ABSTRACT. The picture of solo pulsars as usually presented is that they are born following a supernova explosion, coincident with the formation of a rapidly spinning neutron star. They emit astonishingly regular pulses of radiation whose periods gradually lengthen over time scales of one to ten million years, taken usually as a pulsar lifetime. The present work advances a substantially different picture than the above. In what follows, a model is presented which makes plausible an alternative view of pulsars which addresses a number of previously puzzling questions. In this new view, a neutron star typically goes through three stages. In the beginning, just after its formation, the magnetic field of the rapidly spinning neutron star tumbles erratically. Only later, on a time scale << 10 yrs., the tumbling motion gives way to pulsar behavior, an accurate limit cycle behavior whose period is given simply as proportional to the moment of inertia divided by the conserved angular momentum. In a time << 10 yrs. the pulsar dies, as the magnetic axis aligns itself with the rotation axis, a stable fixed point in the parameter space of the model. There are thus three time scales: the pulsar period, typically of the order of one second, an intermediate time determined principally by mechanical (or viscous) damping, and the third the damping time of the pulsar period, as angular momentum is radiated away over a million years or more.