Ironically, one of my favorite characters in the Pratchett books is Death. Pratchett has made Death a character, with the grim reaper appearance you’d expect, who has the job of ending people’s lives. Sometimes Death is central to the novel, other times he has a cameo part, ending the lives of ancillary characters. It’s very like Terry Pratchett to keep mortality, personified as Death, in the picture. These fantasy novels are all about the real world.

During my own real life, Death’s role, and my view of death, has changed. Sometimes, when Death has claimed someone close to me, the void left behind has consumed my world. Sometimes just imagining the death of someone close has consumed me with grief. Am I a glutton for punishment, or just trying to get used to the idea of something I know is inevitable?

As a teenager and young adult, it was terribly hard to think of dying of old age. I thought of death quite often, though. What with the threat of nuclear holocaust, and the usual tragedies of car accidents and such, living to old age seemed unlikely, even though I was surrounded by evidence that my odds of survival were good.

And yet, I made it. I’m officially mid-life, with decades of not dying under my belt. Sure, Death could be around the next corner of my commute, or lurking in some pre-cancerous cells I don’t know about, but odds are low. It’s time to stop thinking about Death as something suddenly tragic that happens to me, or exceedingly sad that happens to other people. Death is not an imaginary character. Death is real, and some day in the years ahead, it will be My Turn.

My Turn — isn’t that scary? Well, yes. But, no. Odds are I have as much time left as I have already had as an adult. That’s a lot of time. Nothing to be scared about. But it certainly does make me want to be a lot more intentional about how I use the time I have left.

Thanks for spending some of the time you have left, here with me.

You see, in Real Life, I thought I knew how to mentally “roll with the punches.” I thought I had the “stay loose” flexibility that Wayne Dyer wrote about recently. I knew all the aphorisms: “And this too shall pass.” “The only thing constant is change.” “Here and now, boys.” — all those sayings that remind you to live in the moment, and go with the flow. But this year I didn’t feel calm or centered or relaxed. I felt beat up.

Now, t’ai chi has a lot of energy transfer, transferring your opponent’s energy away from their intended target — you. I didn’t take t’ai chi for the martial arts part, though. I was more interested in the mental imagery, the form, the energy flow, the kata. But one Saturday morning, I showed up at the advanced class, which was a mixture of karate and t’ai chi. As we reviewed some redirection techniques, the instructor had this to say:

Don’t let an opponent get to your core. If they do, it’s very hard to recover.

Amazing. I realized that with the work stress I’d had this year, I’d done just that. I’d let my opponent shake my core, and I was struggling trying to recover. If I thought of the circumstances causing the stress as dealing with an opponent, rather than just dealing with a situation, I could bring t’ai chi into play. I could defend my core.

It improved the work situation, almost immediately. The environment wasn’t much different, but my attitude changed, and as we all know, that’s more than half the battle. Later, when a new drama erupted on the home front, I felt better prepared to cope.

So if you ever get the opportunity to take t’ai chi, I recommend it. The physicality is terrific. But the mental part — that may be just the survival tool you need, when Real Life mugs you.

So what’s important about foreign policy? What are the first principles?

1. Defend the nation. It’s your job. No one else will do it for you. So figure out how to do it smarter, cheaper, with more applied creativity, fewer casualties, and greater success. That’s the American Way.
2. Don’t go it alone. You have friends in the world. Listen to them. Talk to them. Friends share information. Friends don’t let friends make stupid mistakes.
3. Don’t be naive. Violence isn’t going away. Bad guys are out there. It’s fine to trust people, but not because “it’s the right thing to do” — they have to earn it. Nor should you distrust entire populations. That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy if there ever was one.
4. Find a way to deal with immigrant workers — from overseas or from across the border. Balance the needs for national security and economic vitality. The status quo is not acceptable. Just ask the folks who live in Arizona or California.
5. Be smart about aid money. Aid money is not an entitlement to allegiance. Aid dollars are anonymous and remote, just like drones and cruise missiles. Best case: give aid to your friends. Money isn’t likely to make friends — at least not the right kind of friends. Just ask a Hollywood has-been.
6. Keep making progress in energy independence. Peace in the Middle East is a fine goal and it’s important that we stay engaged in the peace process. (See point #2) However, energy independence is under our control, and therefore more likely to be successful.

