Aging

So, today is my birthday. I'm now officially closer to 50 than I was to 40. This annual ritual we go through takes on different meanings over the years. All through my 20s and 30s I still felt like I was growing up. Mentally, things shifted dramatically during my 40s - now I feel like I'm just growing older - not that I'm always mature, mind you, there's just something about crossing that half-way mark in life that puts a different spin on things.

Truthfully, I think I like the 40s. In some ways I still mentally feel like I'm in my 30s (I'm not delusional enough to still feel like I'm in my 20s). I suspect not raising children has kept me feeling mentally young. I'm so much more cognizant in this decade of what's important in life. I look back at the things that used to rile me up 20 years ago and today I can look at the same things and realize they just aren't worth the mental energy. I deal with stressful situations different in my 40s then I did a couple decades ago. Now I'm more able to step back, put some of the emotion aside, and try to look at a problem rationally and try to look at both sides (still a challenge sometimes but easier than it used to be).

I think I'm aware of emotional aging more than physical aging - and I enjoy and am consciously aware of the emotional aging. I rationalize differently, I react differently, I prioritize differently. And honestly, I feel its for the better. It's something I've worked at over the years and am only beginning to see the efforts pay off. Emotional maturity is an evolutionary process and being conscious of it is rewarding and challenging and exciting all at the same time. At times I see how I'm handling things now, comparing my reaction to how I used to handle things, and occasionally almost wishing I could go back and redo some of my life. But those years are water under the bridge.

Life, with all its ups and downs, all its challenges, and all its lessons, is a learning experience - if we choose to make it so and not let it get the best of us. I love the line "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." Life does try to break us all at one time or another. It's sent me my share of challenges over the years but I can honestly say I have grown stronger at the broken places. It's all a work in progress. Life may be half over but there's still half to go - I hope it's a great adventure.

Book Review - Andrew Jackson: His Life & Times by H.W. Brands

I FINALLY finished this lengthy tome on Andrew Jackson. His life was fascinating, to say the least, but I sadly found little in this president to admire.

To be sure, Jackson's childhood hardly suggested the path that would lead anyone to the presidency of the United States. He lost all of his family to death at an early age and had to fend for himself. His childhood was beyond difficult and it is to his credit that he became the successful man that he did.

My biggest problem with Jackson was his love of killing people - be it in a dual or war. He was never happier than when at war - and he was at war often - against the Indians, the British, the Spanish, and the Mexicans. He was plagued with a life-time of debilitating illnesses, often confined to bed for days on end, but he would mysteriously always be able to rouse himself whenever it appeared he would be called on to lead men into war. He wasn't beyond provoking war to get what he wanted - which is exactly what he did when he decided, as a general, that Florida should be taken from the Spanish and made a part of the United States. His treatment of the Indians was abhorrent and he was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Indians, not just through war, but also through forced relocation, especially during what became known as the "Trail of Tears" when the Cherokees were forced to relocate west of the Mississippi.

Jackson also advocated for the continuation of slavery and held a number of slaves himself throughout his lifetime. He alternated between between paternalistic and abusive of them.

He was singularly devoted to his wife, who died right after he was elected president. In one of the great ironies in life, he and his wife actually adopted and lovingly raised two young Indian boys. Rachel's death clouded the rest of his life as he felt responsible for it because she never wanted him to be president. He barely pulled himself together enough to get through his inauguration.

Jackson is often referred to as the "first president of the people," or by terms similar. This was not through his own doing for Jackson never actually wanted to be, or campaigned to be, president. His friends and supporters did it for him and he felt it was his duty to respond to the call of the people. Before Jackson's election, America's presidents were chosen behind closed doors and it was basically a given who the president would be. The voting was merely a formality. So in that sense Jackson was the first president of the people because it was the first election in which the people really had a genuine say in who would lead them.

