I promised my family to start exuding wisdom as soon as I hit 60 years of age commanding their awe and admiration (or at least some respect, or some attention). My daughter dismissed it as another case of FOPUD (fatherly over-promise under-deliver) and preemptively reset my age to tenderfooted 59 so I can go on spouting immature gibberish for another year when she is going to reset my age again.

However, it is my duty and responsibility, as a parent, to prove my children wrong and thus debilitate, or at least disequilibrate, their burgeoning aplomb. I plan to achieve this imperative educational objective by serving niblets of wisdom too meaty and marrowy for them to swallow, let alone digest.

I hope they (or anyone else) will not mistake it for nourishment and choke on it.

seem to have taken Epicurus’s advice a bit too much o heart: ‘lathe biosas’, i.e. live hidden, inconspicuously.

I miss their calm, cheerful and reflected voices.

For me the Wisconsin summer sounds (with the cicadas loud concerts) and feels (with the warm and humid air) rather Mediterranean: it reminds me of my favorite places on the Dalmatian coast of the Adria: Kotorska Boka and the island of Rab.

I spent most of the summer also mostly in hiding, too: most of the summer days working for money/sustenance of our holy bodiesJ, walking and talking with my wife and our children, reading and listening to Portuguese guitar music.

I had the chance to make a few people aware of the essence and the influence of Epicureanism on our daily lives by giving a talk in the Summer School in Madison, Wis. One person from the audience came to me after the lecture and confessed that she realized she was an Epicurean, unwittingly, as so many millions.

The lecture was taped and as soon as I manage to do some basic editing with my son I will upload it to youtube and give you the link. I could use professional help on editing, though, if anybody of my friends would offer their knowhow and some of their time.

While munching our English muffins on the back porch my daughter told me about the present she is going to make for my cousin. I told her that I admired her rare capacity to think up the kind of present that would make a person happy and then manufacturing it.

“I am a thnky and crafty person” said she “and I like to see the happy faces people make when they get a present from me”.

Details with photo about the typically Wisconsinite present will follow as soon it will be confectioned. I will have to find a toilet paper roll, though, so she can get started on the crafty part.

Today the ritual was specially rewarding due to the sunrays falling on the butter. It looked like it was the sunrays that melted the butter.

The warmth of the bagels, its color and texture, the sight and the smell of the melting butter formed a complex sensual symphony, a hymn to the new morning.

I could not meet Ernest Hemingway. I could not meet Kurt Vonnegut. I could not meet JK Salinger. But I could meet David Sedaris.

As a very special birthday present from my wife. On Thursday, April 7, we drove to Davenport, Iowa, to see and hear him. On the stage he seemed smaller and frailer than I had pictured him. But he was much funnier than I hoped he would be.

After the reading, I joined the long and winding line of one or two hundred autograph hunters. It took him about twenty minutes to start his signing session. He talked and smiled with each and all of us while trying to devour a huge steak. After another 30 minutes it was my turn to tell him a joke.

I decided to introduce him to a Hungarian joke character that portrays a facet of the Hungarian collective soul, the dumb and self-defeating ‘aggressive piglet.

‘ The aggressive piglet falls into a pit.The good fairy is coming along and notices the piglet at the bottom of the pit. She calls: -  Hey Piglet, wait a minute I’ll go and get a ladder!

The aggressive piglet shouts back: – I won’t wait!!!

and another one:

The aggressive piglet goes to the railway station ticket sales and says:

- Give me a railway ticket!

- Where would you like to go?

- None of your damn business!

David seemed to enjoy the piglet, since he mentioned him above his signature (see picture above).

I have no picture with Ernest Hemingway. I have no picture with have no picture with  Kurt Vonnegut. I have no picture with JK Salinger. My wife is a law-abiding lady and she just could not pretend the ubiquitous “No photos, please!” warnings.

My satisfaction could have been complete: I have seen and even talked with the best living American short story author. Except that David Sedaris said on the stage that the best living American short story author was Tobias Wolff…

I could have gone on wondering whether I have just met the best living American short story author or not, had I not taken a firm decision to ignore David’s ranking as less reliable than my own. Upon taking this decision my satisfaction was complete again. Irreversibly, this time.

“pride is an inward directed emotion that exemplifies either a high sense of one’s personal status or ego (i.e., leading to judgments of personality and character) or the specific mostly positive emotion that is a product of praise or independent self-reflection.” (Wikipedia)

Especially Epicureans should be ashamed of it and work hard at getting rid of it as soon as possible since its ugly head indicates an over-inflated ego or a dangerous vulnerability to praise. If independent self-reflection should lead to pride one ought to improve one’s self-reflective skills. Urgently.

I can’t help feeling proud of my friends, though.

