Opus 2024-306: Deadlines

Farmers live with a hard deadlines, they just don’t know what they are.  There comes a day when the snow falls.  There comes a day when the rain comes unexpectedly.  Those are hard deadlines embraced by mystery.

Being retired moves you into the world of vague deadlines.  The standard deadlines no longer apply.  You don’t have to get to work on time.  You usually don’t really even have to set an alarm.  You can stay up as late as you want.

The lack of technical deadlines does not mean that there are not limitations on what you can, and should do.  It’s called liberty.  Liberty involves responsibility, unlike the concept of freedom.  Dennis Prager makes this point in one of his speeches.  I wish I could quote him accurately, but I can’t, but I will give him a hat tip.  He is basically saying that the American philosophy involves liberty, not freedom, because he assigns duty and responsibility to one and license to the other.

The ultimate deadline, of course is death.  Right behind it is incapacitating illnesses.  A couple of us old fogies were sitting around, doing organ recitals, and in the process we started listing off all the ways that we could drop dead at our age.  You had to be there.  We were having a good time and had a good attitude.  We were full of hope in anticipation, because we believe that God‘s hand is upon us and our nation.  You can joke about things when you’re not really worried.  I guess you can joke about things because you’re worried.  The point is the ultimate deadline is not something we worry about because it is a comma, not a period.  OK, it might be a semicolon, but it’s still not the end of the sentence.  It implies some thing on the other side.

You also have gradual deadlines.  They sneak up on you like the proverbial frog in the water being heated on the stove.  What brings to mind is that my coffee is not as hot as it was when I sat down.  It gradually losers that temperature which holds it above the world around it and approaches entropy.  This is the kind of deadline that is talked about, and that quotation concerns, “There is a tide in the affairs of men...”  There is a perfect time to take the soufflé out of the oven.  There is a perfect time to make a lane change.  There are many events in life that have a perfect time.  We can miss the perfect time and still do OK.  It’s good that life is that way.  But there are still deadlines.

Enjoy the challenge.  Embrace the flexibility.

homo unius libri