The space between

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

People often ask me why I write so much about health-related stuff. They meet me, and they’re nearly always amused.

For one reason, I look a bit younger than my 50 years. For two, I’m healthy. I look healthy. I look better than healthy; I look sort of athletic. I lift weights two or three times a week, I do cardio three or four.

I am healthy. I’ve had a few issues in the past—like the whole pre-diabetes thing, and I was fat way back when—but mostly my problems come from a misspent youth and years of hard drinking and cigarette smoking, which are behind me now. The smoking part, anyway.

As I’ve said many times, this column—despite the fact it’s always written in first person—is not really about me. I write about the things I write about because I think most readers can identify with things like health and aging, kids and parents, media, sex and dating, gardening, broken-down cars, mortgage problems, and high Fridays and low Saturdays.

I write about this stuff not to parade myself as some shining example of individualism, but to make the point that even though we may disagree on some things, we have a lot more in common than we have to disagree about.

I think life is richer when it’s perceived as a parfait. I do recognize, though, that that is not exactly the Buddhist way of seeing and accepting things.

But it’s that whole thing about the unexamined life. Why don’t we just live the way we want to live? Why do we allow baseless social rules to determine our behavior? In comparison to eternity, the longest human life is a gnat’s breath. Attaching meaning to a human life is a lesson in futility.

The whole column is always a metaphor, and that hints that life is a metaphor. Contemplation of death is an affirmation of life, solid things are mostly space, friendships are forever, and time is an ellipsis. Something about my cat.