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Oct. 7, 2022 - Lionel Nation
33:08
Appreciating Life
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I've picked this title, Appreciating Life, as so poignant because it is the way I'm thinking right now.
It's what's on my mind.
Remember when Wham!
had Choose Life?
Remember that?
Give me a go-go, whatever, and it was Choose Life.
I thought, okay, that's good.
And I've been thinking about this, and this is going to be a very, very important part about today's version.
By the way, a couple of announcements, a couple of housekeeping.
Beginning now, beginning from now until the end of time, I hope, the morning shows will be one half hour.
For a variety of reasons, far too complicated to go into, far too complicated to even address.
30 minutes max makes the most sense.
It is the best allocation of time, and after all, what is life?
But the most effective allocation of time.
I want to bring that up to your attention as well.
Number two, for my more deep, biting, I don't want to say adult, But politically surgical views of life in general, I can only commend to you my private channel.
I just did what I thought was an absolutely brilliant, if I say so myself, review of the state of elections and the like with a particular take This is a
different endeavor today.
This is a different endeavor.
This week...
Marked two occasions where two people that we know passed away.
One was a very, very close, close, close friend.
A fascinating woman.
Absolutely one of the most incredibly gifted political Observers, bar none.
So much so that I am convinced, I am convinced that even her immediate family did not even remotely understand the greatness of such.
It was something that I just thought was so, she was so good, you would absolutely love her.
She passed, and we...
I never understood the notion of the word pass.
I've never understood this.
All my life, I've been fascinated with death my entire life.
Not with the process of it, but where people go.
And what happens afterwards.
And what happens during.
Before, after, and during.
It's a subject matter that is not at all, I think, depressing.
It's a matter of fact.
It's a matter of truth.
There's no way around it.
It's just the way it is.
There was a book which I read that absolutely transformational in my life called How We Die.
By Sherwin Newland, father of Victoria Newland, which I didn't know I didn't put together until years later.
In it, it is an explication, a description of the processes of death.
How we die.
Fascinating.
Because for the longest time, I always would say things like, you know, if we die, I'd say, no, no, no, no, when?
Okay, you're right, you're right, you're right.
Because even though we don't recognize this fact, we put off the reality of such.
We put things off.
We put realities off.
It's a very interesting concept.
A fascinating concept.
In any event.
I wanted to discuss that with you.
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Preparewithlionel.com When kids are little and they have the death of a pet, of a relative, of somebody, it is still that level of Confusion and fascination has never left me my entire life.
Never left me.
It never left me.
I've always had this.
I don't understand it.
Now, as you know, if you've children, if you've studied any developmental psychology, there's something called object permanence that Piaget and others have advanced.
It's a fascinating subject which deals with the fact that just because you cannot see something anymore doesn't mean it's not there.
And it's one of the strangest things to explain to children.
You can say, okay, here's the magic flying pickle.
You can call it peekaboo.
It is a concept that to most people mean nothing.
But to a child, it is the first cosmic Surreal concept.
And then, when you're a child, you start seeing things like, you see the wind, but you don't see the wind.
You see the result of the wind, and then the wind goes away.
Then you have a balloon, and the balloon is filled with air.
And you can't see air, but you know air is there.
And you understand the concept of it.
And little by little, as you make your way through life, Adding on layers and layers of this surreal understanding.
It is beyond brilliant to see this when you see...
Because normally with a child, you're so happy with a child, you don't recognize it.
You don't see it.
You don't...
You're just happy.
It's cooing and it's just so cute.
Whenever I see a little baby in a pram, as you call it.
And by the way, a little word of design.
Isn't it great?
Don't you love the fact that somebody said, why don't we raise these buggies and carriages and all of this, strollers?
Why don't we raise them?
I love that.
Why don't we raise them so you don't have to bend down?
Some design part.
This is fairly recent.
Remember when we were kids, we had these metal things where you stop quick, you hit your head, and it was awful.
They had this, like, this chaise lounge.
By the way, it's not chaise lounge.
It's a long, long chair.
Anyway, you know that...
