End of Preschool (revised to include more graveside musings)

Starting next week, we have full school weeks for the first time since September. It'll be a relief to actually be able to teach something. It's hard to keep any kind of focus when you're constantly interrupted, so although I like the time off, I'm ready to get going.

I went to a funeral today for someone I never met, the father of a colleague. It was truly interesting. He sounds like the coolest guy ever and I'm sorry I never met him (not that there's any reason I would have). This is the second time I've had this experience. The first was a friend's father who died much younger, so the funeral was much bigger because most of his friends and relatives were still alive. This is not so much the case with a 97-year-old. When you go to a funeral of someone you know, you think about the person who died. When you don't know the person, you start thinking about yourself.

Oh man, I really need to buy a burial plot.

This place is pretty nice. But there are a lot of dead people here.

I wonder where else you could get buried.

Who'd come to my funeral?

I need to expand my circle of friends so more people would come.

No, that's ridiculous. Why do I care who comes?

Oh man, I'm going to die.

And of course, the big question...

What would they say about me?

Sometimes I find it hard to draw a distinction in my motivations between doing stuff because it's the right thing to do and it'll make someone else feel good, and doing it so people will like me, think well of me. I really tried to give that stuff up long ago, and have been fortunate to find that in many cases if you do the former, the latter will follow. But I don't want to overly trust my motivation because it seems easy to slip into doing unselfish things for selfish reasons.

So I guess I'd like to hope that lots of people will come and say lots of nice things about me, but I think it's better if I kind of don't care. Being a good person is more important than being well-liked in the larger scheme of things, and you can't really control how anyone feels about you anyway. And if you don't believe that, how good are you a controlling your own feelings about other people?