Musings of a Middle Aged Man

Now that I am retired and no longer obligated to occupy my mind for the benefit of a large corporation, I am free to focus on topics of personal interest or follow my mind as it wanders to and fro. Sometimes, those wanderings are drawn to a topic that elicits deep focus. My monkey mind tends to bounce between being the horse drawing the cart and the cart being drawn by the horse. I must be careful to prevent the tail from wagging the dog for too long lest I succumb to doom scrolling the day away.

Beauty, it is said, lies in the eye of the beholder. I oft wonder why formal definitions of beauty tend to omit the feral in favor of the carefully coiffed, eschew the chaotic in favor of the meticulously organized, believe anarchy should bend a knee to the ordered, even if the ordered is dysfunctional. Letting the chaos reign long enough, complex patterns will emerge, a type of intricate order born of the anarchy. Wilderness, in its feral state, has existed long enough that the early pandemonium has settled into an elaborate harmony, forming a system that is beautiful for its cooperation between constituent inhabitants. Thus, all nature in its untrammeled state is beautiful, including that which is dangerous to humans. The Grizzly Bear roaming the backcountry is a dangerously beautiful sight that quickens the primordial soul of a lone hiker with awe.

We spend years in school absorbing the supposed truths set out for us by authority figures...teachers, principals, school boards, and politicians who are more interested in pushing their personal agendas at the expense of an education beneficial to the sponges that are children. This aberrant conditioning runs parallel with the religious institutions that preach dogma, claiming it to be unimpeachable facts, but is, in actuality, disguised indoctrination. This one-two punch creates a society of people lacking the ability to think critically, think independently, or truly generate original thoughts. All they can do is fall back into rote mode and vomit back the vile bile they've been forced fed like the pigeons that become foie gras. Only, the goal is not to fatten the liver for consumption, but rather to bloat the mind with opinions that act as articles of faith, ensuring rational thought becomes elusive to their minds and souls.

When I was raising my children, I did everything in my power to help them transcend limits, to believe there were no horizons they could not overcome as long as they worked hard, that their potential was limitless. This should not be confused with the new agey phrase, believe to achieve. That saying omits the critical strive, the third leg of the stable stool, without which the stool is a dangerously unstable place of wood better off in a warming fire. My parents raised me in a similar fashion, which is why I was able to kick above my intellectual weight class to earn a degree in Electrical Engineering. Their belief in me helped me believe in myself and achieve success.

There is a phrase, "seeking the miraculous in the everyday," that the New Ageists love to glom onto as their own. They leverage as a supposedly newly found and profound insight that their attitudes wear like a shiny cast over their rage clothing. Only, this concept, they believe, is for a new age, is actually old school, older than Uncle Walt's verbose rendering. A trip in the wayback machine with Sherman and Mr. Peabody would find this phrase as part and parcel of Buddhism's goal of being mindful. I have no problem with modernists using ancient concepts to enhance their lives. Some would decry it as cultural appropriation; however, I come from a country that likes to claim we are a melting pot,

Uncle Walt Whitman was on the vanguard of what is categorized as the Romantic era of American literature. The era is marked by an emphasis on individualism, imagination, the spiritual dimension of nature, and skepticism toward the pure rationalism that claimed reason is the primary source of genuine knowledge independent of sensory experience, empirical observation, or tradition. Me thinks this era, earmarked by nature writing, was a reaction to the mephitic air poisoned by the raging and unregulated waste spewed out the ass of the Industrial Revolution.

The Kesh Temple Hymn, a Sumerian praise poem composed circa 2600 BCE, is often cited as the earliest religious text. The words were inscribed on clay tablets and were associated with worship in ancient Sumer. The poem pays homage to the goddess Ninhursag (Nintu), praising her temple in the city of Kesh, while also highlighting the roles of the supreme god Enlil, who authorized the temple's construction, and the goddess of writing, Nisaba, who is credited with composing it, making it a multi-layered hymn to deities and their sacred space. The poem is recognized as the oldest surviving literature in the world. This makes sense, logically, considering Sumerian cuneiform script, emerging around 3,200 BCE, is regarded as the oldest written language. That the oldest known piece of literature...