It took me over forty years to understand that I don’t understand the correlation between my needs, my desires and the way I satisfy those desires, resulting in stressing myself, my  friends and family, my coworkers and supervisors, clients and suppliers. It took me another five years to read all the relevant books on Epicurean life techniques and happiness studies to work my way out of the jungle and another five years to hone my tools by using them to set people free of their self-defeating beliefs and  unhealthy habits and help them dismantle the walls they build between themselves and their pathway to happiness through congruence and stress-FREEDOM. It took me another year and the invaluable support of my wife to write a wise AND funny book for those who are interested in spending the rest of their lives walking toward their own happiness instead of working for their own or someone else’s greed.

My friends, however, must have been born wise and don’t seem to need the distilled fruits of hard-earned practical wisdom packed in nicely wrapped palatable pieces of advice. They must be champions in analyzing their desires, in satisfying their natural needs through synergistic satisfiers, in keeping their lifestyle and behavior patterns in line with their values and attitudes, serenely threading down their own proven pathways from pain to pleasure, producing their own happiness though congruence and stress-FREEDOM.

I must assume they do all this judging from the absence of their comments on the excerpts of my book that I have been publishing in sequels in my blog. The only topic they mildly reacted to was sequel 15: “How Is It Possible To Find Romantic Love? “

Complete strangers ask me when  will my book be available in print and on kindl, when will I start training and coaching sessions on the Galenian Epicurean Conduct of Life, or at least publicly speak about it. (Which I don’t’ know yet. I still have to take care of my health and the happiness of my family.)

But it’s a relief that my friends are doing well, confidently threading their own pathways toward happiness.( Or what they believe is happiness?)

It’s a shame to feel proud but who could help not being proud of them? (Maybe Epicurus?)

I still sleep one or two hours more than before but that does not disturb anyone and I still have to take imodium occasionally.

I started making my daily walks with my kids again and resumed some of my chores, foremost among them cooking. My wiener schnitzel was highly appreciated even by the most critical members of my family.

I am looking forward to the St Patrick’s Day party at one of our friendly neighbors,  even though I might not want to indulge in my deep reverence for Jameson whiskey. Yet.

At the age of 9 or10 I walked out to my mother’s aunt’s farm from my grandma’s house in the village. It was a walk of about 3 or 4 km along a dirt road and short cuts over sugar beet fields. When I arrived to their open gate I saw a German shepherd bolt from the far end of the yard and dash toward me. I was dumbstruck by surprise and paralyzed by deadly fear as the animal made his killing leap towards me. Time stood still as I gazed at his ice cold eyes with greenish reflections, suspended in the air at the height of my neck, his jaws open, his formidable teeth pointed at my face. As time stood still I was irrefutably convinced that my young life would be disrupted the moment those teeth reached me. And then something inconceivable happened. Like a sack of potatoes dropped from a cart the dog plummeted to the ground howling in pain. My grandma’s sister, her husband and their son were running towards me. Their son, Imi, had reached me first. He leaped between me and his dog, now writhing in pain on the grassy ground. While his mother put her arms around me his father, who could not bend, kneeled down to take a look at the dog. “A bee has stung his upper lip” the old man grumbled as he pulled out the sting. They explained that bees die when they sting. They also said that bees sting only if they feel attacked and that they therefore could not understand why this one single bee sacrificed its life for me. I spent the next few days saving bees that fell into the water in the trough, endlessly grateful. From then on I counted this event as my first re-birthday.

I considered my mother’s cousin, Imi, to be something like a bigger brother. None of us had sisters or brothers and, although nine years older, he spent quite a lot of time with me on weekends during the school year in our town home, where he went to a boarding school, and on their farm during the summer holidays. He taught me, among other things, how to ride a motor bike.

I must have been 13 or 14 as he came to us, proudly showing his new motorbike and asking me to take a ride with him. It was a wine-red and silver 125 ccm Java and I felt honored and excited to be taken to a ride. As he pulled out of the driveway onto the high traffic street something happened to the gearshift and the bike suddenly stopped in the middle of the street, not making it to the opposite side of the street. I saw the white Polski Fiat approach in slow motion and then I saw ourselves from above, from a bird’s eye view of about 3 meters as the car, in very slow motion, hit the bike from behind, the bike sliding ahead and tipping to the left and sliding on its side a few more meters. I saw at the same time Imi slowly fly and gently land on the right side of the road. And I saw myself slowly fly behind the bike and then gently land on the tar, in a sitting position, right in front of the front bumper of the Fiat. The bird’s eye view stopped here and I was wondering how the Fiat managed to stop before hitting and crushing me. This was to be my second re-birth day.

