You may never get another handwritten letter -- assuming that you've ever gotten one.

If you're forty or fifty or older, you've probably gotten some handwritten letters, likely from your mother or grandmother. If you're younger than that, you may never have gotten such a letter.

Why? You know why. Email. Voicemail. Text messaging.

Even the occasional phone call has become a thing of the past.

There was a time, not so long ago, when communicating with each other meant putting pen or pencil to paper and sending the result in an envelope to another person. And waiting, often days or weeks, for a reply. Maybe your whole life.

There is much to be gained from our new communication technologies -- speed, for sure -- but there is something lost, too. When someone sits down at the computer and types a response to your previous email, that person is not likely to go back and check what was written, not just for accuracy, etc., but for typing mistakes. You know that you get, as I do, emails from intelligent people that have howling mistakes in grammar and syntax. Maybe you just accept them and move on, but they are symptons of a larger problem.

As we get more computer-savvy, we often become less literate. We sound dumber in our emails than we do in longhand. And it's all because we're in a hurry.

When someone sends you a handwritten letter, that person has had to think about every word put down on the paper. It's a slow process but one that yields documents you want to keep and maybe even pass on to your children and grandchildren. Do you own any handwritten letters that you've saved and intend to bequeath to your descendents? Probably.

Do you you have any such emails? Probably not.

Surely you've gotten some important ones, but did you print them out? And, if you did, do you think they have anything of the person who sent them in those familiar typed letters? Is passing on a thoughtful email, printed out, the same as passing on a handwritten missive from that treasured person? You know the answer. Just look at your scrapbook.

I'm sure there are more mis-sent emails than there are mis-sent letters. Why?

Because the emails are too easy to send. You type them out and hit a button, and they're gone, winging their way through cyberspace. With a letter, you look over what you've written, maybe scratch out some comments, and then re-write it before sending. Writing by hand makes you slow down and think about what you're saying --and re-think it. An email is the first thing you think of and -- bling! -- it's out there. No calling it back.

So what should you do? Write someone a letter, obviously. Don't make a big deal of it: email is here to stay and is welcomed if it makes us all write more to each other. But take the time to pick up a pen or pencil and write someone you know something meaningful, in your own personal penmanship. Remember that word? It used to be part of your grade.

Do it today. Now. Before you get on your computer and type all that drivel and trivia to all those people you hardly know. All those "friends" you have on MySpace.

There are people in your life who would love a handwritten letter from you. Trust me on this.
Give someone something to keep, even to cherish. They'll be surprised and pleased, I promise.

A college degree is what a high school diploma used to be.

When I graduated from high school, in the early 1960s, I'll bet at least half my graduating class was glad to be done with school and were ready to enter the work force and make some money. College was for the nerds, the egg-heads.

Fast-forward to now. Your high school diploma will get you a job handing burgers out a window, but so will your college degree, especially if it's in the fields that our society doesn't value: Art or English or Philosophy or Psychology or Sociology, et al.

So you went to college for four years, and what do you have to show for it? Likely not much. You may well still be living at home, with your parents casting worried glances your way.

Of course there are college degrees you can get that guarantee you a good job: Computer Science or Petroleum Engineering or Business. Those are jobs our society values because they produce results (i.e., revenue).

But most of us aren't computer-savvy or math-oriented or interested in business. We went to college because we wanted to know more about something in particular but also about life and lots of other subjects. We read all those books and wrote all those papers and took all those exams because we thought we'd come out on the other end being respected for all that we'd endured and achieved.

Or not.

The sad fact is that so many people go to college these days that the degree is being diluted. It used to be a big deal that you had a degree: now almost everyone has one. And that puts you right back in line for the job you're least qualified for: working at the coffee shop, mixing lattes, or selling clothes in a big box store, or renting movies. All those jobs that require maybe a high school diploma (or not).

So what were those four years for? Good question.

I remember a friend who lived up the street whose dad worked on an assembly line and made enough money to buy his family a two-bedroom house and a car and let his wife stay home.

Those days are gone. They went away when our country shifted from a manufacturing economy to an information economy. Gone are those mind-numbing jobs of fitting this part into that part, for good wages. They've gone overseas, where labor is so cheap as to be mind-boggling: two dollars a day looks good in some cultures.

