spirituality

Things Not Understood

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Let’s get an easy one out of the way: Why does anyone support Donald Trump as president of this country? When talking with supporters, I usually begin with his 34 felony convictions in a porn star hush money case. Those are CONVICTIONS* by a citizen jury where Trump’s defense lawyers lost their case. They also lost a civil case for sexual abuse and defamation again, in a jury trial. He also admitted in 2016 to sexually assaulting women, saying “I don’t even wait. They let you do it.” Trump-owned companies have also filed for bankruptcy 6 times. Trump has married three women, divorced two and had a child with a fourth. These are all public, undisputed facts. There is also a trove of his sayings and writings where he insults anyone who doesn’t agree with him using slurs and words most of us would never use. When this summary is over, I ask my listener why they support him, especially curious for the answer from religious friends. The response? If there is anything but the shrug of a shoulder, it is: “Yeah, but what about Biden? Clinton?”

And so it goes.

Most of the world, the real world, has an innate duality un-understandable. The best way to describe it is by using the words “Macro” and “Micro”. Macro refers to The Big Picture, The Theory, while Micro refers to the small picture, the details. It’s easy to see this duality in the study of Economics: Macro Theory affects the whole world, Micro details are how we, as individuals navigate our financial lives. But duality is everywhere. In physics, we have the Macro, Classic Laws of Physics where planets roam and humans shoot rockets into space. But then there is the Micro, Quantum Mechanics world where everything disobeys the Classic Laws and things so small we can’t see them do whatever the hell they want. Better minds than mine—and probably yours—have tried to “unite” Classic Laws and Quantum Mechanics for centuries. Einstein, himself called some of the quantum world “Spooky action at a distance” and could not make it fit his General Theory.

And so it goes.

From personal observation the duality of life exists in all of us and runs our lives. Think about your Macro resolution to exercise more and then your Micro failure to get up the next morning. Getting Macro theory into a Micro life is difficult, but why? It is more obvious with religion. How many of us go to worship on Macro Sunday, then swear, lie, cheat, and disrespect others the rest of the week? In fact, religion is probably the hardest place to make the connection between Macro aspirations and Micro responsibilities. Who really wants to live a minute-by-minute, truly religious life?

And before anyone takes offense, this isn’t about you. It is a Macro Essay about how we all compromise Macro Intentions for Micro Utility. Every Day. It is the nature of us all. Period. Much like the saying often mentioned when trying to understand life: “From the minute you are born, you start to die.”** WTF.

One good way to help ourselves get through all this is to think. Think about it.

Yeah, right. Who has time for that, these days.

And so it goes…

*Please note the difference between being Indicted and being Convicted. Almost anyone can be indicted. Convicted? Harder.

**Ai research cannot say who uttered this statement first, but they give some suspects: Seneca (a Roman Philosopher), Manillus (a Roman Poet), and Eleanor Roosevelt, who used it to emphasize living life to the fullest. Common sense makes one wonder why Eleanor, who lived centuries after both Romans, was included in the list? Damn that DEI.

The Miracle of Medicine, the Mind, and Youth

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There was a time when mornings were full of life, full of energy, when running was first before breakfast, and life got better with each mile. It was a blissfully ignorant time of invulnerability and unlimited happiness, with no doctors’ threats or tests informing dietary and sleeping habits. Only God knows what could have been different to prevent The Calamities of 2023…if anything at all. Hopefully, if the medical science establishment has any sense, they will be searching for way to send patients back to the good, old, days.

Yeah. Right. In the meantime, age takes us by the hand and steers us into physical conditions with strange names and mortal consequences. Science is really good at learning about and naming these conditions but our success at eliminating them has been mixed. How long have we been donating to cancer—as well as other disease—fund raisers? There was a cancer program in the 1960’s involving chocolate bars. I supported it with an allowance big enough to buy one bar a week.

The end result of medical research at this point in my lifetime is we’ve made progress at longevity. Per Ai, my birth year of 1952 has an average life expectancy of 68.6 for males in the United States. A male born in 2025 can hope for nearly 80 years. Ai is quick to point out sex, country of origin, and income can make huge differences, both plus and minus. Ask Ai yourself for more details but—spoiler alert—America does not have the longest life expectancy. We don’t even make the top 5. Monaco is number 1? Maybe wealth is the most important factor?

But as we age, we’re finding it harder and harder to be happy about aging. Why isn’t the aging “experience” making us happier? Is it really making us wiser? We all know why aging makes us unhappy, read the first paragraph of this post. But is there anything we can do about it?

