High School Public Speaking Memory, Today's Early Morning Plans

 I remember, looking back on my high school times at Nova, how one of my female blonde classmates one day suddenly "saw the light" and underwent a speedy transformation into a glib, smooth public speaker.  She even got on the closed circuit school television and delivered a five-minute monologue to the school about how good and easy public speaking was, and that folks like little-old "almost subhuman" me had no excuses for not dazzling the world with my oratory skills.  A little later on ,we were introduced by a mutual friend, on whom she definitely had her eyes set.  I smiled and tried to look and sound nice, but she only came across as a rejecting snob who was fending me off...not that I was even remotely interested in her on the slightest level.  I could have tactfully (or brutally) put her in her proper place by interjecting that good speaking is only part of the equation, and that good listening skills are at least equally as important as well .  You can either esteem (or insult) your counterpart based on your attitude toward them as people, hopefully encouraging them in the process. That one speech I heard was special in one way: afterwards, and I could have brought this up to her, I couldn't think of a single section within the presentation that was of any use.  Oh well, I dealt with the snub in a dignified manner by henceforth avoiding her like the plague...I could see that she was grooming herself to be a finger-pointer later in life...probably launched into tr  ashing me soon after our greeting. So I arose at 3:30, brewed coffee, ran in place, and wrote this article. It's now a little past 5 and the day (March 8) lies ahead (we 'lept' ahead into Daylight Savings Time).  I'm still frustrated by my lack of endurance when it comes to going on modest walks. I want to continue hearing and implementing Jim Rohn YouTube podcasts, read a flawed fantasy novel by Josh Khan and study foreign languages.  And, now that I have that connecting cord, do some journal writing on my wonderful oldAlpha Smart processor before I nod off into an afternoon nap..

Support Groups, Fight Club and Grief

When I was nine, I was going to a brand-new public school: Nova Blanche Forman Elementary School, known then more commonly and simply as Nova Elementary.  Over time I made a few friends out there in Davie, cowboy country in south Florida.  One day a few of us got together and informally established our own fight club, transforming into a sport and ritual an activity usually reserved for bullies and angry kids.  Surprisingly, it lasted longer than you might think, although with my ribs poking through my chest...making me look like a concentration camp survivor...I quickly got tired of the good-natured blows that naturally would come my way.  So I totally got the meaning behind the concept of an adult fight club, presented with such force in that 1999 same-titled movie. My son Will revealed, though, that this movie went down into a rabbit hole of plot twists and deeper meaning, so one evening I began to watch it...from the beginning.  Presented in the first person, the narrator...played by Edward Norton...is suffering from extreme insomnia stemming from his depression about his mundane, boring life.  He hits upon the strategy of participating in support groups to cure his insomnia, even though he usually doesn't have any connection with the groups' themes.  So my exposure to support groups, along with the way they go around in a circle during discussion time with the members spilling their hearts out, began in full earnest with this movie.  Earlier this evening I attended a "grief care" support group presented at a local church...Melissa suggested it.  I'm not sure what I see myself getting from it, but there I am, within this group.  We're committed to anonymity about the people in it as well as the specific stories told. Had I still been working and not retired like I did, I'd have the perfect excuse for avoiding it...I just DON'T LIKE support groups.  Earlier I mentioned that Will was the one who told me about the movie Fight Club: his recent passing is the core reason behind this support group having me "in" it.  Like the protagonist Jake Epping in Stephen King's wonderful novel 11/22/63, I am not a crying man by nature...although the tears are often simmering just under the surface.  I just never thought of life as being endless: it's mortal, with our life spans on Earth bracketed between the year of our birth and that of our deaths.  This mortal physical body that goes by the name William "Bill" "Billy" Irwin belongs to the life span begun in 1956, and the end year has yet to reveal itself.  I am dead to the year 1856, and most likely won't extend to the year 2200 as well (unless Putin's dubious immortality vaccine comes to the rescue).  I'm also dead to wherever my body isn't...I'm looking out the window and my life isn't there: it's here, seated at this keyboard writing this.  The HERE AND NOW, in essence, defines me in a subjective sense and cannot be quantified by physical science in any objective manner. My eventual experience of dying will, of necessity, be conceptually very different from what others experience about my death from their viewpoints.  It's a great quandary, this gulf between subjective awareness and objective observation, and since time marches on without regard to how I feel about anything, I might as well relax and entertain a sense of inner peace about it all, tedious support group or not.  Either I'll survive others or they'll survive me...