So you have your degree. Now what? You can teach in elementary or middle or high schools, but only if you've taken the requisite education courses. Otherwise, you're pretty much in the pool of "unskilled workers" -- right alongside the high school graduates.

Maybe you can land a job with the highway people, holding a sign that tells drivers to slow down for road repair ahead. Or handing out those burgers through the window. Fries with that?

The sad point I'm making is that a college degree doesn't mean much any more. It's like a high school diploma used to be. It shows an employer that you had at least enough discipline to stick with the program for four years.

No matter that you went four years PAST high school. You're still just good at something he/she doesn't value: Art or Philosophy or Music or English, et al. Can you type? Do you know how to use Excel? Are you any good on the phone selling whatever product?

We've become a consumer society, where meeting the needs of people who buy things matters much more than knowledge itself. Almost nobody reads these days, at least not what we consider to be good books. They read thrillers and romances, science fiction or fantasy. Escape lit. Nothing to challenge the mind or our pre-conceptions about how life should be.

Are you surprised? You shouldn't be. We've been trending downward in our reading for a long time as the audience tends more and more toward movies and instant feedback. And your degree in the Liberal Arts has become less and less viable in the job market.

There was a time that going to college meant becoming more open to new ideas, more tolerant of other ideolgies, just generally smarter, grounded in the basic philosophies of logic and ethics, well-read in literature, even semi-fluent in a foreign language, able to talk simple psychology or sociology or just politics with another intelligent human. But these traditional attributes of a higher education, which still serve us so well in our day-to-day lives, which enrich us and make us more interesting people, nowadays are downplayed and even de-valued, both in colleges and in our society.

What is valued now, more and more, is your ability to get a good job and make lots of money.
Damn the rest!

So if the sad truth is that a good many college degrees will not guarantee you a better job than if you'd never gone to college at all, where does that leave you? In the coffee shop, probably, at least until you figure out where to go (back to graduate school?).

But while you're pumping those lattes, you can be sure that your customers have someone more interesting to talk to than their average coffee-hawker, and that may keep them coming back.
Bigger tips? You bet.

Hey, you may get to be a manager someday!

(Just don't forget the art and literature and philosophy that got you where you are.)

Eat like an animal.

I'm sure you've noticed that the only truly fat animals are the ones we've domesticated. Cats and dogs. Cows, too, but we WANT them to be fat: that precious marbling in our best steaks.

In the wild, the ancestors of our Fido and Fluffy were and are lean as rawhide. Why? Because they have to chase down their supper. Our pets have only to saunter -- or waddle -- into the kitchen, where a bowl of whatever they like (or whatever we think they like) is waiting.

Just like us.

Have your ever seen, or can even imagine, a fat wolf or mountain lion? Of course not.

But the secret to their sleek physique isn't just that they may have to run all day to get a meal. No, it's because they eat only when they're hungry.

I suspect that our concept of three meals a day originated back when most of our grandmothers and grandfathers -- and their parents and grandparents -- worked at real labor all day long and needed the nourishment. Plowing the fields, chopping wood, cooking over a wood stove and trying to keep the dirt off your dirt floor: chores to wear a person down, make him/her hungry. In the morning, to prepare for the day's onerous work, at noon to keep the energy up to go face hours more in the woods and fields or at the scrubbing board and the clothes line. At evening to try to replenish all the calories lost during the day. Then to bed -- early -- to prepare for yet another day of hard work.

You know as well as I that most of us don't lead that kind of life anymore. Some of us do, and for those unfortunate souls, I say: three meals a day and snacks, too! For the rest of us, its' time to re-think the three meals a day paradigm. Yes, we did it when we had little kids, because they're growing and need all the fuel they can get, and it's always best to sit down to meals as a family.

But that doesn't cut it for us adults. We don't need that much food. We're grown. All we need is enough to counter the calories we burn every day, which probably isn't much. Most of us drive to work, then sit at a desk; we walk around to one extent or another, but we almost never run. At the end of the day, we're not so much exhausted as bored.

So we go home and eat. Six o'clock means supper. Even if we're alone or just two grown-ups together. Maybe you had a soft pretzel in the middle of the afternoon and aren't really hungry. But it's time to eat, so let's do it!