A couple of things could be done. First, look for and appreciate the humor in life. It’s there but gets lost in the mail, so to speak. The earliest humor is the simple fact the day we are born we start to die. Right then and there the clock starts and there is no stopping it. Cruel or funny? Make your choice carefully, it matters. I recently filled out a health questionnaire asking me: “Do you sometimes forget things?” I can’t remember if I even answered. Another plus for aging is streaming services for computers, laptops, phones, and televisions. You can travel world from your chair or hospital bed, watching period dramas, slapstick comedy, relevant medical shows, and take enough on-line courses to become your own Doctor…as long as your faculties are intact.

And there is it: intact faculties. Most of us wouldn’t mind living to 100 or more if we can still, read, write, walk, and wipe ourselves, right? So, are the medical miracles helping us live longer helping us know we are living longer? You’ll never know until you get there, wherever “there’ is.

One thing we should all change our mind on, is death, especially if the Near Dead Expericencers (NDE) are to be believed. Nearly all NDE people, upon their return from death, report a heaven much too nice for most of us. Many also report not wanting to come back to life, and wondering why they did.  Can we expect the same at our own permanent death? If so, why worry? And why stigmatize suicide and outlaw assisted suicide and euthanasia?

It’s Monday so the post took a somber turn, or did it? One thing that makes a difference in and about life is how you view it, how you perceive it, and how you process it. And what you should always consider is there is no other choice than what happens on the macro level: you will die.

Will you suffer cognitive decline in old age? Not if you die young. One NDE describes his experience by comparing his life to a laptop computer. There is a memory on the old laptop you can transfer to a new laptop, and then you can discard the old and recycle it. That may sound matrixy (sic) but if it helps… embrace it. And don’t forget to keep some empty thumb drives* around, just in case.

Next post we’ll talk about Aliens and how they affect modern life through movies, plays, television, and Oscar voting.

*Memory sticks, or whatever else they are called these days.

A Little Big Mistake or A Big Little Mistake?

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I made one of those, yesterday. A huge one or as our leader likes to say a “Yuuugee one.”

To be honest for you, it was an accident of intellectual gravity: I fell into the mistake while looking somewhere else, somewhere mundane.

The internet is a wonderful/crappy place, depending on what you’re looking at or for or…

See? It happened again, And exactly the same way: how can one thing be more than one thing or less than one thing, and not just ONE THING.

Walmart would not accept my credit cards online so I (logically) assumed an answer to the simple question “why?” could be found in the spider web/internet/darkweb world. On the Network. In the ether. Floating in space. Wherever it is answers live. My local Walmart had an object I wanted so I placed it in the cart and proceeded to check out…four different times. Four different credit cards were used, and each time Walmart immediately accepted the order, accepted the payment, gave an order date, listed pick up instructions, and then cancelled the order saying it “exceeded stock limits”***. All within minutes of each other. Maybe Ai was practicing, working out, building up its circular processing muscles? The first three times I went back and confirmed the number “in stock” at the store before repeating the process. As would any intelligent individual, the frustration ended at four tries. (Oh, you would have stopped at two? Right.)

Curiosity not only kills the cat but routinely kills hours of my life as once a mind is opened to the “wonderful/crappy” internet there is no anticipating where said mind will end up.

Mine ended up mired in the swirling, exciting, puzzling, enigmatic world of Quantum Mechanics (QM). This sub-atomic Rubik’s Cube of a land has snared my prying synapsis’ more than once, but this particular trap was set and tripped by the clickiest click bait of all time: “How to understand Quantum Mechanics in 5 Minutes.”

See? Again. Big/Little Mistake. You’re making one, now, by reading further. (PS NOT “farther”. Look it up.) Back to the article: was it click bait just to make me look or was it real, someone really explaining QM in 5 minutes? I was now entangled (remember that word from previous QM posts?) in the perfect QM Schrodinger’s Cat dilemma. Do I look or not? If I did would there be a truth or a scam? Enlightenment or disillusion? Knowing what little I already know about QM, (the “little”: NO ONE understands it), why was the decision a hard one to make? What was pulling me closer and closer to the event horizon of a clicked link?

Sadly, this post is about how we exist in macro and micro worlds (MM Universe? I like it.) I needed help with a macro Walmart Card issue and stumbled into the unsolvable micro world of the small and mysterious. Bet Andy Griffiths or John Wayne or John Wick or Liam Neeson never have this problem, at least the guys still alive, anyway, a clause added to make the preceding verb tense correct. Macro or Micro?

And it brings to mind another duplicitous word that lives dual lives (lives and lives, get it?) in the MM Universe: Faith. Every scientist/physicist worth his salt is aware of QM. But since it is so small, and so hard to observe and quantify, do the men of science have faith in what they see? What they think? What they theorize and postulate? Or do they just believe without proof?