You know when you go to the beach, you have those...
Chairs with that plastic.
The stuff that we had as kids was horrible.
And now, yesterday we saw a cute little baby in an elevator.
This design is so obvious.
Raise it up.
Also, pick the thing up, put it in the car.
It's brilliant.
How long did it take for people to say, why don't we do that?
Please give me one minute.
I love design.
I love design.
There's a book I've got called Quintessence, which I love.
It's about the most essentially brilliant things.
Ivory soap, Campbell's soup, the Zippo lighter, the Ace comb.
Design.
The Eames chair.
This design.
Genius.
Well, somebody a long time ago said, and I had this.
I have a trial case.
You know when you go to...
Court, you got your big trial case there.
That thing weighed a ton.
Put your stuff in it and everything.
And then somebody said, wait a minute.
They sold these metal container types of things where you put your suitcase in it and it had wheels.
You put your suitcase in this frame that had wheels on it.
It was brilliant!
And you had to have a little carrying case for the whatever this carrying thing is.
I don't know what the name of it is.
That went on for I don't know how many years.
And somebody said, wait a minute!
Why don't we just put wheels on the suitcase?
Now, grant you, Granted, rather.
We've mapped the genome.
We've done all this stuff.
Somebody says, why don't we do that?
That's a great idea.
Huh?
A man from Scarsdale?
Unbelievable.
So then we said, the heck with these metal trays or these carts or these trolleys, these things that you put stuff in?
And that went on for five years?
But remember, you had to tilt it.
You had to tilt it to pull it.
You see?
There was wheels on it.
But then somebody said, wait a minute.
Let's put four wheels that rotate 360 and you can just push.
And if you've been to JFK and the international area, you realize, my God, you can put people and do it.
They didn't think of this?
That just fascinates me, the design.
Nobody thought of it.
Anyway.
*Burps*
So as we're going through all this stuff, we had two friends I mentioned.
One that we knew very well.
She watched this daily.
She was a member of the crew here.
And then we had a friend who was not necessary.
I don't want to go too much into detail, but...
We knew her rather tangentially.
I don't want to go too much into the specifics, but she is no longer with us as well.
It's a fascinating subject, which I go into on my private channel.
I'm sorry.
I feel a lot freer, and I am less constrained, as you can imagine, by not having these problems.
And the thing I thought was, As we went to this one celebration of life, I, if ever you go with me and Mrs. L to anything, you're going to have to go and observe everything that goes on.
Observe it.
Pay attention.
Don't miss anything.
And the first thing I noticed, could not believe what I was saying.
When you go to an event, whether it's a funeral, whether it's a memorial, whether it's a mass, whether it's a service, whatever you want to call it, you must dress accordingly.
Dress.
How you dress says everything.
Life is a uniform.
Life conveys Everything.
And how you dress.
The hat you wear.
The clothes.
It says something.
Casual.
And when somebody dies, I've always thought.
I've always.
It's instinctual.
It's what I believe.
You dress accordingly.
And you wear dark.
Yes, it is tradition.
Yes, you're right.
Yes.
What do you call it?
Funereal?
What do you want it?
Dark?
Whatever.
I was debating, is this tie too blue?
Should I go more black?
Is it too festive?
It was navy blue.
This is me.
I'm demented.
Why?
Out of respect for the event.
Okay?
I'm from the dark ages.
I'm from a time that doesn't exist anymore.
We're not, don't wear, you know, jewelry.
I mean, don't, don't, you know, you're not festive.
Even a pocket square, you must, but tone it down.
Okay.
I almost needed to be resuscitated.
First, I see people walking in with sandals and not, not, not open to, I'm talking just like going to the TJ Maxx and I saw this kid show up.
Wearing what amounts to, reminded me of the Unabomber, a hoodie, a hoodie, a hoodie, like a running suit, a running suit!
I couldn't believe this.
What has happened with parents, people walking around, one guy with his shirt tucked out, you know that untucked thing?
I could not believe what I was, I could not believe what I was seeing.
Couldn't believe it.
Couldn't believe the level of...
