Sunday can be a day of reflection, a generally recognized, if little practiced “time out” day.  Monday through Saturday, the other six days of the week are pure hustle.  The organism of society and economy is in “fast forward” mode, and a majority of us have a defined role which we play, mainly out of habit.

This morning I recalled the yesterdays experience of my retirement celebration.  The event convened by our three children with invitations to a number of friends and co-workers took place at Buffalo Creek Brewing in Long Grove.

After some forty years of fulfilling my role within a company, I must accede to nature and embrace the change in life mandated by the passage of years. The change had to come.

The words, expressions of good will and gratitude that were offered up by those I have had a work-place relationship, as well as by the fellow travelers in the work-of-words, poetry, philosophy, literature seemed like a gift of stunning good fortune, like nothing that I could have earned.  I felt like the kid who happens upon a perfectly shaped arrowhead, lying among the pebbles in the creek bed…….

Today I contemplated writing about the latest installment from the occupant in the White House.  That would cast a premature pall upon my sense of good fortune that lingers from yesterdays conversations and the company of many good friends.  Since the President is unlikely to change, and his administration will continue to dismember our institutions, the subject can be touched upon at a future time.  Like chemo treatment for cancer, the recovery is going to take some time.

Here are some good words from The Two Sources of Morality and Religion by Henri Bergson.  The book was first published in 1932.  Bergson was a French-Jewish philosopher who was influential in the tradition of continental philosophy.

However radical the difference may be
between primitive man and civilized man,
it is due almost solely
to what the child has amassed
since the first awakening of its consciousness;

All the acquisitions of humanity
during the centuries of civilization
are there, at his elbow,
deposited in knowledge imparted to him,
in the traditions, the institutions,
the customs, the syntax and vocabulary
of the language he learns to speak,
and even in the gestures of the people about him.
It is this thick humus which covers today
the bedrock of original nature……

In short, the obligation which we find
in the depths of our consciousness
and which,
as the etymology of the word implies
binds us to the other members of society,
is a link of the same nature as that which
unites the ants in the ant-hill
or the cells of an organism.

— Two Sources Of Morality And Religion by Henri Bergson p. 83