Amazing. All this in one day. Thanks for coming along for the ride, but it’s time for a macro nap. In a few hours neurons will be calmed and all will be right with the MM world, again. Have faith.

Micro world? See ya next time and say hi to the Ai bots.

***I drove to Walmart and purchased the item earlier today and posted a strongly worded Macro letter to Walmart.

Con Temp Late

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Words are fascinating. How did they come to be? Who decided red meant red? Blue, blue? What was the first word ever uttered? “F$%^” when he/she/them stubbed his/her/them’s toe on a rock? Were his/her/them’s companions mortified at the vulgarity? How would they express it? Club to the head? A new, different word?

Would language and communication end if we all spoke a different language? Because we do, but have just enough understanding of basics to function, and most of those understandings are non-verbal: a smile, laughter, crying, actual physical, Three Stooges-violence. (Why, I otta..soytenly.)

The make up of words is fun to talk about. take the title word: Contemplate. An alien with limited knowledge would break the word down like the title. The noun version of Con (Discussion on “parts of speech” will follow after masters degree is finished) means against, Temp means not permanent, and Plate is something we use to eat our food. So the word means we are temporarily against eating off dinnerware? We are against eating off temporary plates?

Another option would be Con tem plate. We are against tem plates? Not another word.

Contemplate has survived attacks like this for centuries and held on to its accepted meaning: “think profoundly and at length”. But, sadly, in this time-sensitive world we live in the only people who have time to contemplate are the elderly, especially those inexorably (please look it up for its exact meaning) approaching senility. It’s all part of the “aged getting wiser” shtick, a myth which does not take into account bitterness, regret, and–worst of all–reminiscing. They take up so much time.

It’s easy to understand the lack of contemplation in youth, they don’t know shit, but why is contemplation not the norm for the engaged? The unemployed? Those inclined to addiction of any sort? And what about psychopaths? Actually, the latter may be excellent contamplators(sic), just in a twisted, unacceptable way.

It stands to reason(Stands? To reasons? Be right back googling. You should, too.) contemplation must be an everyday act, unless a barking dog is running after you. Thinking profoundly before we make make major decisions in life should be the norm. Sadly, my own experience and those of many divorced friends, shows thinking is done, but “profound thinking”? Not so much. (Fact from the infamous internet: 41% of first marriages end in divorce, 60% of second marriages end in divorce, and (bless their hearts!) 73% of third marriages end in divorce.) Don’t ask me…

Politics are where contemplation would be best practiced. All our politicians never seem to contemplate. Ask them a question and you get an immediate answer, either from memory, note binders, or teleprompters. (Are they Pre-contemplators?) Makes no sense, but the stupidest part is we, as voters, accept it.

Forgive me, it’s a beautiful morning and I made the mistake of trying to write something readable, here, before enjoying the sunshine. Should have thought more profoundly…

Whoa…really?

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Night time is a tough time for old people. In the darkness and quiet times we have plenty of opportunity to think. And what do we think about? Hopefully, you’ve read enough to know. It is a running review of the past, present, and future of life, complete with an inner dialogue between two parts of the same brain: a reasonable, intelligent part, and a strange little voice that won’t shut up.

But I was surprised the other night when the little inside voice calmly said this to the rest of me :

“I am ready for death. When it happens I’ll welcome it.”

The inside voice is the mouth in your head that thinks and talks about things your brain tries to keep you from thinking about. The usual conversation for me involves food. My brain says “you’ve had enough, stop eating”, while the inside voice says “man that Klondike Bar was good, lets have another.”

There isn’t a winner in debates between the brain and the inside voice..they tend to reach an agreement, a settlement, a compromise, and life goes on. Sometimes I get the extra Klondike Bar, sometimes I don’t.

So on that fateful night, as I lay awake in the dark thinking of all life’s complexities, my inside voice blurted out the statement noted above.

I sat up in bed and bed and said loudly: “Whoa. Really?”

Yeah. That’s exactly what happened. My brain and inside voice agreed on something and I was the last to know. I was surprised but felt a relief, a peacefulness new to my life. I liked it.

In the light of morning I recalled the night’s events and noted the relief, the peacefulness still filled my body with…well, peace.

Its not easy to comprehend the billions who have died before us, or the billions who will probably die after us, but there is some comfort in knowing they exist. But as someone once said to me: “There’s the past, there’s the present, and there’s the future. Live where your feet are.”

Which reminds me I need new shoes. Slip-ons. No laces.