I just finished watching movie “A Beautiful Mind” with Russel Crowe and Jennifer Connelly with tears running down my cheeks. Quite embarrassing, as I am sitting in the aisle seat of a busy airplane.
The movie is about Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University, Dr. John Forbes Nash, a 1994 Nobel Price winner, of the Game Theory fame.
The movie touches me deeply on many levels.
I feel a deep loss of unfulfilled lifetime intellectual potential, sadness, as those, nearest, treat me for an old fool I probably am, and I am longing for kindness and love that was shown by Jennifer in that movie.
It is very well known, that inside, we all have an image of ourselves when we were young, but looking at my aged hand typing this note on a phone, I wonder, is this it?
Let’s suppose, I do not kick the early bucket and live out my life, I hope to be mentally acute till 75, or longer, because after all, we do live healthier lifestyle than my parents and grandparents did. In next 25 years, will I accomplish anything that is above the mediocrity of comfortable middle class lifestyle?
I am burying myself in my hobby studies, deep dives in various areas of interest to escape this mediocrity, with no one to share or discuss, but I am also aware that all of that produces little progress.
People asked retired Captain Joshua Slocum, “Will she pay?”, when he was restoring his free, but rotten, sailboat. He did sail her as the first solo circumnavigator and wrote the most famous book about it. She did pay, a thousand-fold.
I do not know who I will become when I finally grow up, but I know it is still a long ways from now. I hope my life will be worthwhile in the end.
Like Captain Slocum, I want to do something grand and write about it.
“A man should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
Mr. Heinlein should have added “… and write a book about it”, but considering he was a famous author, I guess it is implied.
After all of that, what is left on the list, is to comfort the dying and to die gallantly.
We talked about it the next day, it is far better to die in a volcano eruption (Hawai’i or Cascades) than on a bbq patio while watching a football game.
