All of my life I’ve been a Wonderer.  I wonder how and why things work. We are born wonderers. Everything we encounter is new. What a marvelous time that is for us. Watch a young anything and feel the excitement they’re experiencing as they see, touch, smell, and taste every new thing they encounter. I work at keeping my wondering active through empathy as I watch the children I’m privileged to encounter in my daily life. They’re in the process of deciding what they’re going to be. We have to be something, in our society.

            The years pass, the number is quite variable, and we become adults. Now we know everything we have to and move into the process of survival in a society that requires us to furnish food, clothing, and shelter not only for ourselves, but for the family that we’ve acquired along the way.  And to do that, you have to be something.

            In my world, I became a teacher. My father decided to become a mechanic – – that was his world. Like you, we both became something. (Think. Who are you? What do you call yourself, in your world?)

            If you’re lucky, the time will come when you can retire. We work hard for many years to reach this Act III OF OUR LIVES. A time to do whatever we want. It’s wonderful for a while, then a strange feeling creeps into our lives. Perhaps it’s the desire to still be productive in some way. Perhaps you’ll feel the need to become someone different from how you spent your life up to this point. Today’s technology is moving so fast that if you take a long nap, you’re left behind.

            My father, a master mechanic for 35 years, came to live with me at age 86. He’d been retired for 21 years and lived in a mobile home. He was deaf and just worked in his garden most of those years. I had a new Ford pickup and he was admiring it. He said “I’ll keep it tuned up for you.” He opened the hood and looked at the engine. He just stood there for five minutes looking it over. He turned to me with tears in his eyes, I’d never seen this man cry in my life as he spoke the words I’ll never forget. “I have no idea how this engine works. I won’t be of any help to you.” He turned and went into the house. I started to cry then. A proud, old man had just lost his identity. He’d lost who he was his entire life. He was now invisible.

            I decided that wasn’t going to happen to me. When it came time for me to retire, I was going to find myself a new identity. In the next blog I’ll share with you just how I worked at that.