Churnings..............................

      For all his negativity about old folk, Aristotle did say that "education is the best provision for the journey to old age," and part of what he meant is that acquiring good tools for thinking - and thinking philosophically - prepares us for one of the principal callings of an authentic old age:  pondering the big questions.
      I need to take a step back when considering such questions.  Sometimes I think my basic philosophical impulses, those "what's it all about?" churnings in my gut, were ruined by studying academic philosophy.  Too often I became preoccupied with the heady, abstruse concepts of the great thinkers and lost that sense of wonder that made me read them in the first place.  I need to remind myself that to head off in the direction of philosophy, a person really only needs the basic intuition that the unexamined life doesn't quite cut it for him.

-Daniel Klein,  Travels with Epicurus:  A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life