next onslaught of physical exertion by building back better, becoming stronger. It’s the same with choosing to learn again. Hard at first, but the more often we choose to learn, the easier the choosing becomes.

Choose to be The Seeker. Choose learning. Discover again. Awaken your creaky mind, and you won’t feel so lost.

July 26th, 2023, my father, Jerry Lee Taylor, passed away from cancer. The nature, situation, and events surrounding his death I could drag out for several paragraphs, but suffice to say via machinations of his second wife, I missed his funeral, wasn’t included in the obit as one of the surviving relatives, and a host of other ugly things. She and I won’t be on speaking terms any time soon, but having fully exercised her pettiness, there’s nothing more she can do now. He’s interred, and she’ll soon be just a bad memory.

As of this post, my father’s been dead slightly more than a week. When I was informed 10 days ago he was dying, every minute crawled. The longest week of my life culminated in the longest day of my life when I finally learned of his death (discovered by my sister online).

When I think back on my father’s life and the ups and downs in our relationship, there’s plenty of opportunity to find fault with how both of us handled things, but near the of his life, my father and I had reached a detente of sorts: he wouldn’t mention details of my life, I wouldn’t haul out ugly bits of his.

So his weekly Sunday phone calls thus encompassed the weather, how things were going, the usual banter between moderate acquaintances. We never spoke too deeply about anything, but mere cordiality was enough; certainly far more than we’d had in years prior.

I wouldn’t say I’m numb, but I haven’t determined or surmised how I feel yet, at least not completely. Certainly some sadness punctuated by somber moments of reflection. People wonder, for having missed his funeral, have I found closure. I don’t know if I would’ve reached it any faster had I stared down at a box in the ground, as I had with his father.

His second wife’s pettiness hurt, but that can be overcome, and as mentioned, she’ll eventually be just a bad memory, and eventually a vague one. As far as my father goes, there’s no great wound, no great regret. Was he a perfect father? No. Far from it, and I definitely was no perfect son. But we never got completely estranged, and toward the end I do think we genuinely cared about each other, regardless how anyone outside the relationship of the two of us might characterize it.

Reaching peace with this will take time. I’m sure I’ll find it.

So here begins yet another platform rollout for my website, this time, finally, on WordPress rather than a cheap feature-starved site builder. What motivated this particular migration away from Google Domains (which worked just fine for as long as I had it) is to avoid the announced handover of Google Domains to Squarespace, which is more expensive than what I’ve moved to (Hostinger). So far, and it’s early in the process yet, things have gone (mostly) smoothly and Hostinger’s tech support is solid (I jumped the gun and started building the site before the SSL got installed, that caused issues. Resolved now, obviously, the URL starts with http://s.

My personal gold standard for web hosting is SiteGround, but they’re pricey. Very pricey, with no cheap schlocky site builder to spare your bank account.

Hopefully the investment here is for the long term.