First Lines of Arthur Brooks "Strength to Strength"

 "Who are the five greatest scientists who have ever lived? This is the kind of question people like to debate in nerdy corners of the internet that you probably don't visit, and I don't intend to take you there. But no matter how much or little you know about science, your list is sure to include Charles Darwin. He is remembered today as a man who changed our understanding of biology completely and permanently. So profound was his influence that his celebrity has never wavered since his death in 1882.

And yet Darwin died considering his career to be a disappointment."

- Arthur Brooks, Strength to Strength  

As I get older, I have an obvious interest in what success looks like as as an aging person in a society obsessed with youth. Brooks examines middle-aged and elderly satisfaction though many different lenses, and perhaps the most interesting to me was the idea of Fluid vs. Crystalized Intelligence. Put simply, Fluid Intelligence is reasoning and problem solving while Crystallized Intelligence is the combined use of past knowledge. Or as Brooks puts it: "When you are young, you have raw smarts; when you are old, you have wisdom."

Strength to Strength is essentially a survey of ideas. While not all of them resonated with me, I enjoyed the journey. The book certainly helped me (as someone who just turned 50) reframe my tendencies towards synthesis and common sense as a benefit, not a bug. 

First Lines of "Rollback"

"It had been a good life.
Donald Halifax looked around the living room that he and his wife.Sarah had shared for sixty years now, and that thought kept coming back to him. Oh, there had been ups and downs, and the downs had seemed excursions into the flames of hell at the time--the lingering death of his mother, Sarah's battle with breast cancer, the rough periods their marriage had gone through--but, on balance, when all was said and done, it had been a good life."
- Robert J Sawyer, from Rollback

Picked up Rollback as my "easy" book as I work my way through Tom McCarthy's C (which has gotten much better than I wrote about the other day). One of the reasons I'm so excited about Sawyer's novel is because it's about older people dealing with new challenges, as opposed to most of SciFi which typically deals with young people. Here, the premise of this book is that an older woman has to get back into the game after a series of communications she sent out into space are answered 60 years after they were sent. There are complications - that's what makes the story really interesting - but the focus on older people is refreshing.

What is a Midlife Crisis?

As I approach 40, I've come to realize that my biggest mistakes were not the choices that I've made or, surprisingly, even anything that I did - rather, my biggest mistakes and regrets are what I did not do. It seems to me that most mid-life crises arise from foax finally realizing what they want to do, but it being too late - or them believing it's too late - for them to do it. Luckily, with a few exceptions, it's not too late for me to realize the things that i've always wanted to do - I just need to go about doing them (for example, getting over my fear of heights). Hopefully you'll hear more about this in the future!