Time Takes on Urgency During Aging

As I age, now into retirement for seven-plus months, my changing perception of the passage of time is causing me to reevaluate how best to spend it.  For one, with me it no longer seems that the future is as vast and wide open as it was during my youth...that's being pretty realistic, I think.  You can be pretty healthy...even athletic in your "golden" years, as Paul, an acquaintance in his 80's, demonstrated, and then quickly succumb to an aggressive cancer, organ failure or other ailment.  After my open-heart surgery four years ago, I recovered to the level of being once again able to do Parkrun 5Ks.  On one such run the following year, Paul and I found ourselves running side-by-side, and he revealed he had run many marathons in his past. He seemed very fit and at the close of our little talk, he then sped off and finished the 5K well ahead of me.  I hadn't seen Paul in a long time and just recently discovered that he had died this past February from pancreatic cancer.  Very sad, but that's a common part of being a senior: you're going along just fine, with what seems like an open future stretching out before you...and then, poof!, just like that, you're gone.  Well, that's one rapidly shifting perception of time that's recently affected me.  The other is my increased sensitivity to how, with each new day, I have things I want to do and how so-called "urgencies" that crop up tend to crowd them out, making me feel selfish and guilty should I assert myself and carve out my own time for them.  This also has to do with my sense that I don't have forever in this world to pursue my own interests and goals in spite of how well I physically feel or what encouraging words my doctors say...I'm developing my own personal sense of urgency regarding these things...

Happy Hump Day of the Year

If Wednesday can be called "hump day" for the week that starts on Sunday and ends Saturday, then July 2nd can likewise be termed "hump day" for the year...that is, for non-leap years.  For exactly 182 days precede today and 182 are to come in 2025.  This morning I was watching the Weather Channel and the good meteorologists sitting around on the curved blue couch, apparently with nothing better to do, posed this question to the viewing audience: what is your favorite "half" of the year, January through June or July through December?  The poll's answer was that more thought July through December is better...I wonder, though, what the response would be if the question was posed at the beginning of January! For if you're standing smack in the middle of a calendar year, then one half is what you've just lived through and the other is right in front of you, about to happen.  So I suppose the responses that most folks gave...at least those who watch the Weather Channel in the morning...showed that they are generally optimistic about the future, that the next six months will be better than the previous six.  As for me, I am personally so much bound to focusing on each single day as it comes that I don't allow myself to get too hung up on "favorite" stretches of time.  I can find good and bad in every month and season I've lived through so far, and I'm guessing that that's probably going to continue.  This July, though, is considerably more trying for Melissa and me than in the past because our dear son Will passed away last year on the 18th...but that wasn't not July's fault, and I'm looking forward to good times and experiences on this early side of the "hump" in 2025... 

Biden's Cancer, and Surviving While Aging

It's been announced that former president Joe Biden has just been diagnosed with stage four prostate cancer, metastatic and into his bones, after an examination revealed a growth in his prostate.  This is bad news, of course, but it seems that his cancer may be effectively treated with hormone therapy.  Apparently, Biden did not have the advantage of a PSA blood test to forewarn anyone of the possibility of malignancy...I've even read that beyond a certain age, medical authorities often didn't even encourage patients to get one.  I'm a cancer survivor as is Melissa, and her sister is undergoing some serious struggles with her own.  Growing older has some really good aspects to it, but keeping your health is a big, top priority and that can become an adventure, to say the least.  And as you age you're bound to see yourself as a survivor, not only of the different physical afflictions you've had to overcome to get to where you are, but also over those close to you who have already passed from this world into death.  I look at the calendar and sometimes it's hard to fathom that we're in the year 2025.  Yet time marches on, and why not.  Right now my record has my birth year, followed by a hyphen...followed by a blank.  On some mysterious, unknown day that blank will change to a numbered year, but I won't be around to notice...