Conundrum: Do I have a propensity for silence because I have powerful spiritual tendencies, or does my propensity to dwell in the spiritual drive my tendency to seek out and inhabit silent spaces? Of course, there is also the very real possibility that there is neither causation nor correlation between the two, and I am simply a malcontent unsuitable for human interaction. To be clear, in my mind, silence is a metaphor for solitude, even more so now that I am cursed with tinnitus and won't be able to experience complete silence until I am consumed by flames, at which time, both my silence and solitude will be as irrelevant to me as my ear affliction is to the rest of the world.

I stumbled upon literary works by Ojibwe Canadian author Richard Wagamese late in 2025. Of the 93 books I read and rated this year, I rated six with top marks. Five of those books were works of fiction penned by Wagamese. I don't rate many books this highly, let alone multiple books by the same author, unless said author is the deceased prophet, Edward Abbey, a scribe proffering extraordinary magic via the written word. Ed and Richard are two of my most highlighted authors. There are a few others with the ability to parse ideas and assemble words in ways whose beauty brings tears to my eyes and joy to my heart.

Other than war and romance movies, possibly the next most popular genre involves aliens visiting Earth. Almost all end with some type of epic battle from which the primitive earthlings emerge victorious over the advanced alien race. Primitive humans? Indubitably. Any beings who can master star travel have to be more advanced technologically than one whose most advanced exploration method is by remotely controlled, unpeopled vehicles. Advanced technology implies advanced cognitive abilities to harness and create technology that must be light-years ahead of human-designed machinery.

Religion and spirituality are both concerned with humanity's role in the sacred. Religion tends to be institutionalized, communal, and governed by dogmatic doctrines. Spiritually (but not religious) is geared toward the individual and heavily experiential, rendering it more fluid than the static state characterizing religion. The notion of the sacred typically revolves around god, goddesses, ultimate reality, or other transcendental dimensions governing life. Both can be expressed at multiple levels and powerfully shape values, identity, and the behaviors they define as ethical. Both have potential for profound good and devastating harm, especially when they devolve into fanaticism, exclusion, guilt, or abuse.

Despite there being not a smidge of evidence for the existence of an immutable, eternal soul, its existence is a deeply held belief, likely echoing from the dawn of modern man, perhaps even a conviction of our Neanderthal ancestors. This assumes the Neanderthal propensity for ritual burial is evidence of their belief in some sort of afterlife. There is a hidden presupposition in this question, namely that a soul exists, which leads me to believe it was postulated by a theist or a deist. The question, then, is missing one of the potential answers, rendering it more a trap than a quest to uncover truth. Theist camps claim each of the three answers to be the truth, depending upon the religion followed.

Religion was primitive humans' first attempt at pseudoscience, their first attempt to make sense of the mysteries encountered by the primeval brains of a nascent species with minds able to soar from the physical to the abstract on wings powered by imagination. As with any first attempt, it was clumsy and riddled with holes invisible to fledgling brains, rightly focused on satisfying physiological needs necessary for basic survival, such as building or finding shelters to protect them from weather and marauders. They formed small cooperative groups to share the hunting and gathering necessary to support the group, including the offspring scurrying about the cave and those soon to cross the threshold from mother's protective womb to Earth's suckling breast.

To level set: Superstition is a belief that attributes supernatural significance to specific objects, actions, or events despite lacking scientific evidence or logical connection. Faith is a profound trust and belief in someone or something, often transcending mere intellectual acknowledgement, to involve deep reliance and commitment. Both involve faith (a form of not knowing) in unseen, supernatural forces. These forces influence life. They rely on rituals, generally stemming from fear or a desire for control and meaning. The key difference is the object of their focus. One's magical thinking is targeted toward a sky daddy, while the other is not limited to a god. Both make space for the inclusion of amulets to bring about good fortune and to ward off evil.

