I visited a cemetery once and remember these two sentiments engraved on two different head stones.
The first seems to be the banner for religion. It has an appeal to most citizens. The second has appeal to many but only a few can decipher accurately its meaning.
What does it mean to ‘live life with intensity’? I suspect most would judge that money is the key to such a life. I think that money is the key to comfort, which is not a key that would fit the lock on a ‘life lived with intensity’. I suspect that wealth is the death of ‘life lived with intensity’.
I will have to recognize at least one exception to this and that is George Soros. George Soros is both a rags to riches–fantastic riches in a domain of finance that he alone began–and an individual with a highly developed intellectual life. I read a book about him and by him and I find him a model of one who has lived life with intensity.
I think that a developing intellectual life is the means to a ‘life lived with intensity’.
My grandfather was a farmer, born and raised. He farmed the same ground for almost sixty years. He had a one room school eigth grade education. Over the span of his life he married, raised three children, and worked the dirt. There was never a surplus of money but he always found a way to provide for his family and keep the farm running in good years and bad. He never joined any service clubs, but there was a small park donated to the city anominously that he landscaped by himself in his ‘spare time’. He never joined any political party , didn’t hob nob with the affluent in the area, but the postman delivered the Wallstreet Journal and The Washington post daily. He only went to church for weddings or funerals, but a few of the ministers in town stopped by the farm now and then to discuss the bible because the old man knew it better than they did.
I never asked, but I don’t think he could have spelled the word intellectual, but he was the most intelligent understanding human I have ever known. He didn’t write his memoirs, he just lived his life as completely as he knew how. Did he live his life intensely? Not by any of societys definitions. He was a back country dirt farmer of no particular importance to any but his family.
Because of him, I decided early in my life that, while things intellectual are interesting and even useful at times, the only thing that truly matters is intelligent understanding of who,where,and how you are.
Maybe. But I think that a person has little value in life if they haven’t made a positive impact on those they leave behind. Even a tiny scrap of wisdom shared with the right delivery can change a life forever. Now that’s powerful. Kinda like a tentative grandpa type. Actually, tent, that isn’t the first time you’ve quoted him. I recall something about a woman on a horse.
