With Age, We Have to Say Goodbye to Friends We Never Met — Reflection on the Roots of Wide-Ranging Embrace

© 2012 Peter Free

 

09 January 2012

 

 

Speech-writer, editor, press secretary, and political commentator Tony Blankley passed away yesterday

 

I was sad to read of Tony Blankley’s death today.

 

Mr. Blankley was significantly more politically conservative than I, but I always looked forward to hearing what he thought on television shows like The McLaughlin Group.  He was the kind of solid person whose sense of things one values, even when it flies far from one’s own.

 

 

Humanity’s large bucket of soulful connections

 

One of drawbacks to the exercise of habitually friendly inclusivity is the sense of loss that comes with its inevitably widened stream of life-ending departures.  That’s true for me, even in regard to people whom circumstances made adversaries.

 

 

With aging, losses appear to rip our interconnectivity net to remnants — yet, these metaphorically wind-flapping holes paradoxically increase our awareness of our temporally forward, backward, and sided relatedness

 

Sad joy is a paradoxical companion to the sense that we are connected together in the Universe’s indescribable pulse.  Call that whatever we do.