Moving on

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
--Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Yesterday, I mailed in my tax return.  I also composed on-line and submitted a personal page for my university's quinquennial classbook, a publication that comes out every five years at the time of the class reunion.

What these two activities have in common, of course, are evocations of the moving on of the "Moving Finger." 

Completing my tax return gives me a financial summary of my past year.  But I also have kept a copy of every tax return I've filed since I was 30, and these returns -- taken together -- give me a financial summary of my life.  Some ups and downs, of course, but generally -- as with most middle-class American lives -- a steady improvement financially.  And then, with retirement, a struggle to balance an abrupt ending of wages against increasing value of investments.  Luckily, I retired just as a pleasantly strong upswing in the stock market began -- but no upswing ever lasts forever.

More interesting are my class pages, beginning with a simple typewritten paragraph or two back at the time of my tenth reunion, up through increasingly sophisticated printed pages with varying formats of text and photographs. In each, we present ourselves to our classmates in a manner as self-congratulatory as possible, depending on how it is that we want to congratulate ourselves.

But the astute reader can read between the lines.  My alumni association on-line ID -- selected in my 20s -- was and still is "wanderer."  At the time of my tenth reunion, unlike many of my more clear-minded classmates, I had spent time floundering through periods of graduate school and uninteresting employment, and was only now finishing my first year of law school.  No doubt a bit embarrassed, I emphasized my more interesting experience with wilderness backpacking.  Subsequent five-year periods showed increasing confidence in my professional activities, but even more increased emphasis on outside activities, and especially on travel.

By my 25th reunion page, I was talking about overseas hiking in Kenya and Norway, and my pages continued to emphasize similar experiences around the world as the years went by.  My most recent page, submitted yesterday, may well be the last page of its sort that the school will request -- I suspect the alumni association fears that our personal experiences will be increasingly depressing from this point forward, and that it would receive a rapidly decreasing number of submissions.  (Maybe they don't fear that at all; maybe that's just my gloomy "Eeyore" take on life!)

At any rate, my submission this year was primarily photographic, and my text was a short summary of my life -- not as an attorney, not as an investor, not as a loving family member, but as -- you guessed it -- as a traveler.

When I was 14, I traveled alone by train from Seattle to Chicago to visit a school friend.  Ever since, I've been hooked on travel.  [My school's overseas program in Italy] sealed the deal for me. 

Then followed whatever I could brag about in the small space allotted me.

It's been fun.  My life's far from over (I trust), but if it were over today, I'd be satisfied with what the Moving Finger has "writ."  I'd shed no tears to "wash out a Word of it."