Tag: writing

Beloved Distance – In Depth

On By Kay LorraineIn brain, connection, distance, neurobiology, neurology, neuron3 Comments

What’s “Beloved Distance” About?

In our modern globalized world, fraught with strife, violent conflict, and daily casualties numbering in the tens of thousands, separation is often perceived as the enemy of humanity. Keeping oneself at a distance from others is seen as the root of sexism, racism, homophobia, classism, and myriad other -isms which preclude even the slightest chance of peace. “To become a true global citizen,” Suzy Kassem sounds a common refrain, “one must abandon all notions of ‘otherness’ and instead embrace ‘togetherness’. … This is the only way mankind will truly evolve.”

A message of eradicating the distance between oneself and others resounds across the ages, from the Buddha’s warning, “There is … No sorrow like separation,” to John Lennon assuring us that if we all join together, “the world will be as one.” This perspective is practically a given among those who consciously seek our collective evolution. After all, the prototypical Fall from Grace was an act of separation from the Divine, as well as an innocent blindness to the difference between Good and Evil. And the antedote for our loss of grace? Unity. Connection. Oneness – the ultimate goal of an evolved species. And anyone who claims differently is likely still trapped in a toxic, dying paradigm that threatens to destroy us all.

In this work, I explore an alternative view: namely, that rather than being our enemy, Separation – or Distance – from a perceived Other is at once endemic to our human nature and an invaluable bridge to the connection we hungrily seek. And only by accepting the fact of our separation can we truly learn to creatively navigate the spaces that divide us.

Separation and Distance is, in fact, a fundamental component of our participation in this thought-form theater we term “reality”, beginning at the most basic of our sensory functions and extending throughout our entire human infrastructure. Experience of Distance from Others is not due to inferior design or devolved consciousness. Quite the contrary — it’s part and parcel of who we are, how we’re built. In this work, I propose that our acceptance of and successful integration of Separation, combined with our ongoing impulse to close the Distance between Ourselves and the Other, is the very thing which provides the essential influx, aggregation, and processing of “data points” which inform and evolve our human experience, raising it from mere existence to engaged, expanding evolution.

Starting from the following basic fact about our physical condition, that at our most minuscule neural level, we are separated from direct contact with the world around us, I will explore how:

  • due to this separation, we never have direct contact with anything, and
  • our experience of reality depends on a complex yet well-integrated process of data detection, decoding, and interpretation, which “fills in the blanks” in ways that are both enriching and problematic,
  • rather than suffering from separation, our experience of ourselves and our world is continuously enriched and evolved as an end product of this process, and
  • we can learn from our physical systems’ in-born capabilities to address the issues of “Otherness”, separation, and alienation in our outer world and actively, intentionally find commonality that makes us more than the simple sum of our connections.

We need not vilify and excise all Separation and Distance and sense of Other from our roster of acceptable life experiences. Indeed, we can holistically embrace the contradictions of Separation and the tensions of Distance in our experienced reality, in much the same way that our physical systems do. Rather than banishing the experience of Distance as “unreality”, I propose that we embrace it more fully as a building block of an expanded Reality and recognize the opportunities inherent in its gaps to take ourselves beyond the limits of our imagined constraints. For indeed, ultimately richness and meaning is added exponentially to our lives precisely because of the essential separateness of our natures.

Order Your Print Copy on Amazon Now

Now Available

Beloved Distance – The Separation That Connects Us to All

Paperback 9×6″

168 Pages

$11.95 (+$2.99 s/h)

Printed on-demand, takes 5-10 days for delivery.

Order Your Print Copy on Amazon Now

Click here to buy in Kindle Format ($9.95)

The wait is over – Beloved Distance is now available for download and (print) order

On By Kay LorraineIn distance, neurobiology, philosophy1 Comment

Deloved Distance CoverNow Available

Beloved Distance – The Separation That Connects Us to All

Paperback 9×6″

168 Pages

$11.95 (+$2.99 s/h)

Printed on-demand, takes 5-10 days for delivery.

Order Your Print Copy on Amazon Now

Click here to buy in Kindle Format ($9.95)

ut Beloved Distance

We live in a world on fire.