Podcaster's Time Management Strategy

I've written in the past about Rob Dial's Mindset Mentor podcast, and the various topics he's presented regarding personal development.  Sometimes he's on point and sometimes not...and I'm finding more and more that he's repeating the same things that I've heard in the past.  That last thing is something I would have expected and embrace...at least in the areas that resonate with me.  And time management is one of these.  The other day he broke down his strategy of managing a day in his own life with four key points: mastering one's to-do list, mastering one's schedule, employing the Pomodoro Technique of 25 minutes focused work on ONE thing with 5 minutes rest, and then reviewing the day at the end.  I tried it the other day and pleasantly discovered that I was actually getting ahead of my plans, finishing tasks earlier than expected.  Yesterday I didn't do it and...it didn't work out so well.  Everyone's different and I doubt that Rob Dial would even recognize my own interpretation of his suggestions...I always take what he says with a grain of salt: I think he'd like that...

Quote of the Week...from Bob Dylan

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.                 ---Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan, Minnesota's great poet/songwriter/performer, turns 83 today...he is a part of that cluster of famous musicians born in the early 1940: he's 15 years older than me.  So for 15 years of his life I wasn't alive...should I be despondent over my death, or non-existence, during that period?  After I die...whenever that happens...should he likewise be despondent should he outlive me?  You see, I'm taking a little of ol' Bob's above quote and working with it, for I think we two just might have overlapping views about the passage of time and the concepts of past, future, and the now.  Not that the "The Bard" was referring to any of this with his quote, other than emphasizing that both future and past are indistinct and essentially unreal while only the now, the very moment we are currently both living through, is truly all that is real.  It's indeed a great mystery, not any less than what happens after death from our own perspective, about what we were before we existed in the first place.  Yet unless you believe in reincarnation, and that would only be a conjecture on your part, time itself seems to be an illusion, a construct that living organisms have used to perpetuate themselves...

Quote of the Week...from Eckhart Tolle

The power for creating a better future is contained in the present moment. You create a good future by creating a good present.                                  ---Eckhart Tolle

Two years ago I wrote an article (click HERE) about the book The Power of Now by philosopher Eckhart Tolle.  Today is his birthday, so I thought it would be appropriate to feature one of his quotes. I was attracted to Tolle's beliefs because I...independently...had come to believe that the essence of subjective reality is embedded in the here and now: basically it's the definition of what "I" am. Furthermore, nothing can be accomplished unless it is actualized in the present moment.  Yet so many of us, myself included at times, live in past regret or future worry.  Neither of these are fruitful, although if approached as learning or motivational tools, examination of one's past and future can lead to better insights as to how best tackle what is really going on...in the now.  Sometimes the hallmark of a great thinker is their ability to distill into lucid language truths that, upon revelation, seem self-evident...Eckhart Tolle is one of these sages...

Tail End of 2023 Here

Now that it's officially past Christmas day, I suppose a lot of people regard the upcoming week preceding New Years Day as the time for refunds and exchanges of gifts not wanted or the wrong shape, size or color.  For me it's a brief period for me to reflect on the year winding down and contemplating ahead to 2024.  If the next calendar year is anything like it was in 2020 when we had the insane presidential election, the Covid crisis outbreak and the nationwide protests following the George Floyd killing, I'd better brace myself.  Yet I have high hopes for my health, self-improvement, fun and adventures as well as for my loved ones. I am optimistically looking forward to 2024, and sensationalism and media manipulation can just take a back seat to my own agendas, thank you very much.  May this week prepare you for what's to come, including bringing a sense of perspective and balance to your own lives...

