Happy the man and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

by John Dryden
Happy the Man

                   1685

I

Dad might have read Dryden's poem sometime, I don't know.
He did feel it. He knew fair or foul. Was not a stranger to rain or shine.

Somehow, though, he escaped "chasing one conceptual creation after another.
This matrix of concepts appears in many variations,
but its weak point is the same: it is fabricated.
Without really looking at the nature of appearances,
we project a meaning-generality onto the world,
shaping it with our assumption of independent existence."¹
Dad knew better, from his own experience, untellable to others
but clear in his conviction, his action. He felt he had a part in something larger.
Something he would never see in its entirety.
And that was fine with him.

"A click of insight reminds me that life is a Rube Goldberg machine,
a game of Mousetrap. A rolling marble travels through a tilted chute,
plops down a stairway, and lands in a pool of water, which splashes up,
tipping a match, which strikes and lights a candle.
Aha! A certain set of causes and conditions have ripened."²

That dad would dislike, but get the point, accept the ripening.
His life had an arc we neither fully understood. Doubt I ever will.
But that's ok. I think he has a clue now.
"Love is the measure of our practice."
That he always knew. With practice, his measure of love grew and matured.
Relaxed from stiff gaited to rolling easy.

II

"At the end of the day, the measure of our practice
is how we interact with others.
Those 'other' beings aren't really others after all,
they are us and we are them."²
Aha! A certain set of causes and conditions have ripened.

And...
we are one.
Same-same.
And that was fine with him.