And the pounds mount up. We don't notice at first, but others do, and sooner or later someone says, "Putting on a few, huh?" or something similar that startles us. Now we have a problem: we've got to take off those pounds so we'll look the way we used to look and want to look now. But we also love to eat. Big problem.

I think there's a way to stay lean and still eat what you want. Eat like an animal. Animals, in the wild, eat when they're hungry. I'm sure you've seen National Geographic videos of lions walking right past herds of gazelles at a watering hole. Why didn't the lions pounce? Because they weren't hungry. And the gazelles knew it and went on drinking. There are also films of sharks gliding past whole schools of fish. Why didn't they attack such a tempting target? Because they weren't hungry.

Suppose you only ate when you were hungry. What would that be like? Suppose you opened the refrigerator and took out what you wanted to eat and ate it and then closed the refrigerator.
And then didn't eat again until you were hungry. I'm pretty sure you would eat less than if you sat down for a real meal, by rote, three times a day. And clean your plate, remember?

If the lion or the shark can pass by easy prey because they're not hungry, you and I can pass by the the fast food place or the ice cream stand.

Eat like an animal. In other words, when you're hungry. And because you've freed yourself from the very unhealthy three meals a day concept, you can indulge in whatever you want with no guilt. A lion absolutely gorges on that gazelle. I've heard that pythons can swallow a whole pig and then lie still for a month while the meal is absorbed.

A double-cheeseburger is sometimes just the thing we crave, but give it a few hours to dissolve, and don't think about eating again until you're actually hungry. That may be your big meal of the day.

It's very freeing to think that you can eat anything you want if you don't do it on a schedule. A chocolate eclair from your favorite bakery? Go for it -- especially since you skipped breakfast and only had a Swiss cheese on rye and an apple for lunch (and didn't eat half the apple).

You are your calorie count, and it doesn't matter if you get it three times a day, on schedule, eating food you don't necessarily like, or if you get it whenever you're hungry during the day or night, opting for something good. Count 'em up, if you must, and then decide how you want to get 'em. I'm in favor of what I want, when I want it. I won't eat as often, and I won't eat as much, but I will so much more love what I'm eating!

Pass the gazelle, would you?

Your body is your vehicle. Keep it tuned.

Suppose when body types were being handed out, we were all in a big car lot, and there was a
lottery. Some of us got a Lexus or a Hummer. The luckiest got a Corvette or even a Ferrari.

But most of us got a Volvo or a Ford Focus or a Volkswagon bug. Or a mini-van. The least fortunate among us got an old Impala with bad brakes.

We're all granted a certain body -- tall or short, muscled or not, powerful or slow, humming or choking -- and it's what we have to get us through life. It's not fair, but it's the way things are.

When I was a kid, I realized soon enough that I was skinny and didn't have the muscle mass my 10-year-old friends had. They were faster and stronger than me, through nothing more than dumb luck. I mean, they hadn't done anything to deserve their better bodies: it was a gift they were given that I wasn't. Go figure.

But that didn't mean I had to surrender. I learned that I could work out with weights and run and try to get myself up to their level. It was a pipe dream, of course: they were genetically too far ahead of me. By whatever happenstance happens in our biological make-ups, they were out of my league from the beginning. I was born into a Chevy Vega while my friend Ronny was driving a Mustang from the beginning. I was beat before the flag to start the race was dropped.

But in early attempts to catch up, before I knew that I couldn't, I was inadvertently keeping my vehicle in the best shape it could be, given what it was. My Vega couldn't keep up with the Mustangs, but it could get me where I wanted to go. And it did, even when I traded it for that mini-van later on. I learned early the value of exercise, meaning keeping my vehicle in shape.

And, lo and behold, something interesting happened as I got older: more than a few of those high-performance vehicles started to break down, as the athletes stopped their sports and started getting fatter, with bad knees and aching joints. In the meantime, my mini-van kept chugging along, as I jogged my two slow miles every morning and did my sit-ups and didn't drink too much beer. (Okay, sometimes I did.)

The point is that you don't choose your body type. But you can make the best of it. If you're given a Taurus, keep it tuned. If you're given a Mercedes, do the same. And if you're given that old Impala with bad brakes, you have your work cut out for you, but you still have to keep it running the best you can. And -- who knows? -- it may outlast those Corvettes and Mustangs.