On February the twentieth, 2002 (20/02/2002), I was driving in Hungary from Székesfehérvár back home to Budapest where I lived at the time. It was getting dark and I chose not to turn on the radio but reflect on the business negotiation I conducted with the managers of a Japanese company. The right side of the road was about 2 meters higher than the road and I saw a huge stag take a jump from above towards the middle of the road. Then I saw his enormous mass come in slow motion towards my windshield, that first slowly bent inward and then, still in slow motion, form hundreds of crack lines running in all directions. I knew that this would be the last thing I saw in life and was quite surprised when the slow motion stopped, with a bang on the roof, and the Volvo came to a halt. I was fifty that year and this experience drove it home to me that I should change my life. And that that life of mine was extremely fragile and finite.

After this third re-birthday I had no more mysterious and dramatic near-death experiences. Nevertheless I went on living through moments that conveyed the same message: that something irrevocably ended and something entirely new began.

One of these moments came again as I took off from Dusseldorf on Dec. 13, 2009 heading for America with my two youngest children. My 8 year-old daughter told me that this was the second most important day in her life, after her birthday, and I could not get out of my head the first two lines of an Italian song: “Il tredici dicembre, Santa Lucia , il giorno piu importante, che ci sia.” (‘December 13, Santa Lucia’s day, the most important day that exists.’).

On Feb.18, 2010, as I pronounced my vows to my newly wed wife, I felt again very intensely that something completely new began in my life.

On Nov. 24 I was diagnosed with a rare and mean skin cancer and on Dec.1 they found out that it had metastasized into the sentinel lymph nodes. From that day on I have been celebrating every morning as a new re-birthday. The “celebration” consisted for the last three weeks of enjoying the moments of the absence of pain, or the grayish morning light, especially as some of the side effects of the radiation therapy got worse and worse.

Every day was still a re-birthday, only the party was every day different.

Today’s re-birthday party has something special about it. The sun is shining and I have managed to have two slices of toasted bread without pains and issues. My thankful pores are telling me that this is the beginning of a new life period.

Nobody knows how and when the enemy sneaked in. My allies discovered it and warned me about its presence after the histological examination of the tissues cut out of a sebaceous cell on November 18. The general of the allied forces, Surgeon Dr. Ronald E. Beresky, worked out a strategy  at Dean Med Center-Stoughton Clinic, and brought up his big guns , i.e. his small and sharp scalpels, bistouries and lancets and attacked it frontally. After the battle he sent out his high tech reconnoitering units, the big CT and PET scanners, to make sure that the enemy is completely wiped out.

The time span between the „bad news” {’the pathologists found Merkel Cell Carcinoma cancer cells in your tissues’) and the good news (’neither the blood test, nor the chest x-ray, nor the CT and PET scans show any more cancerous cells in you body’) stretched over 34 days, in other words I had 34 days to think over everything, and especially my priorities.

Out came the “Cancer Patient’s Epicurean Time Management” which I shared with my friends in emails, in my blog;

http://stress-freedom.net/2010/12/cancer-patient%E2%80%99s-epicurean-time-management/

and on Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/notes/stefan-streitferdt/cancer-patients-epicurean-time-management/475002962837

I have just  re-read this posting with post-cancerous eyes and found nothing essential to be changed: the priorities stay as I defined them.

I am aware that just because I have got a bit of a reprieve, I should not think that I have turned a corner.

The other learnings of my reflections and musings are not new. In fact, they they were put down by Epicurus and his friend, Metrodorus, are 2300 years ago:

“It is possible to provide security against other things, but as far as death is concerned, we men all live in a city without walls.”

“We have been born once and cannot be born a second time; for all eternity we shall no longer exist. But you, although you are not in control of tomorrow, are postponing your happiness. Life is wasted by delaying, and each one of us dies without enjoying leisure.”

My dear friends, colleagues, wayfarers, trainers and coaches, trainees and coaches, fellow-mortals all: can you derive any benefit from the booty I made and shared for planning your own lives?

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Between the age of 16 and 26 I was convinced that I would become a brilliant short story writer and stopped to simply and purely enjoy the short stories I was reading. Instead, I started studying the techniques used by the authors.

After having given up this ambition I could just relax and enjoy them again.

About two or three years ago I chanced upon Sedaris’ “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim” in an airport bookstore but the book mysteriously disappeared as soon as I got back to Germany and miraculously reappeared again as I unpacked the cardboard box with my most beloved books in America. My wife and daughter must have seen it on my night stand and heard me chuckle while reading it so they decided to add another volume to my pleasures.

While enjoying every single sentence I remembered DeWitts’s words:

Epicureanism presented two fronts to the world, the one as repellent as the other was attractive. Its discouragement of the political career was repellent to the ambitious, its denial of divine providence to pious orthodoxy, and its hedonism to timorous respectability. Its candor, charity, courtesy, and friendliness were attractive to multitudes of the honest and unambitious folk. (Epicurus and His Philosophy)

…and I felt happy to belong to that multitude:-)