Everywhere we turn, there’s discord, strife, violence. It feels like everything is falling apart, and the global suffering never seems to end.

What can we do?

Some say, we must eradicate separation and experience Unity, in order to step back from the brink of destruction. We must come together As One, and embrace a sense of universal connection.

The only problem is, separation is central to our human experience. We are separate beings, distinct from each other. And we constantly seek to distinguish ourselves from others, as part of our community-building work.

This book explores how we can embrace separation and distance as a vital part of our human lives. It asks us to look within – to the very structure of our cells – to find answers… and ultimately meaning… in the way we’re built, and the way we are built to connect.

Separation is what we are.

Connection is what we do.

Join this journey into the innermost workings of the amazing human body, and let it change your ideas about the outermost workings of the human species.

Get your copy now

 

 

 

 

Beloved Distance eBook is queued up for publication this coming week

On By Kay LorraineIn brain, distance, neurobiology, philosophyLeave a comment

Deloved Distance CoverThis weekend has turned out to be another full one (and I’m flying to Austin, next weekend, so there’s another weekend… consumed. So, I’m making the most of my time.

I’m still waiting for the print proof copies to show up (tho’ they might be waiting for me down at the garage, if FedEx showed up today – I’ll have to go check).

In the meantime, I’ve prepped the eBook version, and that is ready to go on Wednesday. I’ll be offering free copies of the eBook on publication day (Wednesday, January 17), as well as opening up to purchase.

Folks who want print copies will be able to order on Wednesday, as well. It’s just going to take a week or two for them to arrive, since the first print run has yet to go, and fulfillment takes time. But nonetheless, Beloved Distance will be available this coming Wednesday, January 17, 2018, as planned.

And once the production details are all settled and the book is in circulation, the in-depth discussions shall commence.

On it goes.

Ever onward.

P.S. If you’d like a review copy, please comment below. Specify print or digital. And if you’d like to chat about Beloved Distance on your radio show or podcast, feel free to reach out to me, as well. Would love to talk!

Proof copies have been ordered… now the wait

On By Kay LorraineIn distance, neurobiology, philosophyLeave a comment

Deloved Distance CoverLast weekend was a full one. I’m still recovering from the marathon work session. Final edits all typed up, final formatting for the interior done, cover (shown) sorted, and now I wait for the proof copies to show up.

I’ve run six different versions, each with a different typeface. Yep, it’s that important to me. I want to choose the right font, and I also want to make sure all the images are as clear as possible. It’s challenging to tell from the soft copies, as well as from the interior approver app on CreateSpace, because the way something comes across digitally doesn’t ever match exactly how it will look in print.

That whole ink-on-paper thing… and never knowing exactly what quality the paper will be, or if the print job will be done to perfection… all that.

Yep, just have to run a bunch of copies and see what’s the best.

I’m currently in the process of sorting out the Kindle version. That should be ready to go by early next week.

For now, it’s all about wrapping up the loose ends — getting promotional materials together, perfecting the “elevator speech”, fixing the website(s), and getting ready to roll.

One step at a time. One step at a time.

On track to publish, a week from today.

Yes.

Beloved Distance – Book Overview

On By Kay LorraineIn brain, connection, distance, neurobiology, neurology, neuron2 Comments

Beloved Distance Overview

In our modern globalized world, fraught with strife, violent conflict, and daily casualties numbering in the tens of thousands, separation is often perceived as the enemy of humanity. Keeping oneself at a distance from others is seen as the root of sexism, racism, homophobia, classism, and myriad other -isms which preclude even the slightest chance of peace. “To become a true global citizen,” Suzy Kassem sounds a common refrain, “one must abandon all notions of ‘otherness’ and instead embrace ‘togetherness’. … This is the only way mankind will truly evolve.”

A message of eradicating the distance between oneself and others resounds across the ages, from the Buddha’s warning, “There is … No sorrow like separation,” to John Lennon assuring us that if we all join together, “the world will be as one.” This perspective is practically a given among those who consciously seek our collective evolution. After all, the prototypical Fall from Grace was an act of separation from the Divine, as well as an innocent blindness to the difference between Good and Evil. And the antedote for our loss of grace? Unity. Connection. Oneness – the ultimate goal of an evolved species. And anyone who claims differently is likely still trapped in a toxic, dying paradigm that threatens to destroy us all.

