Can We Talk 2

An Ideal Life?

Prompt: “Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."― Mark Twain Your thoughts, agree or disagree?

         Books! Oh, to be surrounded by good books. If only I could live long enough to read all I want. I am a slow reader, so that makes it even harder to keep up with the books I have. To stay up late and read a story I just can't put down, now, that's a thrill. (I can't permit myself that pleasure any longer, because I'm on a c-pap machine, and it has to be so many hours a night. It reports on me to my doctor like a GPS. Hopefully, it's making me healthier and I'll live a little better.)

         It's a family thing. My brothers liked to read, or at least two of them, but all three quote Shakespeare. My parents read and collected many books, which I now have. And the e-reader has books you can't lend or give away. I need to move to a smaller home, so deciding which books I can keep, and which have to be donated, is baffling me.

         Twain is further right. Chatting with a few friends is a wonderful way to pass the time, whether we're remembering the old days, or discussing books or movies, or contemplating alternate meanings of "The second coming". Those friends are the ones who will meet us in a crisis, or sit by our beds while we are dying, or come to our second weddings. We'll do the same for them.

         As to the "sleepy" conscience, he is right and wrong. It would be so easy to enjoy the first two, and not think about cutting the grass, doing laundry, or getting to work on time and wide awake. The carefree life floating up the Mississippi would be nice. However, we live in an age of taxes and insurance and responsibilities for the nice things we must have. And what of the rest of the world. Would the ideal life involve ignoring the damages of natural disasters in another part of the earth? A sleepy conscience permits us to be free of guilt for our own "errors in judgment", much less oppression, injustice, and violence at home and abroad.

         If only he hadn't thrown in the part about the conscience. We can never be truly carefree for long because our world is in such turmoil. It keeps us unsettled and distraught. The books and friends are a welcome relief and escape from the turbulence astir in the world.