preparing life

Life is too often treated as a sequence of preparations for whatever may or may not come next. Preschool prepares you for kindergarten, which prepares you for elementary school. Elementary school leads, naturally, to middle school, where teachers attempt to intimidate you into shape for high school. High school grooms you for college, which (depending on which fork in the road you choose to take) will prepare you for either graduate school or the inevitable “real world.” Your career in the real world sets everything in place for retirement, which prepares you for... what, death?

I would like to do things for the joy of doing them, not for the purpose of being prepared. I am not a boy scout, after all.