Silence is typically defined as the absence of sound. Incomprehensible is the inability to understand. The question rejiggered would be "What does it mean to be an absence of sound that can't be understood?" Silence can also refer to a book omitting pertinent data, effectively silencing knowledge, ensuring the topic can't be properly comprehended or is purposefully manipulated toward nefarious ends. And there is the vacuum created when a group is silenced by institutional exclusion, epistemic injustice, and marginalization, bringing about loss of agency and the inability to influence the world around them. The oppression of people is a silence incomprehensible to me, who believes all humans should be equal participants in the game bookended by life.

There was a time when a child was meant to be seen, not heard. Told to stop crying or they would be given something to cry about. More often than not, they were instructed not to speak unless spoken to and, in even less enlightened times, were used to do menial and dangerous labor for a pittance, if any compensation, because they were viewed as more expendable than the more robust workers in the labor force who required higher wages to support their families. It wasn't until 1796 that an English radical published "Rights of Infants,"

There was a time in my arrogant younger days when I would have responded with an unequivocal yes. I thoroughly bought into the anthropocentric doctrine proclaiming that the only valid moral choice would be to choose human survival over the survival of any and all non-human beings. The arrogance arises from the pompous belief that humanity was somehow more special than our evolved brethren of the nonhuman varieties. It was a haughty attitude toward nonhuman life, bolstered by the many religions where man is the face of the worshipped deity, with the rest of the earth to be used and abused to satiate man's desires.

My thirty-plus years as a soccer referee make me uniquely qualified to address this question. It was a role requiring me to be not only the judge and jury, but also the executioner when severe breaches of the Laws of the Game (LOTG) occurred. The brilliance contained in the LOTG is the unwritten law, known as Law 18, that says referees must use common sense when applying the LOTG. This allows the referee to set aside any breaches of the law for the “Good of the Game.” It helps the referee manage unique situations with practicality rather than the strict application born of rigid literalism

Inner peace, aka peace of mind, is generally defined as a state of psychological or spiritual calm that is maintained despite the presence of external stressors. External stressors are events or situations that originate from your environment rather than from your own internal thoughts or beliefs. Let's face it. Bad shit beyond our control happens to us. We cannot control external stressors, but we can choose how we respond, a choice that is healthier than surrendering control. That a question about cultivating inner peace would come from the current incarnation of the Dalai Lama, the world leader of a religion dedicated to inner peace and a man whose countenance is so beatific...

The earliest identified purposeful burial site dates back 300,000 years ago in South Africa by our hominid ancestors, Homo Naledi, an extinct relative of Homo Sapiens, our species. The Naledi were cave dwellers with a timeline overlapping early Homo Sapiens. The Neanderthals, contemporaries of the Naledi, were buried with grave goods, including flowers. They included behaviors of covering bodies or placing them in protected niches as if their corpses needed to be protected for future use. The earliest Homo Sapiens single individual, intentional burial sites are estimated to have occurred 100,000 years ago. Those Sapiens grave sites contained bodies decorated with red ochre and tools suggesting their ritual care held symbolic intent. 40,000 years ago, burial sites grew more elaborate with graves containing ochre, jewelry, weapons, and artwork, culminating around 4,700 years ago in the Egyptian pyramid system. Modern burials...

There are no known organisms that live on nothing. All must engage in some sort of food consumption to sustain their lives. Predators either hunt and kill or scavenge off the deceased. Grazers mow green plants until they are nubs, then move on to greener pastures. Photosynthetic organisms, such as plants, consume light, water, and carbon dioxide to synthesize the sugars necessary for their survival. Biologically, consuming means taking in matter and energy to live, grow, and reproduce, a process necessary to all living beings if they are to perpetuate and procreate. Without the pressures of death to sustain life, evolution would have taken a vastly different path. I doubt that life would have evolved beyond single-cell organisms, including the blue-green algae that inhabited the primordial soup.

