Wow! That takes a bit of thought.

I asked myself the question and I seem to have come up with a variety of situations. Being in the throes of advancing age and general decrepitude (as we all are, in one degree or another, no matter how young or old we might be), I seem to lean toward some of the more sedentary pursuits.

When I'm writing and it's coming well. When it just seems to flow out of my fingers, and after a long burst of writing, I notice that I've cranked out maybe 1,500 to 2,000 words in a relatively short time; then, when I read it after letting it sit for a day or two and I can honestly think, "Hey, that's not too bad!" I've always wanted to write (fiction, non-fiction, essays), but I just haven't had the time until lately.

Weirdly enough, sometimes when I'm watching a science program on the tube, like Nova or something on the Discovery Channel, and the subject of the program has to do with cosmology, astronomy, space travel, that sort of thing. Suddenly I want to live forever and see how it all turns out. I wish they'd run Carl Sagan's Cosmos series again.

Music. I love performing, and although I don't do all that much of it anymore, as often as I can manage I get together with friends and swap songs. When I can sing something I like, and when I reach the end of the song I can say, like with the writing, "Hey, that's not too bad," often adding, "Gee! Maybe I'm finally getting the hang of this!"

Now here's the really weird one:   I love to practice, both voice and guitar. When I start a vocal practice session all croaky and full of mud, and at the end of twenty minutes or half an hour of vocal exercises, I can feel the voice opening up and coming out nice and clear, then haul off and sing a couple of songs and they come out the way I want them to—yeah!! And with the guitar. When I first tune the beast and my fingers feel like a bunch of bananas, then after playing some warm-up exercises and going through several pages in Shearer or Carcassi, the fingers start doing what I want them to do. I try one of the classic pieces that I used to play fairly well, and if I can still get through it without screwing it up too badly, I feel pretty good about that.

Down in the Hoh Rain Forest on the Olympic Peninsula, communing with this huge tree just a few dozen yards down the path from the parking lot. . . . It's been there for maybe half a millennium or maybe longer, and when I'm there, I feel that I'm in the presence of something old and wise. Somehow, I think it knows I'm there—but relative to it, I'm sort of transitory, like the birds that light for a few moments on its branches, then fly off again, or the squirrels that skitter up and down its huge trunk. That's when I feel how ephemeral human life is—and when I would like to live forever.

Don Firth