Quote of the Week...from Benjamin Franklin

Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today.        ...Benjamin Franklin

Of course, ol' Ben didn't live in today's bustling culture of digitalization, where technology that was supposed to liberate us is actually shackling us into more and more commitments to fit within a shrinking available time period.  Tack onto that the fact that, while in Franklin's time the concept of a "day" was closely tied into the cycles of the sun with the daytime's lightness and the nighttime's darkness, the day, at least in the cyberworld, is "on" for 24 hours, nonstop...including streaming entertainment and video games.  I wonder whether this is a contributing factor to the tendency for formerly late-night businesses operating in the real world to shut down much earlier...of course, Covid got the ball rolling in that direction with a subsequent shortage of available staffing that hasn't since completely abated.  It can be a struggle to try and keep one's calendar clear amid the many calls for commitment to different things, while at the same time that this digital bombardment is happening never before have people felt so disconnected, unrecognized and irrelevant.  Maybe you're an exception to this trend...good for you. But I don't see this going in a good direction as the concepts of "news" and "reality" have become so digitally twisted that our democracy and freedoms may be in dire peril during the next few years while autocratic demagogues run rampant and unchecked.  But back to Benjamin Franklin: it's coming down to having to be a bit of a jerk around others to assert myself and live my life in today's allotted span that I have set out for myself.  Otherwise, today will turn into tomorrow and then the next day and then the next week, month, year, decade...until I am no longer around to look back with regret on the wasted past... 

"Aught" We to Stop Referring to Decades?

Dr. Rick, the dude on the Progressive insurance commercials who has committed his efforts to helping young adults to stop acting like their parents, has one less item to work on. The tendency for baby boomers like me to group decades together from the previous century (Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, Nineties) came to an abrupt wall with the advent of the twenty-first.  The opening decade of this century is technically called the "Aughts", but I kind of like to use "Zeros" although nobody really uses either term...or even any name at all for this crucial span of time.  Lots of neat stuff happened in my life during this period, and significant events (like the 2000 election, 9/11, the Iraq & Afghanistan Wars, the Christmas tsunami, Katrina, Obama's election) occurred...but the Good Doctor has yet to feel any need to dissuade straying young'uns from grouping it all together as a decade.  No, young and old alike seem to have a mental block about time once the calendar shifted over from "19" to "20". You might think then that once 2010 came around than at least, at that time, folks would resume with the decade talk, calling it the beginning of the "Teens"...but nothing doing.  And now, deep into the Twenties, I had yet to hear any such reference to the times we live in, with most people I imagine thinking more of the roaring 1920s when the term does come up instead with the associations of Prohibition, silent flicks and Calvin Coolidge.  Are we truly finished with the decades talk?  I've heard references made to the "2000s", but as far as I'm concerned, that term covers every year in this century, not just the first decade...