I grew up in the racially charged South Side of Chicago, an area with definitive lines separating white from black. Many of the families in my suburb fled the city neighborhoods in which they grew up because they feared living in an integrated neighborhood, believing they would be under siege from those "colored" people. The exodus was called white flight. It was exacerbated by unscrupulous real estate agents who would cold call and announce that "they" were moving into the area and ask if the homeowner would like to sell before property values plummeted. It was not until I attended University, where, immersed in diversity, that I was able to purge myself of the infected thinking rooted when surrounded by homogenous thought and petty prejudices that I assimilated by osmosis.

The belief that humans have free will is the basis for the modern laws governing crime and punishment is foundational to most, if not all, modern societies. Those that don't tend to be firmly embedded in Determinism, the belief that all events, including human actions, are determined by prior causes. Modern laws include caveats to lessen or eliminate punishment if a person is deemed either too young to make rational decisions, alleged to be mentally compromised, psychologically incompetent, or coerced into committing an unlawful transgression. Religion is a system known for strict adherence to dogma in the face of conflicting data, requires free will...

The implicit implication when saying something needs to be fixed is that the thing is broken. A stick can be snapped, as can a human bone, when pressure is exerted with sufficient force. Machines can stop running because a crucial part becomes defective, taking down an entire system. Earth is a highly complex system with checks and balances, but I don't envision Earth being broken, considering it is a self-healing system that adapts to variations, creating new realities as elements evolve and the system dynamically adapts, creating new realities.

The USA in which I grew up is but a faint mirage of the USA in which I am now living, despite my living in the same city area for nearly all of my soon-to-be 65 years on earth. Some, increased empathy, individual awareness of their rights, a growing appreciation of diversity, and less outright segregation have been for the betterment of society and individuals. Others, the resurgence of blatant discrimination against the poor and nonwhite, the trend toward embracing fascism, and a desire to return to earlier days when only white males were allowed to vote, are very much to the detriment of a once-admired nation. It is quite a culture shift over my lifetime.

That someone would need to seek out the significance of silence tells me they are likely an incessant babbler compelled to fill the silence they fear with nonsensical words, the way a baby craves a favorite blankey or self soothes by sucking their thumbs. So powerful is the silence vacuum, the police frequently use silence as an interrogation technique because they know silence is a black hole void that pulls incriminating words from people's mouths.

There are five question renderings beginning with the letter 'W': What, when, where, why, and who. Coupled with two tiny words, 'am' and 'I', they span queries from empirical to existential. What I am, when I am, and where I am can pretty much be answered unequivocally by observation. In my case, I am a human living in 2025 Chicago. 'Why am I?' requires delving deep into metaphysics for any plausible answers. 'Who am I?' can be addressed both empirically by observation...

indness, a false equivalency. In this instance, presented as a false dichotomy, attempting to imply that morality and kindness exist in a causal relationship when they are, at best, tangentially related. This question presupposes morality is inherently about kindness, whereas reality is nothing more than the code of conduct a person chooses to adopt and cultivate from within themselves. Kindness is treating people how they wish to be treated...

There was a time in my arrogant youth that I viewed art, narrowly defined as drawing and painting, as a colossal waste of time and artists as people unable to survive the rigors of a classical education focusing on maths and the hard sciences. It was an attitude probably fostered by my complete lack of ability to draw anything other than lopsided stick figures and a desire to be more like my hero, Spock, a person dedicated to logic unencumbered by emotion. Also, in my quest to become a being of pure logic and science, I focused all my reading on non-fiction books to grow my real-world knowledge, not realizing my accompanying empathy deficit would haunt me later in life. It wasn't until years later that I read a non-fiction article explaining that reading quality fiction helped a person develop the empathy that makes them a higher functioning human being,

Humanity's fledgling mind was sharpened on the vast plains and rough steppes in the heart of Africa, long before there was a name for the elephant-headed continent, into a finely honed instrument capable of experiencing the material side of reality. The honing experienced exponential growth once they achieved hunting and gathering prowess, giving them the leisure time necessary to turn inward. The inner explorations gradually developed into a rudimentary spiritual sense, boosting their intimacy with the lands, animals, and plants encountered in their daily wanderings...