Okay, they were there.
So what?
You know what else I noticed?
People who are sitting in a church laughing.
I know you're seeing your friends, I know, but there's something weird about laughing.
Congregating and laughing.
You can hear this.
And there are people who are loud.
There's no decorum.
This is reverence.
This is the goodbye.
This is the valedictory, the denouement.
And I'm not trying to be overly priggish or needlessly fastidious about these things.
I mean it.
I mean it.
And I might mean to go through the...
I'm not going to go through the...
The religious part, that's up to you.
People are funny about that.
How is it, how is it that we maintain a balance between saying, well, that was the way it was then versus that's the way we do it now and Moreover, when do you say, that doesn't matter anymore.
That's not important anymore.
That's not critical anymore.
That's that.
The second point.
Have you ever had someone that you, the second person I'm referencing, we did not know very well.
But it was a person that was troubled.
Very, very troubled.
Emotionally.
Psychiatrically, psychologically, very troubled.
And sometimes, I don't know if you've ever had this, sometimes you can feel the effect of somebody's death more from somebody you did not know.
And it's not so much that they're gone because you didn't see them before.
It's the fact that there seems to be this incredible sense of this is unfair.
And I still hang on to this notion called fairness.
And I believe in this thing called justice.
It's not fair.
How unlucky.
We use these terms because we have this internal sense of what is and isn't okay, what's fair, what's to be expected, what a tough life they've had.
Listen to this one too.
Is there life after death?
I love this.
And as you can imagine, we all have our opinion, and you do not need any explanation or any permission to think of anything else.
And there's something called...
Thanks to the Internet, as it were, there are wonderful, wonderful shows that deal with quantum physics, quantum mechanics.
I was watching something, Sir Roger Penrose, explaining his theory of consciousness, which is wonderful.
And there are...
Folks who are, for example, Penrose and Stuart Hameroff from University of Arizona, they talk about something called orchestrated objective reduction, and it's evidence that protein-based microtubules, a structural component of human cells, carry quantum information.
Information stored at the subatomic level.
And the quantum information, they believe, within the microtubules is not destroyed.
It can't be destroyed.
And it just distributes and dissipates to the universe at large.
And we're not going into detail.
And you can observe this at your own leisure and the like.
There is now evidence, or at least a hypothesis, for people who are not normally known for being overtly or, or, or.
Overly, I should say, religious, that there is an evidence of life, or a continuation of life, or a transubstantiation, or evolution of something, kind of a recalibration of life, that nothing ends.
Now that's not necessarily what people want.
I think people want When they think of life, they think of life in terms of the way life is to us.
What we see, that we will see Uncle Dave and Grandma.
We will see them.
We will be able to talk to them.
We'll be able to take what we're doing now and to extend it later on in a place where there is happiness and there is no disease and no death.
I'm not even discussing that.
That's more.
More of a more...
A corporeal and a tangible form of life.
But as I'm attending these services and as I'm thinking about this, this person, this person who is theoretically no more, is living in me and is the focus of my...
The person's not there anymore.
The person's not there.
There is, quote, the physical, the tangible, the atomic.
It's not there anymore.
But I'm possessed with the energy of this person.
I'm thinking about him.
I'm reminding him.
This reminds me of this.
And you can tell somebody this.
That lives on.
In fact, sometimes people live on more in death than in life, which is even weirder.
And if you have children, And if you have young people, young in particular, how you handle death is very, very important.
Normally, the first time I think is, I think death of a pet, kind of, at least for me, it was one of those things where, what was it?
And it's a very traumatic thing.
And as you look, and as you find ways to describe it, it is, as the show was called, Appreciating life.
But also you use words like sleep.
You know, he's asleep.
It looks like he's asleep.
You know, going like, you know, a permanent sense of sleep.
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Lionel, or Lionel, as some people insist upon saying, I don't know why.
I'm thinking about my friend today in particular.
She would be watching this right now.
She had the most incredibly exquisite, and by the way, I'm conveying her energy to you.
She had the most exquisite sense of politics.