On this 11/22, Fifty-Nine Years Later

As I mentioned in Saturday's article, I've just finished reading Stephen King's epic time travel classic 11/22/63...for the sixth time.  Although I'm a fan of King's I typically don't reread his stuff like that...what is the case with this particular novel?  I did like his chief protagonist Jake Epping, whose first-person narration is perhaps the best in any story I've ever read.  And the character of Al Templeton...the man who has discovered a time portal that transports anyone entering it back to a specific moment in September, 1958..is remarkable, especially with regard to how he interprets his discovery and applies it.  But after giving it some thought, I think the main thing I took from the book is something that needs no magic pathway into the past.  It's all, after all, a simple thought experiment.  Although Epping and Templeton did their time traveling as 2011 adults transplanted into a mid-twentieth century environment, my experiment has me, with my present so-called wisdom and knowledge, conveniently entering my own distant past at what I now consider pivotal times of my youth...and then acting differently from what I actually did.  So, for example, maybe instead of my poor study habits back then I set up a regular homework routine and religiously adhered to it.  The resulting good grades and improved relationships with my teachers would also lead to different social relationships with my peers...and differing expectations and new challenges.  But would I be well-equipped for all the changes going on around me including possible adversity from my own parents (people tend to be resistant to change in others, even for the better)...after all, the further I progress in my "new' past life the more novel experiences I will have and no way of determining their positive or negative (and possibly tragic) outcomes.  In a way, this is what Epping discovered in 11/22/63...so let's go further on with that thought experiment.  Suppose I take that regret about my past...poor study habits or something else that comes to mind...and since I don't have a time portal to "remedy" things, instead I simply apply the changed behavior to my present moments, here in good old 2022?  And it's here, I think, where I feel the attraction for Stephen King's best novel, in my opinion.  Templeton sets the goal of preventing the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963 and Epping is left to complete the task.  I was in the second grade, just having come back to the classroom after lunch, when the terrible event was announced to us.  At home my parents left the TV on with its nonstop coverage of the aftermath...I think that affected me more than the actual initial news.  After all, I was only barely seven and wasn't exactly filled in on what was going on politically...

Quote of the Week...from Nelson Mandela

We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right. 

                                                             ---Nelson Mandela

I came across this quote on the Internet while seeking if there wasn't an appropriate one about the passage of time.  You see, I was comparing how time passed so slowly last September while I was following the progress of the U.S. Open tennis tournament to now, just four months later, with that of the Australian Open.  Back then I was at home full-time, recovering from my surgery with few other daily concerns.  Now, though, I am much more active and have returned to work long ago, rendering my days broken up into little segments many of which either demand my undivided attention or draw me physically away from the TV set where all the great tennis is happening.  The result is that while back then I was able to follow the tournament from the early rounds and get to know several players, this time around I suddenly find myself here today with the final matchups already set in place: Ashleigh Barty against Danielle Collins tomorrow for the women's title and Rafael Nadal vs. Daniil Medvedev (US Open champion) for the men.  Last night after work I did get to see much of the semifinal match between Nadal and Matteo Berrettini, which was entertaining.  As for Nelson Mandela, he languished for much of his adult life in a South African prison for being one the leaders fighting racist Apartheid in that country but later became not only its president but also a champion in his own right for peaceful social progress and reconciliation along the model of Gandhi and King.  The passage of time can play tricks on the mind and give one the false impression that it's all too late now...I remember thinking this lie even as far back as the fifth grade in 1967 when I was only ten!  But now I know better: as long as I am alive and breathing, I will always have time in the "now" to decide whether to do the right thing...this is a privilege as well as an enormous responsibility... 

Marking Time by Age or Calendar Year

Normally, I don't mark time by my age and birthdays...but yesterday's was a big deal because I turned 65, which seems to be a major dividing line in how my society separates people, depending on what side of that magic number they're on.  Aside from all the questions about signing up for the various Medicare plans, there has recently been a major distinction regarding vaccinations between those below or beyond the 65 year threshold.  Even before the Covid vaccine first came out several months ago, there was a special, fortified flu vaccine designed to protect the elderly...starting with those age 65 or above.  Now the booster shots for Covid are currently unavailable to the general population age 64 and below...a group to which I belonged just two days ago.  I plan to get both of these shots in the next few days, although I don't enjoy being stuck with a needle anymore than anyone else.  As for my opening comment about marking time, after I began elementary school I was primarily noting the passage of years by either my grade or the calendar year, not so much my age...although attaining 18 was significant as I was then eligible to vote.  As for the military draft, I miraculously managed to fall within the exact time period of President Nixon abolishing it and Jimmy Carter reinstituting registration...so my age didn't mean as much with that as it would were I just a few years older and concerned about being drafted for Vietnam. I now wonder whether I'm going to start thinking more of my physical age as a year marker now that I've passed the 65-year hurdle...

