To Ease the Passing of Time

That’s what Leonard Cohen answered when he was asked how difficult it was for him to write a song. The life of a songwriter and a performer may seem glamorous and exciting, but it’s not an easy life. It takes a lot of time, patience and work to put together songs and music; and then you have to pack your suitcase and go on a tour around the world to perform for your fans. In an interview, Cohen talked about how he had to struggle with depression and anxiety problems all of his life. To fight his stage fright, he was known to recite Latin chants with his backing singers and drink whiskey. One of his agents stole the rights for some of his most famous songs. That forced him to work for a living until he was in his eighties. Even if it was a blessing for us because he wrote songs that he would not have written otherwise, it must not have always been easy for him. But compared with what others have to go through, Leonard Cohen considered that he had a pretty good life.

I could say the same thing about myself. Apart from a mysterious pain behind my eyes that has never left me ever since I was seven or eight years old, a struggle against alcoholism that lasted almost one third of my life, and an anxious personality, I must say that I’ve had a pretty good life too. It could have been a lot worse. I loved the work that I did as a French teacher for forty years even though I sometimes felt dizzy and thought I was going to faint during my last afternoon class. I found friendship and love, laughed, played, and danced a lot. I traveled, read books, listened to all kinds of songs and music (including Leonard Cohen’s) that brought beauty and comfort to my soul. If I compare my life with what a lot of people have to go through in this world  just to stay alive, I consider myself lucky, very lucky.

Some people will argue that it’s not only luck, that we are ultimately the artisans of our own destiny and happiness. In a way it’s true. If I had not stopped drinking twenty eight years ago, I would probably be dead, completey crazy or very sick by now. But when your country is used as a battle ground by foreign powers to promote their ideologies and their financial interests, or if you are ruled by a cruel and despotic dictator who looks only after himself and is willing to sell his people and their labour to the one who will make him the best offer, you may end up in a dungeon having your nails pulled out, or in a crowded raft in the middle of the Mediterranean sea hoping to be rescued, or separated from your children at the border and sent back to your country to be killed.

I realize that a lot of what made my life so easy was put in place by those who came before me. Our political, economic, social and judicial systems are not perfect and need to be improved, nobody will deny that, but they are a guaranty that some sort of stability, social order, justice and well being will prevail. My father worked in a paper mill. It didn’t cost him a fortune to send me to school. It would have been a lot different if we had lived in the United States. At the age of 45 he had his first heart attack; he had a stroke nine years later and spent the last three years of his life in a wheelchair mute and paralyzed. He was well taken care of by our universal health system and we didn’t lose our house because of medical bills. It wasn’t too hard for me to find a job. My salary was always, directly or indirectly, paid by the federal government. I never worked too hard, I was able to buy a house, and now that I'm retired, thanks to Maria's wise management, we have a sufficient income to live a comfortable life.

Even if I vote at all elections, I was never actively involved in politics. I think that the way we alternate between the right and the left in this country is a good way to create and distribute wealth and to govern in the best interest of the individuals and society in general. I hear a lot of people criticize our Prime Minister: the English say he’s too French and the French say he’s too English, the Westerners say he doesn’t care enough about them and the Easterners say the same thing about themselves, the oil industry says he’s too much for the environment and worries needlessly about climate changes that don’t really exist while the environmentalists accuse him of favoring the financial interests of the oil companies at the expense of the environment.

To go back to Leonard Cohen’s quote and stretch it a little bit, we could say that life is very difficult in this country that our politicians are corrupt and selfish and that there is a lot of injustice, corruption and poverty but compared to what.