Treat your body as a machine. A vehicle. It needs maintenance. You don't have to run or lift weights. Just go out and walk. Play tennis. Swim. Anything to keep moving, to keep the parts from seizing up later on.

A Lexus dead at the side of the road looks a lot worse than a Ford Focus cruising by with family inside. Whatever vehicle you were granted -- whatever body -- take care of it, because it's more than likely going to outlast lots of better ones granted, by chance alone, to people who weren't smart enough to take care of what they were given.

Remember: there are more old Volvos on the road than any other car, Ferraris included.

Genealogy is worthless to most of us.

I know there's a big push these days to trace our ancestry, to find out who we came from and where they lived, etc. But I have my doubts about its worth.

You are, first and foremost, who you are. A person born into a certain family and a certain time. You will have to deal with all that first and immediately, but who your parents were matters only if you patterned yourself after them or rejected them and their values. They are, after all, people like you but who grew up in a different time. They were kids once, just like you. They struggled just like you're struggling, made mistakes just as you make mistakes.

What they did that was remarkable is that they mated and produced you. That had never happened before.

They were very interesting people in their own rights, but they aren't you. Only you is you (pardon the grammar). There has never been another you. You're in this world alone, a new person, and the only reason your parents matter is because (1)they are supporting you, (2) you feel you owe them something, or (3) they're making you feel guilty. They brought you into this world, but that was for them, not for you. They wanted a child. You're that child.

Whatever you think you owe to your parents, you owe a lot less to their parents and to their parents' parents, etc. Maybe you knew a grandparent or two or more, but you likely didn't know a great-grandparent. Your Grampa's dad? Your Grandmother's mother?

It's almost inconceivable to imagine people that far gone from us. But they existed and lived lives like ours, without the modern conveniences but still full of joy and anxiety and boredom and hopelessness and hope. And yet . . . they're not part of us, at least not on a conscious level. Yes, maybe you are descended from your grandma who was feisty and fought for women's rights, or maybe you came from a Civil War soldier who gave up his life for a lost cause.

But that's not you. That's him or her in another time.

Genealogy is deceptive in that it tries to convince us that we are the people we came from. I'm pretty sure that's not true. It's interesting to find out who your ancestors were, but, unless you're in line to ascend to one of the few thrones left in our civilized world, you should probably take it all in as history and get on with your own life.

I take pleasure in thinking that I'm one of a kind, born into this cosmos of particular parents but free to be anyone I want to be. Personal history should be a scrapbook, not a piece of luggage.

Hello, World! This is me! A brand-new person! You've never seen me before! Stay tuned!

Life is not one of my addictions.

Addiction is defined in Webster's Ninth (the dictionary I have at hand) as "the quality and state of being addicted" and "compulsive physiological need for a habit-forming drug (as heroin)".

I think this is short-sighted.

An addiction to anything means that you percieve it as something you absolutely need in your life. Of course you may be addicted to drugs or alcohol, but that's just the start.
You may be addicted to love (I think there's a song about that), to being needed. You may be addicted to that adrenaline rush you get from climbing ice-faces or free-falling out of planes or kayaking white-water rapids. Or you may be addicted to social events or certain kinds of music or movies or even foods: I've known people who have told me they couldn't live without sushi or steaks or seafood fresh from the ocean. You may be addicted to your audio/video equipment. (Sad, yes, but true.)

I've always been the addictive type, in the dictionary sense, meaning that I was susceptible to the influence of various drugs. Most I resisted, despite their pull. I still struggle with some. But the point is that addiction takes many forms, and most of us deal with it to one degree or other in our lives. There are just things and people and substances that some of us have trouble resisting even when we know they're not good for us.

There are positive addictions, by the way, but they all have their downsides. As I said, you may get addicted to the social life, to being with other people, but you may feel lost, even miserable, when left alone. You can get addicted to exercise, but if you take it too far, you can end up tread-milling yourself into anorexia or even heart failure. Or you can get addicted to a special diet that promises you better health but that, in the end, deprives you of protein or other important nutrients. You can bcome addicted to family -- to having all your relatives and children near, with you at the center -- but there's always the chance that a child or niece or cousin will veer off-course and cause you much heartache.