Great Old TV Episodes...from Through the Wormhole

This week's featured episode is IS TIME TRAVEL POSSIBLE? from the popular science series Through the Wormhole, specifically #3 from Season 1, originally aired in June, 2010. A few years ago I had The Science Channel as part of my cable television premium service...eventually one day I reevaluated some of what we were paying for and decided to delete the package of channels that included it.  But while we still received it from 2010 through 2017 this channel featured the series Through the Wormhole, narrated by actor Morgan Freeman, that probed into different deep topics of cosmology, physics, and even metaphysics.  To me this was a step up from the Cosmos series and which, while avoiding the high mathematics and science in these areas, still provided a nexus between the scientific community researching them and people at large...something our society, so much of it in science denial and ignorance, desperately needs.  One of the topics often covered is time, and one of my favorite episodes is this one on time travel.  As usual, Morgan introduces it with a poignant memory, this one from his childhood days with his grandmother, and then one supposition after another about the nature of time gets scientifically laid out, ideas many of which I had been maintaining as a non-scientist for years: it was an episode of personal affirmation for me! The two most prominent points the show made in this regard were (1) that all that ever happened, is happening, and will happen are equally a fundamental, transcendentally existing part of reality and (2) the concept of "now" is a subjective...not objectively discernible or provable...element of time.  As for the series Through the Wormhole as a whole, I always rejoiced (and laughed) at the often unbridled joy and enthusiasm of the various featured scientists as they discussed their theories and discoveries: these folks know how to live!  Unfortunately, I can't find this series on any channel right now, except for some on YouTube.  I'm considering purchasing the complete set on DVD, but there seems to understandably be a run on it and they're out of stock...also, my library doesn't have any DVDs to check out, either. But let's return to that "time" episode and an important quote from Morgan Freeman: "Time is not universal.  The strange truth is, time is personal"...    

Just Finished Reading Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick

Martian Time-Slip is a 1964 science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick, the twelfth book I've read of his so far.  Its time setting is 30 years into the future, i.e. 26 years ago in 1994.  Mars has been explored and settled for several years and it seems humanity has transported its nationalism, prejudices, and mental illness straight over to the new world...which they have discovered is already inhabited by a human race called the Bleekmen: apparently both Earth and Mars were seeded with humanity around the same time by an outside source hundreds of thousands of years ago.  A repairman recovering from a schizophrenic episode on Earth has moved to the Red Planet with his family in order to find some mental peace from the masses of people crowding his planet of origin.  He finds himself drawn into a complex web of relationships between a bigoted wealthy businessman, that man's wife, his neighbors which include a trader in the thriving black market and his autistic son...and the psychiatrist treating the boy.  The narrative is presented from the various characters' perspectives, and this becomes pretty interesting when the autistic boy is featured...he suffers from the problem of dealing with a time that flows much more quickly for him than for the "normal" people around him.  Also, he is a precog, which is someone who can see into the future.  This piques the businessman's interest and he seeks to use the boy's talents for his own purposes.  Mars is presented as a bleak, unfriendly world where no one in their right mind should want to live...in this at least I thought the author probably got it right.  Dick, however, treated schizophrenia and autism in this story as two forms of the same thing and presented them as vehicles for enlightenment...from what I've read about him he, too, suffered some some kind of mental illness.  That he would have Mars already being colonized by 1994 isn't really surprising since transportation technology and exploration had been in a state of explosive growth during the span of the previous few decades...it's more far-fetched...and much more disappointing...to me that we're now in the year 2020 and haven't left low Earth orbit in 48 years!  Martian Time-Slip wasn't one of my favorite Philip K. Dick stories, but the idea of somehow becoming disengaged from the normal flow of time is an intriguing subject that he treated very well here...

