THE TRIUMPH OF THE TRICYCLE
Our backyard neighbor has a grand little garden I enjoy watching erupt each new spring. This year there's been a charming add-on. Their little girl has grown out of diapers, and hesitantly into the seat of her new tricycle. Watching her the other day from my second-floor window was a lesson in triumph...
At first she sat on it trying to reach the pedals. Then to pump the pedals.Then to maneuver the handlebars. She didn't make a great deal of progress down the sidewalk, but really it was her many pauses that were the most instructive. There she would sit, pondering her journey. To pump or not to pump? To turn or not to turn? Especially, to be or not to be?
Unlike Hamlet, she was not contemplating her death; she was speculating on her life. I couldn't hear her sing-song chattering from my window, but I'm sure I heard some of her thoughts: "Gee, I wonder how long before I get the hang of this thing...I wonder what tomorrow morning will look like...what will I do with it...what kind of tomorrows come after that...will I grow as tall as Daddy and as nice as Mommy...?"
Everything around her was static and today. The tricycle, the sidewalk, the garden, her secret observer. On the other hand, everything about her was mobile and tomorrow. Her thoughts, her questions, her hopes, her expectations, most of all her exuberant curiosity.
And so as closed the curtains of my private sky-box, a comforting thought slipped into place. Springs still happen, gardens still sprout, children still grow, their tomorrows still arrive. And with their arrival, this amazing world of ours still keeps spinning and trying and occasionally -- because of little grownup girls and boys -- succeeding.
MEET YOUR PARENTS
Whether or not your parents are still alive, the operative question always remains the same. Have you ever met them...? Chances are, not likely...!
All that children see in their parents is all that their parents saw in their parents. Only what's there to see as they are, here and now. But children forget their parents were people before they were parents. They had braces and acne, hopes and dreams, youth and vigor, all nothing to do with having children.
Un-tombing their long ago youth is not easy for a child. Perhaps it's not even possible. But here's a spring-cleaning idea! Stay on the lookout for forgotten old photo albums, because somewhere, somehow, they just may house the sacred key to this soulful search...
....an old candid of your parents before they were parents. When they were lean and young and beautiful and full of tomorrows. If you come across some unseen scene like that, hold it close in your hands as you feel the sweet tears in your eyes. This will be a meeting like none you've ever had before.
Monday, April 12, 2010
Sunday, April 11, 2010
WHAT'S REALLY REAL IN LIFE?
Has this ever happened to you? Sure it has! You're in your weekend grubbies picking up some milk at the store. You see some people standing outside a nearby church. Wedding or funeral, they're all in their finest. Neat black suits, sparkling white dresses, impeccably shaved and made-up. For a moment, you feel like maybe you should hide somewhere...
Here's one of those little mirrors when you suddenly look at yourself and ask: "What's really real in life? Showing up at your best at important moments, or just showing up as you are each new morning..?"
Maybe this is how to look at the question. Life comes in two parts -- the on-stage part and the back-stage part. Both really are real; but each calls for a different part and heart of us to show up. On stage -- at weddings, funerals, events -- we're inclined to bring our best self. Our best effort. I mean, this in the best sense is a performance. And performances do call for our best.
Backstage is different. Effort, yes; performance, no. Backstage -- most of those hours in most of those days in most of our life -- is mainly a matter of doing what needs to be done, more than what others expect us to do. Eating, reading, resting, watching, throwing out the garbage, getting the bills paid on time. No one's watching, so no need for a performance.
Does the difference mean our backstage self is somehow less? Not really. Just distinct, and yet at the same time, complementary. The better we use our time backstage, the better we probably have to offer when we're onstage. In an actor's terms, it calls for a good audition...good rehearsals....learning your lines...knowing when and where to move on stage.... most of all, getting to really understand the part you're playing.
If, as Shakespeare insists, life is a stage and we're all players, then the best way for the audience to get comfortable with our role, is first for us to get comfortable with it. But that, my fellow players, usually takes the better part of a lifetime...
Here's one of those little mirrors when you suddenly look at yourself and ask: "What's really real in life? Showing up at your best at important moments, or just showing up as you are each new morning..?"
Maybe this is how to look at the question. Life comes in two parts -- the on-stage part and the back-stage part. Both really are real; but each calls for a different part and heart of us to show up. On stage -- at weddings, funerals, events -- we're inclined to bring our best self. Our best effort. I mean, this in the best sense is a performance. And performances do call for our best.
Backstage is different. Effort, yes; performance, no. Backstage -- most of those hours in most of those days in most of our life -- is mainly a matter of doing what needs to be done, more than what others expect us to do. Eating, reading, resting, watching, throwing out the garbage, getting the bills paid on time. No one's watching, so no need for a performance.