Which brings me to my point: I'm not addicted to life.

I'm sure this sounds strange, as we all want to live as long as we can, right?

Yes and no.

I've seen my own mother live to be 98, soon to be 99, and I'm not sure I want to live that long. Her mind is sound, but her body has let her down. She can barely get out of a chair and doesn't dare set foot outside her house for fear of falling. Her muscle tone is gone so that the skin hangs from her arms like ill-fitting curtains. She's trapped inside her house and her brain.

But dread of old age isn't the only reason I'm not in favor of "any life is better than no life".

There's a philosophical view, too. I saw lots of smart young men die in Viet Nam, some not even 20 years old, and had a best friend die in a car wreck at 25, leaving behind a wife and child and promising future. Life and death are so random that my own existence on this planet can't be considered "the be all and end all", except to me. I can't believe that the number of years I spend here matters much in the long run. As the poet Dylan Thomas wrote, "After the first death, there is no other." If anyone dies, especially young, then my own survival is just luck.

We all die. It's a given. Whether we live ten years of a hundred, we're all gone sooner or later. (And if you think about it in cosmic or geologic time, any lifespan, however long, is a gnat's wink.)

To be addicted to life means that you are afraid of dying -- afraid of thinking that all the people you've loved and all the things you've done (or not done) and all the places you've seen will be wiped out the instant the sheet is pulled over your head. But it also means that you're afraid you, too, will be obliterated. Like you never existed. It was all you knew, and now it's gone -- and so are you!

It's a natural way to think. But it's also the only way he have to think. We're limited in our mental powers, just as we're limited in our time on this earth. Biology claims us all in the end. There is no escape. It happened to Lincoln as well as to Hitler, to your grandma and mine, too.

Many if not most of us fall back on what we call "faith" -- usually meaning a hope that we will be awakened again in some afterlife, where we'll be re-united with those important to us in this life (and maybe, in the bargain, be better looking and richer, too). But we know, if we're honest, that it's wishful thinking. We don't have any proof that it will happen or that it's ever happened.

I think there is a deeper faith that can sustain us and make our last days more bearable: faith in the mysterious system that created us -- and yes, that will extinguish us. Faith that, somehow, it all makes sense in a way we can't begin to understand.

It's the way things are, the way things have always been and always will be. It's what is.

So why not just accept it? Don't hurry it, but don't fear it. Make plans for it. Take care of your loved ones. Be sure friends know you appreciate them. Clean out your office, for God's sake!

By all means love life, live it to the fullest, milk it for whatever you can, but just don't get addicted to it. In the end, you'll have to give it up. Maybe tomorrow, maybe fifty years from now. But the time will come, and it's up to you how cool you are with that.

Amen and good luck.

Which sense would you give up? Not too fast now!

If you had to give up a sense -- seeing, hearing, touch, smell, taste -- which would you choose? Most of us would put seeing at the bottom of the list. It's the last sense we want to lose. We want to see the world we encounter, to be able to maneuver through it un-aided. But what would it be like to move through that world seeing everything but not able to hear anything anyone said to us, much less music or just the sounds of traffic and doors being opened or closed or kids laughing in our neighborhood? What if you could see your own babies, your children, but not hear anything they said to you? And what about touch? What if you could never again feel anything through your fingertips: a kitchen utensil, a key to your car, a lover's body? And what if you could never again feel that lover's lips against yours? What if you couldn't tell when a stove was hot? You get the picture. It's not as simple as it seems. Of course we all want to see what's in front of us, if just to avoid being clumsy and tripping over things. But if you chose to keep that sense at the expense of another, you would be giving up lots that you take for granted. Suppose you give up the sense of smell. Okay, so you can't detect your favorite perfume. Big deal. But you also can't appreciate the aroma of spring flowers in bloom or your favorite foods. You eat those enchiladas you always loved, but now they taste like nothing. Wine is wasted on you, except for the effect. This, of course, leaks into the loss of another sense: taste. Smell and taste are so connected that when you lose one, you pretty much lose the other. If you can't smell the spicy shrimp, you also can't taste them. If you can't taste the rare steak with mushroom reduction and shallots, it's because you can't smell it. So if you lose your sense of smell and taste, your dinners out with friends are going to be much less enjoyable. You're going to be eating but faking it. Delicious, you say, but you don't mean it. What you're eating is just stuff, ruffage. You might as well be eating lettuce with no kind of dressing. You don't even know when you're full. And you don't take any of it home in a doggy bag. Why bother? There is no reason you need to think about any of this, as most of us will never lose any of these senses. Especially taste and smell, not to mention touch. But people do lose sight and sound every day. Maybe it's good to think about it ahead of time, in the unlikely event it happens to you or to me. How would we cope? If I couldn't see anything tomorrow, I would be distraught. Panicky. I would be feeling my way around the house, crying out like an abandoned child. But people deal with this affliction all the time. They go blind and then somehow go on. Wow! People also go deaf. I knew a girl who told me that one day she woke up and couldn't hear birds anymore. She could see them on her deck but couldn't hear them. One by one, the sounds in her life disappeared. I've never known anyone who lost the senses of taste or smell or touch but can imagine that it's traumatic, even life-changing. We're resilient as a species, but we're also dependent on ALL our senses, and the loss of any one is a serious blow to our equilibrium, our sense of ourselves in the world, in time and space. How we adjust to such a loss is a matter of individual strength, a test of character for sure. But it can't be fun. The lesson to be learned? Cherish all those senses that you take for granted. Not just sight and hearing but taste and smell and touch. Have you tasted anything good today? Smelled anything that pleased you? Touched someone special? What are you waiting for?