In this work, I explore an alternative view: namely, that rather than being our enemy, Separation – or Distance – from a perceived Other is at once endemic to our human nature and an invaluable bridge to the connection we hungrily seek. And only by accepting the fact of our separation can we truly learn to creatively navigate the spaces that divide us.

Separation and Distance is, in fact, a fundamental component of our participation in this thought-form theater we term “reality”, beginning at the most basic of our sensory functions and extending throughout our entire human infrastructure. Experience of Distance from Others is not due to inferior design or devolved consciousness. Quite the contrary — it’s part and parcel of who we are, how we’re built. In this work, I propose that our acceptance of and successful integration of Separation, combined with our ongoing impulse to close the Distance between Ourselves and the Other, is the very thing which provides the essential influx, aggregation, and processing of “data points” which inform and evolve our human experience, raising it from mere existence to engaged, expanding evolution.

Starting from the following basic fact about our physical condition,

  • that at our most minuscule neural level, we are separated from direct contact with the world around us,

I will explore how:

  • due to this separation, we never have direct contact with anything, and
  • our experience of reality depends on a complex yet well-integrated process of data detection, decoding, and interpretation, which “fills in the blanks” in ways that are both enriching and problematic,
  • rather than suffering from separation, our experience of ourselves and our world is continuously enriched and evolved as an end product of this process, and
  • we can learn from our physical systems’ in-born capabilities to address the issues of “Otherness”, separation, and alienation in our outer world and actively, intentionally find commonality that makes us more than the simple sum of our connections.

We need not vilify and excise all Separation and Distance and sense of Other from our roster of acceptable life experiences. Indeed, we can holistically embrace the contradictions of Separation and the tensions of Distance in our experienced reality, in much the same way that our physical systems do. Rather than banishing the experience of Distance as “unreality”, I propose that we embrace it more fully as a building block of an expanded Reality and recognize the opportunities inherent in its gaps to take ourselves beyond the limits of our imagined constraints. For indeed, ultimately richness and meaning is added exponentially to our lives precisely because of the essential separateness of our natures.

CHAPTERS

Introduction

  1. We Can’t Get There From Here : On Building Community and Falling from Grace
  2. Discriminating Safety : Who Stays, Who Goes, and Why It Matters
  3. There Is No Here : How Separation Is Our Natural State of Being
  4. More Separate Than We Know : Other Dimensions of Our Distance
  5. Going The Distance : How Connection Is Our Natural Process of Becoming
  6. Filling In the Blanks : Of Data Loss and Instinctive Invention
  7. But What Does It Mean? : The Interpretations That Make Us
  8. Every Separation Is A Link : Welcoming Other-ness as an Opportunity

Conclusion

To work in the mode of Cajal

On By Kay LorraineIn brain, connection, distance, neurobiology, neurology, neuron1 Comment
Purkinje Cell illustration by Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Purkinje Cell illustration by Santiago Ramón y Cajal

The article I found yesterday about Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s roots in fiction was a welcome addition to my overall work direction. In it, I found my own sentiments mirrored — and by one of the great leaders in neuroscience.

If we would enter adequately into Cajal’s thought in this field,” Sherrington continues, “we must suppose his entrance, through the microscope, into a world populated by tiny beings actuated by motives and striving and satisfactions not very remotely different from our own.” Cajal highlighted that subject and object—the brain scientist and the neuron—descended from the same evolutionary ancestor, contained the same physical material, and were beholden to the same mortal laws.

Here was a man who literally transformed his field, and he did it (at least in part) by reimagining the human relationship with his objects of study — animating them with qualities similar to our own, because after all, we are “descended from the same evolutionary ancestor, contained the same physical material, and were beholden to the same mortal laws.”

It’s easy to lose sight of this correspondence in our increasingly fragmented world, where experts slice off ever slimmer targets of exploratory interest and specialize to the point where they know “more than anyone else about less than everyone else”. And in these days of funding battles and the struggle to be taken seriously in the scientific world, the idea of finding correspondences between a cell and a full-sized human being might seem like too risky a prospect to even entertain.

