I would rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned. — Richard Feynman This post was inspired by a conversation with my friend and fellow blogger Aimee Wilson. Aimee said she likes question and answer posts because the structure makes them easier to put together. I agreed but said I find it hard actually answering the questions. Aimee seemed surprised. “But we’ve done them together and you’ve always done really well!” It’s true. We’ve collaborated on several Q&A posts here at Gum on My Shoe and on Aimee’s blog I’m NOT Disordered . I’ve used the format on other occasions too, including Every Grey Hair Is a Badge in response to fifteen life prompts by Holly Hatam. That doesn’t mean I find them easy or straightforward. The conversation left me wondering where my issues might lie. Aware of the irony of using the Q&A format to explore my problems answering questions, I reached out to ChatGPT. “I find Q&As challenging to answer,”...
Wake up and live your life on your own terms, you are a king in your own kingdom, a god in your own universe. — Bangambiki Habyarimana We’d been discussing life stuff. End of life stuff, actually. Wills and obituaries and eulogies and celebration of life arrangements. That kind of thing. The kind of thing I’d scarcely thought about until a few years ago. A day may come when I have it all in order. But — as Aragorn might say — it is not this day. This day I have something different in mind. Related, but different. Because all this end of life talk got me thinking about what’s most important about a person. How can we hope to capture the essence of a lifetime, a life, a whole entire person, in a few hundred words? A “standard comprehensive obituary” is somewhere between two hundred and four hundred words. A eulogy is usually longer, between five hundred and a thousand words, “lasting approximately three to five minutes when spoken.” Forgive me for thinking this is scarcely en...