Just Finished Reading 11/22/63 by Stephen King (for the 4th Time)

For a book that came out less than nine years ago, Stephen King's time travel novel 11/22/63 has to be one of my all-time favorites...I just finished reading it, and for the fourth time at that.  This time around I checked it out from my public library's Libby site and listened to its lengthy duration at 2X speed...that comes in pretty handy at times.  Sometimes I wonder why a particular book will get a hold on me and with this one, I have to admit that it's very good in a number of areas.  But I am always intrigued by the notion of the "rabbit hole" or secret entranceway to another place or time.  What King pulled off here with his story is nothing less than genius: the special door from 2011 to 1958 has already been discovered, and Al Templeton has thought it all out pretty much as many of us would have: first explore around, then take advantage of what going back and forth in time can do for you...and then begin to think of more serious uses.  I don't expect any special, secret porthole to another dimension or era in my own material life, but I can expand what Stephen King presented into a workable allegory...

Paradigm shifting isn't as vividly dramatic as stepping through an invisible opening to another time, but you're still stepping through...albeit mentally...into another way of seeing things.  What I am talking about here is both intellectual and emotional empathy, whereby you deliberately shed your well-designed clothing of stances on issues and people and instead see things from the vantage point of another with a different take.  I actually do this a lot in my life, and furthermore I have come to the strong belief that there is a sizeable number of fellow travelers through life...and quite a few on social media...who are cognitively incapable of empathy, dividing everything they see only in starkly stratified terms: black or white, good or evil, worthy of idolization or worth of contempt.  And if we're talking politics, I'm seeing this inability or unwillingness to see things from the other guys' perspective on both sides of the ongoing debate.  You idolize Trump and scorn Biden?  Try criticizing the former and genuinely praising the latter.  You like Biden (I doubt many idolize him...to his credit) and despise Trump? Likewise criticize Joe and find something nice to say about our president.  And with the issues that people are so rapt up in, why not take a little time and see things from the other side's viewpoint...in their words, not just those of their critics...starting with the issues you feel the most passionately about.  I look at the different people in politics and the issues around me and I know that there are legitimate reasons to take the sides people take...but what I don't accept is the notion that those who disagree with me are evil or stupid dupes.  What I do accept is that people tend to become comfortable with their own narratives, which they sometimes wrap around themselves so tightly that they tend to confuse them with reality itself.  Why not take a break...if you're capable of it, that is...and step through the invisible passageway out of your own narrative and into a refreshingly different environment? Unlike with Stephen King's novel, it's really possible and no secret...

Quote of the Week...from Mark Twain

Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.               ---Mark Twain

There is a temptation among some of us to take an ages-old quote and apply it, out of the temporal contest in which it was made, to today's world...the above statement by renowned and beloved American writer Mark Twain (Samuel Clemons) is a case in point.  Twain was said to have made it in jest after a reader with an unusual name asked him to change that of one of his same-named characters. Yet this quote has a much broader meaning as well, a reflection on the times he was living through...but he died in 1910, well over a century ago.  And I think a lot has happened between his time and ours...

Scientific, technological and social progress means that today's possibilities are greater than before...but from the vantagepoint of the future looking back, that same time we're now experiencing will seem limited by contrast.  Serious, debilitating and fatal diseases were running rampant in Twain's time with no immunization or antibiotics available while the era's medical practices, with modern sterilization procedures just beginning to be practiced and a limited ability to control infection after operations, seem barbaric in hindsight...think of all those Civil War amputations.  Communication and transportation were much more limited, and even with the spotlight placed nowadays on racial, ethnic and gender discrepancies in our society, they were much more magnified back then.  People were stratified in their social classes and forced racial segregation was an openly accepted norm of society...even endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court...as voting rights, employment, lending, housing, medical treatment, education and the halls of justice clearly meant entirely different things to people based on their class, race, religion, ethnicity, gender...and of course how much money they had: we're still obviously working on some of this today, but it was much more pronounced back then. Yet Twain could see that his own time...which spanned the latter half of the nineteenth century and the start of the next...represented a marked difference from what it was like before.  And why not? the vast nation was now connected by rail and innovations like the telephone, incandescent light and the electrical grid were radically transforming how people lived, and then here comes the internal combustion engine and cars... 