She would look at it and say, no, no, no, that's not it, and that's why I loved it.
Because, frankly, sometimes I think our version of it is so...
It's rather unimaginative.
It is so...
I love it.
It's intricate.
Politics, remember what I'm telling you, politics is psychology.
Music.
Everything that we do.
Everything that humans do.
Everything has nothing to do with any kind of fixed, objective rules.
It's about the way we interpret stuff.
Everything.
And I love the fact that we would love to be sometimes...
She was a little older than me, but not much.
But we were basically children of the 60s.
We remember this.
When that music...
When music of the 60s was tumultuous.
And when psychedelic came along.
When what you would call metal, but it was hard rock.
I remember listening to...
Oh, Blue Cheer and Great Distortion and Fuzz, you know, Summertime Blues, Iron Butterfly, that.
So we share that particular part.
Remembering how politics, everything, it combined everything.
Everything that you saw on TV, what was going on in the world.
It was so interesting.
And I'm so lucky.
And life, to me, I'm just lucky.
There's no reason why I'm entitled to anything.
I didn't do anything in a prior life, I don't believe.
So any good things that happen to me is just luck.
And there are some people who've had bad things happen to them because of bad luck.
But I am so lucky that I have a frame of reference where I can say to you, I've seen this before.
I've seen this before.
I've seen this.
Oh, I remember this.
This looks familiar.
I know exactly what this is.
This reminds me of such...
I see it and I want to give you this very, very important piece.
And I always tell people this.
And it might be the secret of life or me or you or I don't know about it.
I did a study one time, and I don't remember where it was, but they asked young people to do something which was based upon kind of like these very, very quick mental activities.
Very quick.
Do it.
And young people were great at getting the answer very quickly.
You know, whack-a-mole stuff.
They could see it.
They could answer.
Very, very good.
But they asked older people, and I'm not exactly sure what older conveyed or connoted, but...
Nonetheless, they were older.
And they asked these older people, can you see?
I'm going to break into Marshall Tucker.
Can you see a difference between this and this?
And they would show, I guess, pictures.
Remember when you were in kids?
Remember highlights?
When you were in the doctor's waiting room?
What's missing in this one that's in here?
Or vice versa.
And older people could say, oh, that's different.
And what was conveyed?
And I love this idea.
What was conveyed was that the ability to tell one situation from the other is called judgment.
And older participants in this did much better than younger because of judgment.
Think about this.
When we get older, it's not that we're smarter, but we're able to say, oh, I...
I've kind of seen this before.
Oh, I know this one.
And this is like this.
Or, even more importantly, this is not like this.
Unless something happens to you.
Unless you can say, yeah, I've seen that before.
And there's nothing like experience.
You can tell people all day long.
You can tell a young person all day long about something and they're going to say, you're just telling me this.
You're telling me this just because I...
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And yet, when it happens, you can say, see?
And now you've got it.
And every...
If there's one thing, just one thought today, very, very simple.
Pay attention.
Notice everything.
When you're doing something, if for you, and I hope you don't go to a funeral or a memoriam, and I hope nobody that you know or love passes away, but invariably you will.
If there's anything that we know, make sure you go and pay attention to everything.
Everything.
Dress, custom, tradition, mythology, procedure, habit, procession, ritual, Words, incantations, prayer, thoughts, fascinating.
Believe me, when you look at that, calling into this notion called judgment, but if you look at the world like this and you start looking at it like that, everything you do is fascinating.
Going into the mall, standing in line in a Wendy's, whatever.
Look around you and look at it like you're a diagnostician or you're a behaviorist or you're an ethologist, but for humans.
That is that.
PrepareWithLionel.com Do the right thing.
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Don't forget also Mrs. L. Go to her YouTube channel, Lynn's Warriors.
Sign up, subscribe, like those videos.
They're incredibly important.
Also, Lind underscore Warriors on Twitter, and I'm at Lionel Media.
Until tomorrow, my friends, I say thank you.
I remind you, 9 a.m. Eastern Time.
And as we always say, the monkey's dead, the show's over.
Sue ya.
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