Thanks for reading. And may whomever we vote for, be the best ones we could have chosen, for whatever circumstances and issues they face.

1. Pay the bills. Don’t make a big question about whether we’re going to do it. That creates a climate of uncertainty, and anyone who has experienced uncertainty about their own job security will tell you that uncertainty is going to keep money out of circulation.
2. If an expense has an end date, have the renewal debate. (And no, words like “class warfare” and “cocaine addicts” don’t count as debate.) Consider the ROI on those tax dollars.
   • Would the money be better spent to pay down some debt? Paying down debt has an ROI when measured over time — that’s why you pay down the highest interest rate loans first — and the debt itself has an opportunity cost.
   • Is there a way to spend the money that would create more income, or reduce other expenditures?
   • What’s the ROI for discontinuing the program? Remember, discontinuing it increases uncertainty for investors, loses the program’s ROI, and puts program’s employees out of work. All that is negative ROI.
3. Whether you believe government is too big, or think government doesn’t do enough to help, make a financial ROI case for whatever change you want to make. Find the people who can articulate how that ROI would work for that program and listen to them. Can they quantify the risk and the expense, in a way that makes sense?
   • Military expenditures? Look at ROIs in efficiency as well as effectiveness.
   • Social programs? Look at health care costs, incarceration expenses, earnings potentials.
   • New technology programs? Look at catalysts for growth in existing businesses aside from the implementers.
4. Don’t be afraid to regulate the financial companies – not just the banks – to protect the innocent or the naive. But don’t try to regulate risk out of the system. Some financial instruments are made for risk takers. Slap the equivalent of the surgeon general’s warning on those types of investments, and let the risk-takers have at it.
5. Don’t bail the risk-takers out if they lose. That’s what risk is all about. If you want the consumers to have faith in the system, then it needs to be allowed to function. Risk-takers get potential for high rewards. Conservative investors get their security. Balanced portfolios benefit from both.
6. Be a good steward for Social Security. Replacing Social Security with 401Ks may have sounded like a good idea once, but anyone paying attention knows that (a) 401Ks are volatile, and (b) naive, gullible, and/or short-sighted people are quite capable of making poor 401K choices. These are not risk-takers. These are people who entrusted (willingly or not) some or all of their retirement savings to the government.

Just imagine, a government that manages our tax dollars and FICA retirement funds in an atmosphere of confidence, prudence, and informed decision-making. Wouldn’t that be something to vote for?

With that principle in mind, elected party officials would resolve to:

• Support programs and policies that prevent the causes for divorce. For example, including educating older adolescents on how to improve their odds of a successful marriage, e.g. marry later in life, so that you know yourself better; marry after you know the other person better; what kinds of things are most important to know about yourself and your potential spouse; what kinds of problems a married couple is likely to face and how they can be dealt with. Parents may opt their children out of this education with a waiver, similar to the mandated vaccine waiver.
• Support programs and policies that prevent the need for abortions. For example, require 40 or more hours of sex education to all adolescents, that includes conception, abstinence, contraception, pregnancy, abortion, adoption, and infant care. Parents may waive their children from some or all of the coursework, with a mandatory parental confirmation form granting explicit consent or waiver for each of the topics covered in the course except for conception, pregnancy and infant care.
• Maintain and improve domestic and international adoption laws, programs, and policies, for the benefit of the children, adoptive parents, and birth mothers. As an example, support programs and policies to aid pregnant women planning to give their child to adoptive parents. Women with unplanned pregnancies need practical help.

Elected party members would not be required to support gay marriage, or abortion, but would agree to abstain from legislating against either:

• Make no law, vote for no law, nor confirm any judge that would deny the right to marriage between two consenting adults. To deny access to that contract to a group of citizens based on the sex of their life partner weakens that subset of society.
• Make no law, and vote for no law, nor confirm any judge that would deny the right to an abortion, if that is determined to be the best for the woman by the woman and her doctor. The object is to prevent the need for abortion, without interfering in the time-sensitive, extremely private procedure.

This is a critical plank for me. I value the family, and individual rights, far too highly to turn a blind eye on when a candidate doesn’t share these views. As a result, I have usually voted for Democrats. But as future planks will show, few Democrats would subscribe to my ideal party platform.