Hemingway came back to my mind recently with this great David Brooks editorial in the New York Times. Even if you’re not into Hemingway or even literature, I still recommend reading it.

I didn’t really understand Hemingway until I started crossing into my forties. By then I’d been writing professionally for many years, which helped, but I also needed a perspective that for me only came in the opening salvos of middle age.

Like many of us, I grew up not having a whole hell of a lot, and so in my younger days I thought that the key to happiness was having it all. When that didn’t pan out, I suspected that the key to happiness was not having anything: freedom in low overhead, divest of attachment, the power of having nothing to lose. Strangely enough, both routes gave me pretty much the same mix of bad days and good days. It was almost as if what I had – or didn’t have – didn’t greatly matter to the universe at large.

Strange that.
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