Relocated Priorities

All I really wanted to do was write a year-end column highlighting and summarizing events, but I’m stumped—not because nothing happened during the year, but because everything happened. As years go, 2008 was a doozy.

Stumped or not, I’ll give it a try. As this column is being written early in October (drat those deadlines), the outcomes of the election and the economic meltdown are not yet known, but fools and columnists rush in anyway.

Throughout the year, I kept asking myself, “Is it just my age, or are we living in a world of deteriorating morals, ethics, behavior, and expectations?” I haven’t gotten an answer yet, but I’m afraid I know what it is.

It’s been a year in which pervasive greed has been cited as one of the major factors contributing to the calamitous economic decline in this country. Ambition and the drive to succeed are not only great, they’re essential to avoid national stagnation. But those qualities need to be tempered by consideration of the impact on other people and other entities, and honestly evaluating all costs required to achieve success in a given situation. Uncontrollable, reckless compulsion to have more and more can be a destructive disease, and I believe we saw too much evidence of it this past year.

The Big Move

This was the year my wife and I moved to a condominium. We moved from the home I grew up in from the age of 10, the home we later bought from my parents (I think I overpaid, but I guess it’s too late to do anything about it), the home in which we raised our three children, and the home our grandchildren came to for their ping-pong tournaments. I thought we’d never leave that house, but things change, and it was time to get rid of the yard responsibilities, so many stairs, and most important, to sort through a lifetime’s accumulation of stuff.

The move was horrendous, and months later, I still don’t know where anything is in our new place. The good news is that the emotional stresses I anticipated would come with leaving the “old homestead” never occurred because I was too exhausted by the move itself. By the time I recovered, we were happily comfortable in the new place. So much for not being able to let go. Still, 2008 closed the book on a lifetime of memories.