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religious people are afraid of going to hell, while spiritual people have already been there.
I’m an atheist, thank God, with no fear of hell and no hope of heaven.
There was a fellow named Adolf Hitler over in Germany who had gotten himself the position of führer on the promise that he was going to make Germany great again. Americans, including the much-honored Charles Lindbergh, the motorcar magnate Henry Ford, whose photo Hitler kept in his office, and a man named Fred Koch, who built some oil refineries for the Nazis, much admired him. And then there was a man named Thomas Watson, whose company IBM helped with the statistical problems of transporting Jews to concentration camps and killing them.
At the end of his days, the very wealthy Scotsman Andrew Carnegie decided to sell all his assets in steel and railroads and sponsor libraries. As Carnegie liked to say, “The man who dies rich dies a disgraced death.”
As I like to say, organized religion has all the aspects of organized crime except the compassion.
Shame is firmly rooted in your past, and it doesn’t matter if it’s about the shameful things you did or those that were done to you.
fear is the promise you tell yourself that things will never work out well in future for you. For many of us, this despair of not having a horizon due to the dense darkness we carry leads to deep depression and sometimes self-murder.
did not understand that a husband and father ought to get home to participate in domesticity once in a while.
At this writing the current occupant of the White House is number forty-five, and of that collection eight have died in office, four of whom were assassinated with guns. If you do the math, as they say, you’ll find that the death rate in the presidency is 18 percent. That makes holding the highest office in the land, by percentage, the deadliest job in America, topping even logging, fishing, roofing, sanitation work, farming and ranching, steel and iron work, police, firefighting, trucking, working as a telephone lineman, driving a taxi, and all others that make the most-dangerous list.
there is never a reason to drink, only excuses.
I think forgiveness is the key to eternal happiness. Not some God Guy forgiving us, but our forgiveness of others. And of ourselves. Easier said than done, though.
“Don’t worry, Doctor,” I said. “We come from a long line of dead people.”
I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. W. B. YEATS,
It’s easy to give when you have enough to give. Giving is quite another thing, however, when what you give is all you have.
I am glad he was born. I’m glad he lived. I’m glad he wrote. I’m glad he was my brother. And I’m sad that he died.
Alphie’s death left me in a loneliness that was a kind of death in itself. For life exists only in the connections we have with those we love,
I began this tale by telling you that I don’t believe in God and that my god exists in the faces of my children and grandchildren and beautiful wife. My only hope is that when I do take my last breath, my god surrounds me.
But for an old guy, and I say this with the utmost sincerity, nothing is more emotionally fraught than the loss of mobility. We are the unwalking dead.
The thing about reduced ambling, though, is that it also affects the emotions. Over the last few months, I’ve been batting away and warding off the black dog, as Winston Churchill called depression.
I don’t know about you, but in my gut I find death more inviting than the simulation of life in a wheelchair. I’ve found that the only way to get out of the darkness is to hobble through it.
As I get closer to my last, more than ever, I live my life one day at a time.
And I believe in what Oscar Wilde said: “Forgive your enemies, it annoys them.”
What’s important to me is that I will be taking leave of this body that has housed my mind and what is called spirit for almost nine decades.
Now it is weakened and at times immobilized, but it is still the vehicle of my mind and my thoughts, and it still smiles at the sight of my beloved Diana, and my grown and growing children.
I think my death will be sleep that knows no waking, followed by a wake that knows no sleeping. I’ll
