What then is meaning? It’s a personal reason for our existence. It’s a reason to get out of bed in the morning. It is not a matter of searching for some ethereal, profound, and mysterious meaning, but merely of choosing what to dedicate our life to, for the purpose of life is to live a life of purpose. In other words, the meaning of life is to live a meaningful life. We create ourselves with the power of thought, and we create our meaning with the power of choice.

The meaning of a word is its role in a sentence, and the meaning of a person is their role in society. When we take on a role and contribute to society, we become meaningful by being useful. Our role gives us value and significance.

The world is in great need. It requires peacekeepers and bus drivers, janitors and shopkeepers, factory workers and salespeople, schoolteachers and philosophers, artists and musicians, accountants and politicians, plumbers and physicians, engineers and electricians, computer programmers and dishwashers, cooks and architects. The list is endless. No role is too small; all roles are vital, and every role is an opportunity for someone to find meaning.

It is not the nature of the role, but how we express it that fills us with purpose. Taking orders for food and serving it may be the job of a waiter, but putting people at ease, helping them make their selections, serving them courteously and promptly, and making their dining experience enjoyable is the mark of a professional, the mark of someone filled with purpose. It is this intention to serve others to the best of our ability that elevates even the simplest job into one of great dignity. It transforms a common task into an extraordinary event that touches the lives of others. So, it is not the nature of our job, but the nature of our attitude toward our job that makes our life worth living.

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.

"Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.

"It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or gazelle. When the sun comes up, you better start running.”
– an African proverb from the book “The World is Flat” by THomas Friedman

A great Jewish theologian of the twentieth century, Abraham Joshua Heschel once put it this way: “The grand premise of religion is that (human beings are) able to surpass (themselves),” that is, we are able to “lift our eyes and see” beyond the horizon of the mind, that we are able to see not just what is there but also that which “what is there” suggests, what it represents, what it points to that is real beyond itself.

Al Pacino tells the following story:

"During one of my performances I made a connection with a pair of eyes in the audience, and I thought, 'This is incredible; these eyes are penetrating me.' I went through the whole performance just relating to those eyes, giving the whole thing to those eyes. When curtain call came, I looked in the direction of those eyes, and it was a seeing eye dog ... I couldn't get over it -- the compassion and intensity and understanding in those eyes, and it was a dog."

From time to time I've seen the same quality in my own dog Bogie's eyes, but I had always assumed they were faux qualities. I thought, "It's amazing how they mimic our own emotions." Because, hey, they're animals. They don't really have compassion. They can't really "understand," the same way we understand.

The Pacino story woke me up. Maybe animals aren't "mimicking" our emotions. Maybe they have the same feelings as us ... in even greater quantity or intensity than we do.

Now when my own dog looks at me with those same eyes I'll have to consider that he really is "intense, compassionate and understanding."

Barbara and I decided we wanted to retire and move to a warmer climate. So we spent a full month getting our house ready to sell, packing for our trip, and making last minute arrangement to ship our car to Florida. By the time of our flight on Jan. 31, we were drained.

We arrived in Tampa and boarded a shuttle (an 11-passenger van) to Sarasota. There was one other passenger, a man named Bob who looked to be about 70 years old. The driver of the van was a congenial guy named Nick who was dressed in shorts and a tee shirt.

Nick didn't say much, which was good because I had a hard time hearing him from our seat toward the back of the van. Bob was spread out across the seat in front of us, looking for all the world as if he owned the van. Bob didn't say much until Barbara mentioned how much she admired the Tampa Bay Bridge. At the mention, Bob launched into a long lecture on how bridges were built, mentioning along the way that his uncle had been a famous bridge-builder in the Midwest. I closed my eyes while he lectured Barbara and used the occasion to catch some sleep.

Later, after I awoke I overheard Bob say he was retired and so I asked him if his wife was retired. "Hardly," he said with a laugh. "She's only 37 years old."

Bob went on to say that, while they lived in Connecticut, his wife commuted to her job in Los Angeles. "She flies out every Sunday night and flies back on Friday," he said, with no small amount of bragging, as if to say that this young, vibrant woman just couldn't keep her hands of his aging body.

Bob lived in a section of Florida called Parrish, a planned development that included many homes worth close to a million dollars. His own home was on a lagoon, he said, and I asked him about the alligators.

"They don't bother you much," he said, "if you leave them alone." Then, after a moment of thought, he added, "Of course, there was that incident with Frank down the street a few months back. 'Gator crashed right through the screen on his lanai and grabbed his dog. They don't usually do that unless they're quite hungry."h

The only sound in the van was that of the tires rolling along Interstate 75. Outside, the weather was quite a contrast with that of New England. We had just left a pile of snow 4 feet high on our driveway. Now we were watching the palm trees zoom by.

"A few weeks back," said Bob, "we had an incident with an alligator. They usually don't bother you if you don't bother them, but every once in a while one of them gets a little wild and becomes a menace. Florida State law protects alligators but not if they become a public menace. So I called the state environmental agency and reported an alligator out of control.

"One of their officers came to the house and he and I worked on capturing this belligerent male. This gator was huge, I think about 9 feet long, and very aggressive. The method they use to capture alligators is through a lure, just like fishing. This state guy had a chicken, or something that looked like a dead chicken (hey, maybe it was road kill, for all I know) and he put a giant hook through it and had a long rope attached to the hook. Then he threw it out into the lagoon and we sat and waited.

