I’ve been reading Bruce Lee’s Tao of Jeet Kune Do, in which he says that most athletes are not willing to drive themselves hard enough, and that only through extraordinary effort can one unlock the potential of the human body.
So I got up this morning at 5 AM to work out, even though it’s Christmas Eve and I’m sick.
You might counter that Bruce Lee dropped dead at the age of 32, so what am I listening to him for, but he sure was in great shape while he was alive.
Oh, I was quite a physical specimen myself at that age! So much depends on dying at the right time.
Look what it did for Marilyn Monroe, Lee Harvey Oswald, James Dean . . .
Mozart is another guy who died at the right time. Listen to his music! It’s filled with joy and possibilities . . . because he died as a young man! He never got old!
Mozart is buried in an unmarked grave, not because he was unbelievably poor — although he was certainly not well-to-do — but because it was a common practice at that time.
That’s what getting old feels like to me — burying younger versions of myself in a series of unmarked graves . . .