And yet, there’s so much to be gleaned from the correspondences we find, and there’s a lot we can learn from how our neurology behaves… just as Cajal learned a lot about our neurology by understanding how the human heart and spirit behave. Beloved Distance is a sort of “reverse-reprise” on Cajal’s particular “take” — as I turn our gaze from the microscope to our macroscape and reference not Don Quixote or shadows dancing on the ceiling, but the mechanisms of neurotransmitters leaping into the gaps between our neurons.

It may sound like a stretch, within the context of 21st Century science, but Cajal was in direct conflict with some of the dominant beliefs of his day, as well. And look where his approach got him — and took us: To a whole new understanding of how we’re actually put together, without which we’d have a much less complete understanding of ourselves, and perhaps a completely different version of medicine.

I’ve always had a marked respect for Cajal. It’s my understanding that the prevailing attitude of the day was that the nervous system was all continuously interconnected, like our vascular system. Cajal was an outlier, in that he believed in the “Neuron Doctrine” which held that all cells are individual entities (and so cannot be continuously directly connected). Others were believers in the Neuron Doctrine, but Camillo Golgi (whose stain made it possible for mere humans to view neurons) in fact devoted his Nobel lecture to discounting the Neuron Doctrine. He shared the stage / prize with Cajal in 1906, so the Spaniard was literally sharing space with someone determined to tear apart his work from the scientific pulpit.

What does it take, for someone to hold forth in their work, regardless of vehement opposition? Cajal’s defiantly resilient character, which took him through years of beatings by his father, surely played a role. And yet, there seems to be more at work than a cast-iron temperament. There are flights of fancy in the mix, too. Fancy which is deeply practical and has its place alongside the driest of facts laid out on a slide beneath the microscope.

That fancy, those flights, that imagination is something we all need, to carry us forward. It both tempers us and inspires us, and it makes the long slog of the necessary work into something more than… a slog. Just as we dance between separation and unity, between distance and closeness, the dynamics of creation and observation are complementary. And when blended with intention and intelligence, they can take us in some wonderful places.

You needn’t be a polymath to grasp how mutually beneficial supposedly opposing approaches can be.

You only need to be human… with a sense of adventure.

Sharing: The Hundred Trillion Stories in Your Head

On By Kay LorraineIn brain, connection, distance, neurobiology, neurology, neuron1 Comment
I came across this totally by accident, last night, but it’s very much in keeping with my current work. I’ve always loved the Paris Review. It was one of my most prized companions, back in the early 1980s. I’m still a fan – here’s one more reason why:

The Hundred Trillion Stories in Your Head

By

Arts & Culture

For the father of modern neuroscience, cellular anatomy was like the most exciting fiction.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal, “the father of modern neuroscience.” All images courtesy Cajal Legacy, Instituto Cajal (CSIC), Madrid.

Fiction is, by definition, a world away from fact—but Santiago Ramón y Cajal, often heralded as “the father of modern neuroscience,” used it to find objective truth. Cajal spent his days at the microscope, gazing down at faint, entangled fibers that appeared to his fellow anatomists as inscrutable labyrinths. Contrary to prevailing theory, the Spaniard discerned that the nervous system, including the brain, comprises distinctly individual cells (neurons), which, he theorized, must communicate across the infinitesimal spaces between them (synapses). It was Cajal who first applied the term plasticity to the brain; he went so far as to recommend “cerebral gymnastics” for mental enhancement, presaging twenty-first century insights and trends about brain exercise. “If he is so determined,” Cajal said, “every man can be the sculptor of his own brain.” If all Russian literature comes from Gogol’s “Overcoat,” and all modern American literature comes from “a book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” then international brain research, including grand projects like the BRAIN Initiative and the Human Brain Project, emerges from the unlikely work of Santiago Ramón y Cajal.

Read the full piece here – it’s worth it!

Endings and Beginnings – On the last Friday in 2017

On By Kay LorraineIn brain, connection, distance, separation, unityLeave a comment

sparkler throwing off sparksSomething about this time of year strikes me as incongruous. It’s winter. So what? The days are short, the nights are long, and I feel more like hibernating than celebrating the change from one year to the next.