"A few hours later we heard some splashing and the state guy said we had hooked the alligator. It took the two of us to pull him in. You have to be careful that you don't pull the rope too hard, 'cause the hook will rip the stomach open. Once we got him up close to the bank, the officer pulled out a grappling hook and hooked him in back of the head. That's the way we pulled him in.

"As soon as he had him on the shore, we wrapped tape around his snoot. You know, alligator jaws are pretty powerful, but only when they are chomping down. Theyi don't have as many muscles controlling how they open their jaws.

"Once we got him into the truck he was taken away and my problem was solved."Bob stared straight ahead while Barbara and I saw in the seats behind him and tried to digest it all. We hoped we didn't run into any alligators in Florida.

Chris was traveling in Kenya and, as usual, was shopping. In the Masai Mara, there are no malls. Instead, shopping is done predominantly in the open marketplaces. Of course, being a typical female, she immediately gravitated to the jewelry stalls.

The Masai are expert craftsmen at creating exquisite beaded jewelry. One particular bracelet caught Chris’ attention and, without hesitation (the price being right), she purchased it and slipped it on her wrist. Back at the tent that evening, while dressing for dinner, Chris noticed an imperfection in her bracelet, one odd colored red bead stood out among all orange ones. The evening was ruined. Chris was unable to rest until she could exchange the bracelet for a new one.

The very next morning, even before breakfast, she took a taxi back to the market. Locating the same vendor, Chris requested replacement for the defective bracelet.

The Masai laughed and shared the meaning of the odd bead with her. The Masai are humble people. They believe we must always be mindful of our humanness, and so they intentionally add an odd colored bead to all of their adornments. This reminds them that being human means being imperfect and our beauty and our uniqueness reside in our imperfections.
--Christine Michaels and Lonne Sterling

Last week I was brushing my teeth, getting ready for bed, when I thought I saw something running across the floor. Sure enough, there was a huge bug, about 2.5 inches long, scurrying under the sink. My rapid response system went into action. I grabbed a tube of toothpaste and hurled it at him. He was huge, I swear the toothpaste bounced off him.

I finally nailed him with a copy of James Rogers' "Hot Commodities" (hardcover edition). Barbara was asleep so I didn't bother her with the details.

A few nights later, I was in bed, reading a magazine, when another one of the buggers ran across the page I was reading. By the time I picked myself off the floor he had disappeared into the covers. I ripped the bed apart until I found him, then had James Rogers deal with him.

I showed the specimen to some friends and they were saying that it was only a "water bug." Someone else told me it a "Palmetto bug." But once the exterminator took a look at the little guy the next day he said, "Cockroach, for sure." I told him some of my friends thought it was only a Palmetto bug. "Yeah, that's the Florida expression for a cockroach," he said, swinging into action with his toxic air cannister.

I guess you get used to those things in the tropics.

Today we met Yvonne, a neighbor who likes to garden. It is because of Yvonne that the area around our condo is festooned with flowers of every hue and color. It makes our close area look more tropical than some of the other places on Siesta Key.

Yvonne is about 70 and speaks with a heavy French accent. She gives us little clues about things like how to get the mail, where to find various keys that we will need, and who calls the shots in the condo association.

We speak to her for about an hour before we bid her good day. But as we're leaving she calls us back and tells us in her broken English that, if we come across black snakes while we're walking about the place "They are good. They eat insects and don't bother us while we're gardening."

I had suspected as such and filed this information away in the "Duh" category. But then Yvonne continued, "But if you come across brown snakes they are not so good. See, like that one resting on my steps now."

We looked at her steps, some 10 feet from us, and saw a brown snake about 4 feet long and the diameter of a 25-cent piece sunning on her steps. "They can make trouble," she said, as she picked up a stick and poked at it. I noticed that Yvonne was wearing sandals and suddenly the word "brave" came into my mind.

As her stick poked the snake, it crawled slowly and with deliberation off the steps and into the nearby bushes.

"Anything with designs on its skin is no good," she said. I felt like our experience in the condo had been inexorably changed and wondered if I could ever again walk about the place without checking first for 40-foot long brown snakes with designs on their backs.

Every time we go to the beach at Siesta Key we see a number of Mennonites. The men have long beards and nearly always are fully clothed -- long-sleeve shirts, long pants and suspenders -- while the rest of us walk around in bathing suits. Most times the men take off their shoes and socks and roll up their pants to walk in the surf. The women wear long dresses and white headwear.

You wonder how they can suffer the heat in those outfits. At first, I felt sorry for them. But then I was ashamed for feeling that way. It is obvious that they are different, and also obvious that they don't care what other people wear, for they have their culture, their religion, and they seem content with their unique lifestyle.

My feeling of sadness turned to one of admiration. While the rest of the world seems to overdose on plasma TVs, convertibles, high rent and high living, they have stuck with a lifestyle that is hundreds of years old.

Wait. I just saw two young Mennonite men wearing shorts. One of the them was on a cell phone. Oh, well.

"I don’t think art should give answers. I think art should only pose questions. And art should not fill in blanks for people, or I think that’s what’s called propaganda. I think art should only raise questions, a lot of which may be even dissonant and you don’t even know you’re being asked a question, but that it creates some kind of tension inside you."

From Newsweek: The Sopranos' Pauli Gualtieri (aka Paulie Walnuts) put his cigar-like index finger on the director, David Chase’s, ultimate goal in dropping another plot line that will dangle forever: the fate of a Russian mobster who escaped a whacking.
“He just wanted the audience to suffer,” he said.