On Turning 50
My birthday is 30 April. This year I turned 50. It struck me that this is, for some reason, a landmark age at which one is expected to reflect and offer wisdom. I don't, however, really have any wisdom to offer.
We did manage to have a busy weekend, though. My preoccupation last week was preparing for the first Annual Meeting of the Board of Directors of Ars Hermeneutica, the nonprofit science-education and scientific-research corporation that I founded in 2004. Before this year I'd slowly been committing myself to Ars as my future, and this meeting was a milestone because we elected four new directors; before then it was just myself and Isaac. Four new people who agreed to share the vision and said "yes" to lending their names. It adds a certain amount of reality to something that had pretty much existed only in my own head before.
That meeting was Saturday night. This also is the time of year when there's a good surge of work for me to do in my paid consulting work maintaining the website for The Fund for Peace, yet another nonprofit in our lives. I've done their website since 1999; Isaac has worked for them since 2002 or so. Anyway, they now do an annual project with Foreign Policy magazine called "The Failed States Index", and there was quite a bit to put together before we offered that up for public consumption last night, just past midnight.
Isaac was busy, too. We have friends, a mixed-gender married couple, who both teach clarinet and saxophone. They have an annual recital for their students at which Isaac has provided the accompanying piano for the past several years. The recital was yesterday; the four-hour rehearsal with all the students was Saturday morning. The recital itself was actually quite pleasant this year: the music was interesting and the students all were in top form.
On Friday night it was theatre! The ten-year-old daughter of some other friends was playing "Mowgli" in "The Jungle Book Kids" at a local elementary school, so we went to that. It was also great fun. Such energy these kids had — and lots of talent, too! Some of the production values — costumes and stage set — were quite creative and lavish. Just imagine one person sewing all those animal costumes for a couple dozen kids. The forest was quite impressive. The Mowgli-mother choreographed the kids' dances, and they did a good job. She'd also done the choreography for our own "Crazy for You", which our theatre troupe did a month ago. Those of us watching "Jungle Book" who'd been in "Crazy for You" thought we recognized a number of the steps the kids were doing. It was an odd sense of dance déjà-vu.
I guess I was just too busy this weekend to reflect and collect up wisdom to share. When I have a few spare moments I'll try to give it some thought — I'll let you know when I have some.