A New Year That Really is New

Glass over ancient street below.

We’ve been in one city (Las Vegas) for about two months now and in a few weeks we’ll pack up and visit Germany, England and France briefly before going to Hong Kong and China for most of next year. It’s exciting to think about living in China. We’re getting 12-month visas so we can go in and out of the country as we want.

Now I’m going to say something that sounds like a complete non sequitur and digression from this subject – but it isn’t so please bear with me. When I was about twenty my girlfriend, who was a psychology major, told me that Sigmund Freud said men are constantly thinking about sex and death. Being twenty, I could immediately agree on the sex part. But death almost never occurred to me and, since it’s rather unpleasant, I couldn’t see how it would be on anyone’s mind much at all.

Now that I’m in my fifties and I’ve lost family members, close friends and others, I can readily see how death begins to be on our minds. The idea of a finite life is no longer abstract to me. I get it. So I spend time thinking about what I want to do with the time I have left. For argument sake, let’s say I have twenty years left. What do I want to experience in those years? Who do I want to help? How can I improve? What do I want to become?

Most of all I think about this. Do I want the same year twenty times? Or do I want twenty different years? Or ten different years for two years each? I damned sure don’t want the same year twenty times over. I’d be embarrassed to die that way.

So I’m very excited to go live in China for most of next year because I haven’t done that before and I don’t expect I’ll do it again with my remaining years. I also want to complete a novel I’ve been procrastinating on for longer than I care to admit. That will make next year a completely new experience for me. And that’s a big reason I’m so enamored with the technologies we have today that allow a person the flexibility to re-engineer his or her life so these exciting things are possible.

To me, living today is like a science fiction future where people are empowered to achieve their dreams. Except it’s not science fiction – it’s happening for a huge number of us already – and I hope you are interested in being one of us.

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