The usual narrative is that the young think themselves indestructible while the old know better.

Kids can’t imagine death and so they drive drunk or eat crap or crowd into bars even as some disease, Corona, say, spreads around them.  But then a friend dies or you survive a heart attack or you just turn fifty, when you can no longer hide from the reality you have more days behind you than ahead of you.  Sooner or later we all die.  Knowing it will be sooner sobers some of the youth out of us all.

The ignorance of youth and the bitterness of age come with drawbacks, of course, as with great hilarity. The slow emotional growth for the race probably ties to these cliche truths: the young won’t listen, the old fear change. Yet what is funnier than looking back on oneself?  Recalling the goofball you were?  Knowing you will do that again ten or twenty years from now too, assuming you make it that long.

Yet as sad as we are in our norms, worse still are the exceptions.  The eight-year-old whose war bound reality makes them a witness to slaughter, the senior whose fear of humiliation means they never reflect honestly.  Trauma, the stoping of history, and hubris, an unwillingness to enter into it.  If only we had a planet free of those.  Then the folly of youth and leaving it behind might only be the most impossible thing we do, rather than the locus of tragedy.

All of which is a way of saying that death clarifies, determines a direction we choose to pursue or to flee from, offers us a way to learn or to ignore, to harden into brutes or soften into mammals that would, if they can, be less than brutish

The breath and sense of lightness I heard in others a few days ago was not there in those I spoke with yesterday.  A three-month jail sentence and an economy at full stop.  The reality of the reality getting all too real.  And the mortality of each of us, and of our parents and grandparents too.

But it is the death of the world that was, of how we were living we can still learn from.

What follows is a non-sequitur, but I’ll ask you to indulge me if I quote a line from “Newsroom.”  One news guy tells another: In the old days, until about ten minutes ago we did the news well.  You know-how? We just decided to.”

In the days before Corona, nothing got decided.  Governance was a charade.  Finance a scheme.  Work a task.  The death of this world will not come easy.  The price will be too high.  But in this pause, if we decide what life and death mean well, that will be worth something.

Mr. Dash tells me that at a last raucous faculty meeting the adults are acting like kids.  (“Finally,” I think.)  “Outside, Joburg is becoming quieter.  Mr. Dash, notes.  “Yet as the streets lose their voice, I think we’re finding ours.”

Stay safe.

Make. Give.  Be,

–Ted