The real heroes are those of us who endure.

The Russian writer Chekhov said, "Any idiot can face a crisis. It is this day-to-day-living that wears you out." I think what he meant was that any of us, given a certain situation, could race into a burning building to save a child screaming from a second-story window or drag a driver from a car about to explode after a horrendous wreck. Adrenaline alone might provoke us to rise to the occasion and be heroic, if just for a few minutes.

It's the daily drag of family and job and just living that's hardest of all and that so many of us do, without much thanks, for most of our lives. And while the vast majority of us take it for granted and just do it, day after day, that's what makes civilization work, what makes society click.

When we were young, we all had ideals we aspired to -- running for Congress, writing a great novel, finding true love, raising perfect children, owning a yacht -- but, as the years go on, most of us have to settle for something less. The true test of character is how we adjust to reduced expectations. Okay, so I'll never be President -- or even president of my bank. Maybe I won't own that yacht (or even that new Lexus). Maybe I won't compete in the Olympics, even though I was a really fast sprinter in high school. (Or not: let's be honest.)

Life is all about diminishing expectations, but it's also about new opportunities. When I was in sixth grade, I tried out for choir and was soon singled out as the one voice in the group that didn't fit and was sent back to my classroom. At the time, I was crushed. I didn't know I couldn't sing!
It took a long time for me to get over that, but, in time, I realized that I had other talents that weren't recognized in sixth grade. I could write. Maybe another person in the same situation would realize that he/she could draw or paint or organize people for a cause or work on cars or catalogue information or any number or other things that could make a life valuable.

It's a cliche, but every time a door closes, a window opens. You may not have demonstrated any talent in school -- may even have dropped out of school -- but may turn out to be a wonderful parent or a super real estate salesperson or a great teacher or at least a steady wage-earner at a job you don't like but that you keep because you know your kids are depending on you. Born rich or born poor, we all face a challenge: make it or not, do it or not, stay with it or give it up.

The true test of a person is not the exploitation of a particular talent but the perserverance of will: our ability to live life as it's given to each of us, day by day, against all odds, maintaining our values, living them and passing them on to our kids, being good citizens, obeying laws, voting our conscience. Voting at all, as a matter of fact!

In the end, it's all about putting bread on the table when you'd rather spend it on beer. Taking a menial job instead of resorting to petty crime. Spending time with family when you'd rather spend it somewhere else. Making Christmas special. And birthdays. Putting those important to you first and you second. Making your spouse or girlfriend/boyfriend feel special, even when you're mad at him/her. Sucking it up and realizing it's not just about you.

It's hard. Really hard. Sometimes almost impossible.

But it's what keeps us honorable. And it's what makes families work. Democracy, too. It's what we're all about. It's why we're here.

All power to those who accept their obligations, who endure, against all odds. Here's to us!

Long may we wave!