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Who: Kimball Corson. Text and Photos not disclaimed or that are obviously not mine are copyright (c) Kimball Corson 2004-2016
Port: Lake Pleasant, AZ
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On the Human Condition

06 March 2015 | Pago Pago, American Samoa
Kimball Corson
Our condition is layered. Foremost and underlying it all, we must care for our bodies daily. We must sleep, bathe, eat, cloth, eliminate, procreate, transport and otherwise care for, move and attend to our physical selves every day. The time this takes is inordinate. I guess a good 40 percent of our lives are consumed by such bodily endeavors, as I will call them.

Then there are the functions of learning and doing. On learning, whatever the forms it takes, and it takes various forms for each of us during our lifetimes, it does not come quickly or for some easily. Our reach, with both formal and informal education, corresponds to our basic intelligence and the opportunities we have or make for ourselves. But the essential condition is that we all have to start from learning scratch here. The fine educations and wisdom of earlier generations, and their nuisances, are too largely taken with them to their graves. We must learn from and sort our sources as best we can.

I venture a further guess that another 50 percent of our lives are largely divided into two phases -- formal and informal learning into our twenties, and then our vocational endeavor(s) after that, with a continuing degree of overlap between the two. The doing of something to earn our livelihood, after our formal education, like our formal education itself, is very time consuming. This is the stage of getting ready to do and then actually doing.

I would guesstimate the residual 10 percent of our lives is spend interspersed and divided between leisure, recreation and the pursuit of enjoyment, on one hand, and our individual efforts to give to or deduce some sort of meaning from our lives. We all wonder if and what any purpose to our life might be, and that set of queries reflects on how we should live our lives. We worry about our answers, tentative though they might be, and whether we will have any serious regrets at the end of life.

The bodily endeavors at 40 percent, the learning and doing endeavors at 50 percent and the recreational and wonderment endeavors at 10 percent is basically our lives. The learning and doing endeavors can be as pedestrian as learning little and laying carpet, as tragic as engaging in war and then rebuilding, or as exalted as becoming a legitimate and honest billionaire or a Nobel laureate. No matter how we land out, we are all restrained by these time allocations, notwithstanding some minor reallocability at the boundaries. Then we each die.

This is the basic human condition we rarely think about or mention.
Comments
Vessel Name: Altaira
Vessel Make/Model: A Fair Weather Mariner 39 is a fast (PHRF 132), heavily ballasted (43%), high-aspect (6:1), stiff, comfortable, offshore performance cruiser by Bob Perry that goes to wind well (30 deg w/ good headway) and is also good up and down the Beaufort scale.
Hailing Port: Lake Pleasant, AZ
Crew: Kimball Corson. Text and Photos not disclaimed or that are obviously not mine are copyright (c) Kimball Corson 2004-2016
About:
Kimball Corson: I am a 75 year old solo sailor, by choice. However, I did take on a personable, but high maintenance female kitten, now a full grown cat, named KiKiPoo when she is sweet, or KatKatPo after she has just killed something like a bird or bat. [...]
Extra:
Although I was a lawyer and practiced law with good success for thirty years, creating significant new law, I never really believed in the law, the politics of law or in the over reaching self-interest of most lawyers I met. Too much exposure to Nietzsche and other good and seriously thoughtful [...]
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Profile

Who: Kimball Corson. Text and Photos not disclaimed or that are obviously not mine are copyright (c) Kimball Corson 2004-2016
Port: Lake Pleasant, AZ