Everybody thinks the times they are living in are at the pivotal point in history, and to an extent they're right.  The "now" of Mark Twain's time may seem different than the "now" of ours, but everything that ever happens...or ever did happen...depends on the infinitude of "nows" that preceded it.  Maybe that sounds a little simplistic, but wait a decade or two and then see what that "now" brings...

Here Comes a Nameable Decade and New Opportunities

It looks like we're finally approaching a time...it's been twenty years...in which people can once again comfortably refer to the decade that they're living through.  After the twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties of the last century, we ran into the "units", "zeros" or "aughts" of the early 2000s and then the never-used "teens" of the ten-year span we're almost through with...I noticed that CNN stopped their shows about the past decades after the "nineties"...if you can't name something, then how can you talk about it?  And while we're at it, can we finally stop saying "two thousand twenty" and starting calling the years like we did in the good old days as combinations of two-digit numbers? . "Twenty twenty" sounds good to me, but so does twenty nineteen, for that matter...in spite of folks still saying "two thousand nineteen"...

In anticipation of entering a decade that actually has a name, I think that here is an opportunity for personal reflection as to what I want to accomplish, not just in the year to come but also during the approaching twenties.  Getting rid of bad personal habits, instilling good ones, learning new things, experiencing adventures, being responsible with the health and prosperity I've been blessed with, enriching my relationships with my loved ones...all are worthwhile ventures.  But with time inevitably come trials and setbacks...developing the character and compassion to deal with my own and those of others is going to be a crucial element of the coming years, I am sure.  One thing I am certain of: change does not come in the future but rather in the present moment as I live though my life, one day at a time...

Hey, whaddya know, CNN has actually been reviewing the first two decades of this century...they just call it the 2000s without designating either of the two decades we've gone through...

Just Finished Reading (for the 3rd Time) 11/22/63 by Stephen King

When I've read the same, pretty lengthy book three times in seven years...well, you can be pretty sure that it's one of my favorites.  That's the case with Stephen King's 2011 time travel novel 11/22/63, the title of which clearly alludes to the John F. Kennedy assassination in Dallas, Texas on that tragic Friday afternoon.  After just finishing reading it once again, I was reminded of what King repeatedly refers to as the obdurate past...

The protagonist, relating the story in the first person, is Jake Epping, a high school English teacher in a small Maine town.  He has a friend, Al Templeton, who owns and runs his own small diner down the road and sells the best-tasting burgers for miles around at an impossibly cheap price.  What Jake doesn't know is that Al has long been aware of a time portal at the back of his pantry, through which he can slip back in time from 2011 to 1958...and back again.  He goes there, picks up his high-quality ground beef in the past at an extremely cheap price, and brings it back...a pretty uninspired use of something as significant as a door through time, I say.  Al eventually agrees, seeing that 1958 isn't that far off from 1963, when John Kennedy was assassinated, and decides to do something to change history.  But circumstances of his own flagging health catch up with him and he asks Jake to perform the task of saving the president.  Only one problem: the past is obdurate, i.e. it stubbornly resists change and puts obstacles in front of our hero in proportion to the degree and pivotal significance of the change being sought...

Back in 2012 I wrote that it's not only the past that is obdurate, but also the future.  My rationale was that it seemed that every time I made a concerted effort to overhaul my life and significantly improve it, all kinds of challenges would arise to stymy me, challenges that seemed to randomly come out of thin air.  It was as if time were telling me what direction I had to live my life in and that it would not tolerate any deviation from the "plan".  Of course, you don't have to get too metaphysical about time being obdurate to changes in your life's goals and habits: people themselves tend to be resistant to others around them changing.  It reminds me of the great 1960s song Both Sides Now that Joni Mitchell wrote and Judy Collins turned into a big hit: "But now old friends are acting strange...they shake their heads, they say I've changed".  Whatever or whoever the cause, reality around us resists our proactive efforts to change ourselves and our environment...and you don't have to go 53 years back through a time portal to see that...