Don’t lose your shirt – it is difficult to end wars

While keeping myself busy cleaning my son’s room one day, I came across this note: “End world hunger”. It was in his handwriting, and it sent my mind back to when I had similar notes in my room and in my handwriting. I was planning then not only to end world hunger, but also to eliminate all disease and if there was any time left over, to put an end to wars.

That was some decades ago. Now the notes I write read ‘Buy two loaves of bread’ or ‘don’t forget to call up so-and-so.’

The advantage with the recent notes is that the wishes are guaranteed to be fulfilled. I may not have ended all wars, but I certainly have called so-and-so and even bought bread. Many times. But man does not live by bread alone.

Reading my son’s note after having written an identical one so long ago, I can’t escape the feeling that I have failed.

I would have been happy with two out of three, or even just one. But I am told hunger remains, as do diseases and wars. It is impossible not to ask the question: have I wasted my life? Or should I have tried harder? I think it was Herman Hesse who said that every man’s life viewed from within is a failure (in many cases, whatever angle you look at it from it remains a failure), but that’s no consolation. Nor is it any consolation that my son will probably feel exactly the way I do now when he gets to my age.

When you are young you have all manner of ambitions. To fly like Superman is often an early one. That too is doomed to failure. To visit another planet is sometimes one too. Maybe soon that will indeed happen, although living on one with a Starbucks nearby and fast food joints on every street is still one or two generations away. Then there’s the ambition to marry the girl next door. Some realise it, most don’t, and it is difficult to say which group is happier at the end of it.

As we grow older, we tone down these ambitions. Now the ambition is to remember the name of the person you have just run into at the shopping mall. Or to walk down the stairs without having to walk up again to recall why you walked down in the first place. Wars remain. But a whole day can be ruined when you can’t remember a name. Or forget to get a loaf of bread.

Watch this space for a discussion on the other important thing I found in my son’s room – an unwashed shirt from the previous century.