Jackson's guiding political philosophy was his belief in democracy. His belief that people knew what was best for themselves and were capable of making informed choices. This was exactly opposite the belief of his arch rival, John Quincy Adams, who was a staunch proponent of republicanism and felt the people incapable of knowing what was best for themselves. Brands says at the end of his book that Jackson believed "[d]emocracy wasn't a perversion of the republican promise but its perfection, or at least a large step toward perfection."

Jackson's strongest desire for his country, one he held to until his dying day, was that at all costs the Union should be preserved - that if it fell apart then foreign countries would seize its pieces and it would never be whole again. During his presidency, his passion nearly led him to war against South Carolina when it threatened to nullify a tariff and secede from the Union. This passion led him to fight (politically) for the annexation of Texas, the ousting of the Indian population, and to support slavery (believing the South's economy would collapse without it and knowing the South would secede if the abolitionists got into power). It was on his deathbed that he won his last political battle when he learned that Congress had voted to annex Texas and make it part of the Union.

Brands' book focuses mostly on Jackson's early life and his years as a general. Others have criticized the work for not focusing more on his presidency, but other books have been written on that portion of his life and I hope to read one of them in the not-too-distant future. I think the book did well at exploring the times he lived in and how he fit into and then helped change those times.

It is easy to set here in 2009 and judge a man who was quick to war and who defended slavery. One can argue times were different and notions of civil rights and equal rights were not developed at all in that era. But even understanding that the thinking of that era was different and less evolved than it is now, just doesn't excuse, for me, Jackson's principals, his inability to find value in all men, regardless of race or heritage, and his love of fighting and killing. I can appreciate the things he accomplished in light of his disadvantaged childhood, and I subscribe in many respects to his view of democracy. But his insatiable need for war and death left me cold.

The Creation

Image taken by Pedrito Maynard-Reid (Wales Sunrise)

Enjoy reading (or hopefully re-reading) one of my favorite poems:

THE CREATION

by: James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)

ND God stepped out on space,


And He looked around and said,
"I'm lonely --
I'll make me a world."




And far as the eye of God could see
Darkness covered everything,


Blacker than a hundred midnights
Down in a cypress swamp.




Then God smiled,
And the light broke,
And the darkness rolled up on one side,


And the light stood shining on the other,
And God said, "That's good!"




Then God reached out and took the light in His hands,
And God rolled the light around in His hands
Until He made the sun;

And He set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.


And the light that was left from making the sun
God gathered it up in a shining bal





And flung it against the darkness,


Spangling the night with the moon and stars.


Then down between


The darkness and the light
He hurled the world;
And God said, "That's good!"







Then God himself stepped down --


And the sun was on His right hand,
And the moon was on His left;
The stars were clustered about His head,
And the earth was under His feet.
And God walked, and where He trod
His footsteps hollowed the valleys out
And bulged the mountains up.




Then He stopped and looked and saw
That the earth was hot and barren.
So God stepped over to the edge of the world
And He spat out the seven seas;
He batted His eyes, and the lightnings flashed;
He clapped His hands, and the thunders rolled;
And the waters above the earth came down,
The cooling waters came down.




Then the green grass sprouted,
And the little red flowers blossomed,
The pine tree pointed his finger to the sky,
And the oak spread out his arms,
The lakes cuddled down in the hollows of the ground,
And the rivers ran down to the sea;
And God smiled again,
And the rainbow appeared,
And curled itself around His shoulder.




Then God raised His arm and He waved His hand
Over the sea and over the land,
And He said, "Bring forth! Bring forth!"
And quicker than God could drop His hand.
Fishes and fowls
And beasts and birds
Swam the rivers and the seas,
Roamed the forests and the woods,
And split the air with their wings.
And God said, "That's good!"




Then God walked around,
And God looked around
On all that He had made.
He looked at His sun,
And He looked at His moon,
And He looked at His little stars;
He looked on His world
With all its living things,
And God said, "I'm lonely still."




Then God sat down
On the side of a hill where He could think;
By a deep, wide river He sat down;
With His head in His hands,
God thought and thought,
Till He thought, "I'll make me a man!"




Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled Him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand;
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till He shaped it in His own image;




Then into it He blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul.
Amen. Amen.