I must start off with a caveat (or two). I have two compelling emotional biases when it comes to the ethical question of depriving animals of their liberty and putting them on display for gawkers. On the other hand, I have been an avid gawker visiting zoos for the sheer joy of seeing those magnificent beings in living flesh, blood, and mind. This, despite some of those minds being turned to mush by captivity, leaving a soulless shell to neurotically pace the same worn path over and over, ad infinitum. The two ends of the unbalanced equation amount to my joy at being in the animals' presence...

There is a hidden presupposition in this question designed to skew the answer toward either of two implied outcomes. The question seeks to elicit a binary answer of either right or wrong. This tendency in challenging questions ignores the equally possible answers of maybe or irrelevant because a false dichotomy is being imposed. That presupposition encoded is that right and wrong objectively exist for this or any situation. A secondary presupposition...

Sound waves are mechanical vibrations that travel through a medium such as solids, liquids, or gases, carrying energy as oscillations of pressure and particle displacement. Sound waves exist in a wide range of frequencies. For humans, the audible range is 20 Hz (cycles per second) up to 20 kHz. Many animals are sensitive to other frequency ranges. Elephants are sensitive to infrasound, those vibrations below 20 Hz, while bat sensitivity extends to 200 kHz. The Greater Wax Moth detects the vibrations up to 300 kHz, helping it avoid the predatory bats. Hearing any of the mechanical frequencies requires a transducer capable of mechanically converting sound...

Another question seeking to impose a dichotomy where none exists. It doesn't even consider there may be a middle ground where both can be true or neither reflects a truth. It makes me wonder if the question was generated by a politician attempting to deploy a self-serving law that will line their pockets with Judas Gold mined on the breaking and broken...

The dictionary defines consciousness as the state of being aware of one's existence, feelings, and surroundings. Consciousness encompasses the totality of one's thoughts, perceptions, and sensations, both internal and external. The word is often used to mean the state of being awake, not asleep, as in the ability to regain consciousness after fainting or recovering from general anesthesia. It is the Western mind that confines consciousness to the non-sleeping state.

Equality is the state of being equal in status, rights, and opportunities. It means each individual or group of people is given the same resources and opportunities regardless of their circumstances. One pertinent example is paying the same pay for males, females, or others performing the same job. So important was equality to the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence includes the phrase, "All men are created equal." Unfortunately...

Another query designed to create a false dichotomy. A question designed not to derive a thoughtful answer that could fall easily on either side of an imaginary divide, but rather to elicit a response supporting the questioner's view by implying an answer. Psychology calls this a suggestive question, phrased in a way that presumes or encourages a particular answer, often employed in a manipulative context. It is also called a paradox, which is a question without a possible, coherent answer. A common question of this sort is the infamous, "Can god create a rock so big even god can't lift it?"

Right or wrong is an entirely manmade concept that changes depending upon the spurious claims of religions and their ever-changing morality, or on a set of laws codified by government and is subject to a continually evolving understanding of the law's intent by the judiciary, themselves influenced by their religious affiliations. Ultimately, every person picks and chooses their moral foundation, so wrong or right are subject to individual whims, whims...

Every parent of more than one child is acutely aware of the tear-filled cry of "That's not fair!" when one child has or gets something while the other doesn't. It can be as simple as one child being invited to a classmate's party while the sibling who is in a different class is not invited. Parents must make decisions for the child until they are old enough to pick and choose for themselves. There is likely a good reason for the parents' behavior being perceived as inequitable, considering each of us is a unique individual, unlike any other person in history or futurity...

This question is anathema to minds honed on Western ideologies. A stinging bee exploding the fragile ego bubble of people who believe the world was built for humans and revolves around human needs. An arrogance so all-consuming that land, plants, and nonhuman animals were put upon the earth solely to satiate humanity's desires, irrespective of the impact on the natural world that, unironically, is a requisite for human survival and existence. Even the standard definition of harmony has been abrogated by the Western mind to be solely human-oriented.