The whole “New Year” thing has always seemed a little contrived to me. Birthdays or anniversaries or other dates people pick out as important always seemed so arbitrary, like inventions people used to add structure and meaning to their lives.

And in fact, they are. But while my growing-up years were filled with skepticism about how important they are/were, I get it now. They matter to other people specifically because they add structure and meaning to their lives. And that’s not a small thing.

Within the context of writing Beloved Distance, the New Year makes even more sense to me, now. Something about thinking about distance, living distance, making peace with it, even making friends with it, has made me more aware of just how important it is for us to have those markers that tell us where we are in the course of our life’s journey.

Time stretches out in all directions, looping back into a past that we may or may not want to remember. It leaps forward, as we anticipate what will or will not be. It’s deep and wide, shallow and narrow. And the temporal distance between where we were and where we’re going needs to be measured.

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure”, they say. And as our annual holidays — Hanukkah, Winter Solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa, and the New Years — roll on by, we mark yet another turning, another completion of the cycle.

To be honest, I’ve never been much for New Year’s celebrations. My idea of a good time, is going to bed at 10:00 p.m. on New Year’s Eve and waking up to a quiet New Year’s Day. I like the silence after the flurry of (someone else’s) celebration, when most of the world is sleeping it off. I find it contemplative. I’m also relieved that it’s over. When I’m tired, my hearing becomes acute, so when I stay up till midnight, all the firecrackers, shouting, and general hullabaloo feels like the world is shouting directly into my ears.

But it’s only once a year, so I just put up with it. It’s all over in a matter of minutes, anyway. I can handle just about anything for a few minutes.

Especially when it matters. And welcoming in the New Year does matter. It’s a marker along the way for us — for all of us, regardless of race or creed or class. It’s something we all have in common, after an extended season of disparate faith-based celebrations that sometimes seem at odds. Thanksgiving has evolved from a warm-feeling feast day to a grim reminder that history doesn’t always correlate with our fond (and manufactured) memories. Hanukkah is its own event, eight days of strengthening a sense of belonging to those who celebrate. Winter Solstice slots in there, celebrated by folks who deliberately differ from the mainstream. Then comes Christmas, with the 21st Century inevitability of accusations that non-Christians are trying to dilute the “reason for the season”.

The whole holiday season has turned into one extended practice of subgroups solidifying their ties by both drawing their own ranks closer and accentuating their differences from those outside their particular fold.

But then comes New Year’s. And what a relief it is. It’s a welcome break from the constant schisms, the bickering between “cousins” of faith. The New Year brings us all together. Like the ocean pulling away from the beach, to build into another wave, the tensions of the holidays collect into a soon-to-be-shared communal celebration that signals we can all get back to our lives as part of something bigger than all of us.

So, yes. For all its incongruity, for all its contrived sense, New Year’s is important. It’s a vital marker along the way that places us in the grand continuum, which lets us tie off the last year, put our failures behind us, celebrate our successes, and give us a chance to think about how we can do better.

We might be making it all up — or at least some of it — but it still matters.

Perhaps because we make it up as we go along.

To understand our place in the world, we must consider both body and mind

On By Kay LorraineIn brain, connection, neurobiology, neurology, neuron, philosophy, synapseLeave a comment
The Thinker by Rodin
“The Thinker” by Rodin

If you’re reading this, you have a brain. You may (or may not) use it to the utmost of your ability, but if your eyes are following this text, as you peer at your device or laptop or desktop monitor, your nervous system is working overtime shuttling information through your system, which most definitely includes your brain.

90,000 miles of nerves interconnect, both directly and through chemical synapses. They bridge the distance between our skin and our spinal cord, between our internal organs and our cerebrum. Our whole system is afire with electricity and chemical reactions, with our billions of neurons firing some 200 times per second. And all the while, the brain is “unconsciously” making sense of it.

As George Lakoff points out, an estimated 98% of thought is unconscious.

Lakoff embodied consciousness intro text
George Lakoff: How Brains Think: The Embodiment Hypothesis Click the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuUnMCq-ARQ for the full video

If you think about how busy your “conscious” brain is, just imagine how much moreso is the rest of you. All that chatter and static between your ears is but a paltry 2% of the total thought activity going on. Right now. All the time.

