Do More, NOT Less

One final thought.
As we age (I’m 58), the conventional wisdom is to “downsize.” Sell the large house. Move into a condo. Travel more. Give up the lawn mower and chainsaw. Relax.

I prefer the opposite. Keep busier — more limbs to prune, add some more lawn, expect to spend three weeks hauling out leaves, and each spring to cut up a huge fallen oak or liquid amber limb. I saw that with my grandfather. At 80, his tasks multiplied while his ability to meet them diminished. If farming 120 acres was a challenge at 50 for him, mowing just a fifth of his lawn was even more so at 86. If the house I live in seemed from pictures in pristine condition at 60 (1930), when he was 40, it aged into the house on the hill in Psycho at 100 (1970) when he was 80. Still, he got up every day to do what he could, until he finally just ran out of gas, and one morning did not wake up. Living
in the country ensures that the need to work keeps expanding as you diminish.

All this helps to adopt a similar outlook about America, not to tolerate the acceptance of a shrinking world commensurate with your own decline. I’d prefer America to take on ever more — pay down the debt, run surpluses in five — not fifty — years, build more dams and freeways, drill anywhere there is recoverable oil, beef up the military, require citizens to do more, not less for themselves, even as the bowing, apologizing, qualifying, sermonizing, editorializing, and nearly nonstop whining president seems to welcome our senility and wishes to retire the U.S. into a sort of permanent European condo with lounges on the tiny sixth-floor balcony.

Non hic porcus.