Globalization, to be clear, is a process by which businesses and other organizations develop international influence or operate on an international scale. The world becomes more interconnected with economies, cultures, and populations linked by cross-border trade, technology, and the flow of goods, services, people, and ideas. In simple terms, it is the integration of countries and businesses across international borders. Full disclosure, beginning in 2005, I was on the bleeding edge of global software development, where I saw the challenges...

Love, in its many splendored forms, has been a primary force in art, especially poetry and its close cousin, musical lyrics, for as long as both emerged from consciousness to express the desperate longings of humanity. Morrissey expressed it with his typical angst in his lyrics, "I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does." The definition of love has as many nuanced connotations as the equally ambiguous word God. The definition lies in the soul of the beholder.

n is phrased as a gotcha, a question that attempts to force a choice between implied extremes, similar to the way lawyers and other biased debaters try and twist words to make a point by employing a false dichotomy. Being human and spiritual are not mutually exclusive. In fact, humans require both physical and spiritual aspects to be fully human. To be spiritual is to seek meaning beyond the material world, often involving a sense of connection to...

on both sides of the faith divide, so feel fully qualified to broach an answer to this metaphysical question. I was indoctrinated into Catholicism from the moment I could breathe, attended Parochial schooling for 12 impressionable years, finally breaking free of the mental shackles as my brain grew to think rationally. That thought freedom allowed me to see the inherent hypocrisy of those immersed in the system. I was avowedly secular for many years, even writing an essay titled "I am God!" for a college writing course. The essay earned me an "A" from a devout Jewish professor, giving third-party legitimacy to my declaration...

Creativity is the ability to generate new and original ideas, solutions, or objects by making connections between different concepts. In other words, creativity is using the imagination or original ideas, especially in the realization of artistic work. Art is the expression of human creativity and imagination through various media, including painting, sculpture, music, and literature. Art requires creativity, but creativity does not necessarily produce art. Einstein's Theory...

By definition, to be moral is to act according to principles of right and wrong based on personal or societal standards of good behavior. Moral standards serve as a basis for people to live together in groups predicated on established guidelines of proper conduct and character. Personal moral standards are typically influenced by society, culture, and religion, but ultimately come down to what an individual decides is their personal code of conduct.

Predeterminism is the belief that all future events are fixed or decided in advance by a divine plan, fate, or other force, rather than being determined by present conditions or random chance. In short, all aspects of the future are inescapable, meaning the future cannot be altered. It is the polar opposite of having free will. In human terms, everything we think, say, and do was set in stone at the advent of time with no possibility of deviating from the set course. The mind we think we are changing, an illusion...

Morality is defined as a set of principles and standards that define what is considered right or wrong, good or bad within a society, culture, or individual. It encompasses beliefs about proper conduct and character necessary to live cooperatively and make decisions based on a shared understanding of acceptable behavior.I posit morality is subjective...

ath, the, at least, 50,000-year-old question, a date based upon the earliest ritualistic burial sites, assuming they are an indicator of humans looking beyond earthly existence. Probably earlier, considering our minds tend to wrestle with ideas long before those concepts are made manifest in some tangible form. Art is a creative endeavor. The earliest known cave paintings, at 66,700 years old, are likely the result of early hominids asking the big questions, including how do we summon food to feed our tribe and what do we become after we die?

nism is defined, rather narrowly, as an organic entity bounded by a collection of traits, including cellular organization, the ability to grow and develop, the capacity to reproduce and metabolize, respond to stimuli, maintain a stable environment through homeostasis, and adapt to change. Anything without these characteristics is classified as non-living matter. The first problem arises when we realize there is no evidence that the Earth has or even can reproduce either sexually or asexually. Asexual reproduction requires...

From a philosophical perspective, reality comes in two potential frameworks. Physicalism claims reality is purely physical, that everything is composed of matter and energy, and follows the laws of physics with no existence of spiritual, mental, or other non-physical realms. The other extreme, Spiritualism, claims reality is purely spiritual, with the physical world merely an illusion arising from consciousness. I have been hit on the head with a rock...