Just let that sink in for a moment…

Okay, let’s come back now. The brain-body connection has been talked about for decades, now, very much in terms of mental health and physical health. A lot of us have reached the conclusion that of course the brain and body are interrelated. How could they not be? The brain is part of the body, and its processes are organic, as well as consciousness-related.

The thing is, we seem to lose sight of this, when we think about our “higher mind” activities. When we get into philosophy and try to understand the nature of reality and our place in the world, we especially tend to split the brain from the body, like a space capsule leaving the rocket behind as it propels into the outer reaches of our cosmos. When we think long and hard about things, when we’re rapt with attention on abstract concepts. the very idea of the body seems to fade away. We forget to eat, drink, use the bathroom. We forget we have a body at all.

But of course, it’s still here. It’s not going anywhere — especially when we’re wrapped up in higher thought.

I usually think of Descartes, when I think of the brain-body split. Mr. “Cogito ergo sum“, who surmised that since he thought, therefore he was. Well, that’s fine. And certainly, it’s true. But I think it can also be said that “We think because we are.” So much of our physical systems are involved in thought, and so much of our systematic functioning is analogous to our thought processes, that the idea of neatly separating out the body from the mind and treating them as separate and distinct seems, well, very 17th Century.

Of course, it feels a lot neater, if we can conceptualize thought as something that’s mind-based, rather than body-based. It’s neater, somehow. It feels… cleaner. But as we’re learning more (and more, every day it seems) how much of the body is involved in processing the information our brains work with, that sanitized neatness carries a significant cost to true understanding. And that costs weighs us down with the burden of ignorance — both passive and active — as we both overlook important considerations and also willfully ignore the physical facts right in front of us.

In order to understand the workings of our minds, we have to understand the workings of the body. We have to understand how our nervous systems work, how they react and shape us in relation to the world around us. And when we understand the principles at work on the microscopic level, it gives us an added frame of reference, a finely tuned lens, we can use to gain greater insight into our innermost workings.

Knowing the body first, before approaching the brain, has stood others in good stead. Freud, in fact, started out as a neuroanatomist. I had no idea, till I did some digging a few months back. Long before he turned to psychoanalysis:

He carried out pioneering neurobiological research, which was cited by Santiago Ramóny Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, and helped to establish neuroscience as a discipline.

See Freud was a pioneering neuroscientist at The Guardian to read the full (and fascinating) article.

Freud’s theories have fallen out of favor in recent years, from what I hear. But apparently some of his findings are being proven out, much as Einstein’s Theory About Gravitational Waves Was Just Proved Right. I have to wonder if maybe Freud’s understanding of neurology actually put him ahead of not only his peers but also his professional descendants, so much so, that it’s taken greater neurological understanding on our part to fully appreciate what he was talking about. It’s a theory…

And just as debunked theories sometimes need a closer look, our favorite concepts sometimes need to be called into question. Like the idea that the mind and the body are (or can be) separate and distinct from each other. Like the idea that you can disregard the body when you’re engaged in intellectual activities. Like the idea that the mind can completely rule the body, or that the body must be overcome and made wholly subservient to the mind, in order for the human spirit to rise.

All the undercurrents of hostility to the physique that trace through the Western tradition, seem pretty much like the product of people with some serious body issues. But of course, they weren’t alone. And their Körperfeindlichkeit (hostility to the body) filled a need in the Western psyche that didn’t have a lot of good things to say about the human body, until fairly recently.

Fortunately, the trend is shifting, as more and more people are connecting body and mind in philosophical terms, as well as world view. And I find myself quite comfortable within this trend, albeit on the margins, since I’m not exactly up to speed on all the latest thinking. It’s been a long time coming — and about damn’ time, if I say so.

From where I’m sitting / standing / working, it’s literally impossible for us to understand our place in the world or fully grasp the meaning of our existence, unless we factor in the body. It’s both a full partner in our thought process, as well as full of microscopic templates that can inform our macroscopic patterns. Our bodies guide us unconsciously, and when we engage with them consciously, they can enrich us even more.

And now it’s time to get a drink of water. My brain can use the hydration. And the walk to the water cooler will do my mind good.

Why write? Why think? … Why not?

On By Kay LorraineIn brain, community, connection, distance, neurobiology, neurology, separation, unityLeave a comment

glowing light bulbI’ve always gotten in trouble for thinking the way I do.

Not necessarily for specific thoughts I’ve had, but the manner in which I think.

While some people think / philosophize / study in order to master a subject, establish their expertise, or carve out a corner of the intellectual landscape as their own, I think to explore.

Life is absolutely fascinating, and there’s so much to dig into… connecting the dots… seeing the correspondences… finding out what leads to what and what else is on the horizon.

Frankly, I’m more interested in asking interesting questions — with or without decent answers — than I am in reaching definitive conclusions. And that’s true, all across the board.

It gets me in trouble. It always has. And it’s probably not going to stop, anytime soon.

Some of my most dramatic troubles used to happen with a guy who’s now one of the up-and-coming stars of American philosophy. He’s published a number of books and a bunch of papers, and he was invited as a guest lecturer at a British university not so long ago. He’s apparently a pretty big deal in certain circles, and I’m really happy for him. The last time I saw him was about 10 years ago, and he was amiable — a lot more amiable than I was expecting, actually.

See, he and I used to really go ’round. Our families were connected, and we ended up in each others’ orbits repeatedly. On good days, we had some amazing discussions. We could talk about just about anything, and when we were on the same wavelength, our exchanges were some of the most invigorating I can ever remember having.

On the other hand, if we were out of sync, he had a bad habit of attacking me. He’d get really intellectually aggressive, pressing me on points, not giving me much room to think… even physically attacking me on several occasions.

Of course we were something like 8 or 9 years old, at the time.

Back in the day, it didn’t seem like that big of a deal when we kids scuffled.  I often tussled with other kids — from the neighborhood or my own family. It was just one of those things we did. But the scuffling that happened with my philosophical compadre was… different. It didn’t seem to happen just because he wanted to horse around. It felt more like it was a direct physical attempt to dominate me, to put me in my place, to establish superiority over me, when intellectual attempts fell flat. If my self-created rival (who I always thought of as a friend) couldn’t win his point with words — because he was arguing to win, whereas I was thinking out loud to explore, and there really was nothing to win — he’d use his larger size and heavier weight to overpower me.

Literally.

Supposedly, he nearly killed me, once… according to my mother. She said something about him trapping me in a closed space where I could have smothered? I have a faint recollection of that, but it was really just one in an extended series of attacks from him.

He’s famous, now. He’s got a wife and kids, and he’s all set. I’m happy for him.

I’m also happy I’ve gone my own way. Far from that counter-productive sort of exchange, where there have to be intellectual winners, there have to be losers, and anyone who doesn’t participate isn’t worth the breath of arguing with them.

To be honest, I don’t have much use for that approach. I understand how people can be into it. I understand the draw. I’m just not interested, myself. I’d much rather find a meaty problem and dig into it, exploring all the nooks and crannies, ruminating, marinating, celebrating the intricacies of life on earth. A wide open world where there are no absolutes doesn’t intimidate me. It invigorates me. I figure, I’ll find out in the end… or not. Either way, it’s just how life rolls.

And life should be free to roll. No necessarily in ways that flatten others without regard for their well-being (because that would impact my well-being in turn), but in ways that widen the world and expand our options. In ways that add meaning to life and flesh out our purpose, that shine a little more light into the corners of our experience that often go unnoticed or undervalued. We’re learning so much more about neuroanatomy, so much more about biochemistry, so much more about how our “wiring” works — that electrical / chemical network that helps make us who and what we are.

The whole point of thinking and writing and publishing, for me, is to expand. My mind is pretty open, but it could be even moreso.  My options are pretty extensive, but wouldn’t it be interesting to find out what else is out there? My understanding of life is finite and human, but that doesn’t mean I can’t grow in all directions. There’s a whole lot else I’m interested in finding out, and thinking, writing, philosophizing, are just some of the ways I have at my disposal.

So, why not use whatever tools and resources I have available, to see what else is out there?

Why not?