Does the difference mean our backstage self is somehow less? Not really. Just distinct, and yet at the same time, complementary. The better we use our time backstage, the better we probably have to offer when we're onstage. In an actor's terms, it calls for a good audition...good rehearsals....learning your lines...knowing when and where to move on stage.... most of all, getting to really understand the part you're playing.
If, as Shakespeare insists, life is a stage and we're all players, then the best way for the audience to get comfortable with our role, is first for us to get comfortable with it. But that, my fellow players, usually takes the better part of a lifetime...
Saturday, April 10, 2010
HUMAN PROGRESS IN MAJOR & MINOR KEYS
PROGRESS PLAYED IN A MAJOR KEY
Scientists at the Scripts Research Institute in Florida have conducted experiments with rats (what else?) that strongly suggest: "We are now making our food very similar to cocaine. Especially junk food like cheesecake, frosting, bacon and other fatty, high-calorie foods."
If you're like me, your appetites won't want to hear the rest of this, so proceed at your own risk!
When given unlimited amounts of these foods, lab rats quickly became addicted as these meals lit up the pleasure centers of their brains. As if they were taking drugs. The more they ate, the more they needed to eat. Then when the foods were removed, the rats at first refused to eat anything at all. It was the crash after the high.
Dr Gene-Jack Wang concluded: "Fast-food meals and other heavily processed foods are stripped of fiber and nutrition, thereby designed to trigger our innate preferences for fat, sugar, and salt." So the next time you pass a MacDonald or a Burger King, remember this yummy stuff actually alters your brain chemistry in much the same way that cocaine does.
Carrots, anyone...?
PROGRESS PLAYED IN A MINOR KEY
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water....!
There is this other group of research scientists in England who have studied another region of the brain (the right temporoparietal junction just behind the right ear) which they say is responsible for our moral reasoning. To verify their hypothesis, they placed a painless magnetic pulse to the scalp, scrambling the electronic signals of the neurons there.
The human subjects, with this moral center now inoperative, reached moral decisions in which "they gave less emphasis to the good or bad intent of selected actions." Researcher Liane Young told BBC News: "You think of morality as being a really high-level behavior. So to be able to apply a magnetic field to a specific brain region and change people's moral judgments is really astonishing."
What may be still more astonishing is how today's relentless experiments by neuro-biologists seem to make of our species just another member of the animal kingdom. Slightly higher on the food chain than the baboon and dolphin, but not much...!
And thus we are left to wonder if 5000 years of philosophical & theological thought about good & evil, honor & justice, virtue & morality has been wasted on a species no more significant in the cosmos than any other pile of planetary dust?
If so, does this mean we best burn down our libraries and universities to replace them with sophisticated Orwellian human hatcheries....?
Scientists at the Scripts Research Institute in Florida have conducted experiments with rats (what else?) that strongly suggest: "We are now making our food very similar to cocaine. Especially junk food like cheesecake, frosting, bacon and other fatty, high-calorie foods."
If you're like me, your appetites won't want to hear the rest of this, so proceed at your own risk!
When given unlimited amounts of these foods, lab rats quickly became addicted as these meals lit up the pleasure centers of their brains. As if they were taking drugs. The more they ate, the more they needed to eat. Then when the foods were removed, the rats at first refused to eat anything at all. It was the crash after the high.
Dr Gene-Jack Wang concluded: "Fast-food meals and other heavily processed foods are stripped of fiber and nutrition, thereby designed to trigger our innate preferences for fat, sugar, and salt." So the next time you pass a MacDonald or a Burger King, remember this yummy stuff actually alters your brain chemistry in much the same way that cocaine does.
Carrots, anyone...?
PROGRESS PLAYED IN A MINOR KEY
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water....!
There is this other group of research scientists in England who have studied another region of the brain (the right temporoparietal junction just behind the right ear) which they say is responsible for our moral reasoning. To verify their hypothesis, they placed a painless magnetic pulse to the scalp, scrambling the electronic signals of the neurons there.
The human subjects, with this moral center now inoperative, reached moral decisions in which "they gave less emphasis to the good or bad intent of selected actions." Researcher Liane Young told BBC News: "You think of morality as being a really high-level behavior. So to be able to apply a magnetic field to a specific brain region and change people's moral judgments is really astonishing."
What may be still more astonishing is how today's relentless experiments by neuro-biologists seem to make of our species just another member of the animal kingdom. Slightly higher on the food chain than the baboon and dolphin, but not much...!
And thus we are left to wonder if 5000 years of philosophical & theological thought about good & evil, honor & justice, virtue & morality has been wasted on a species no more significant in the cosmos than any other pile of planetary dust?
If so, does this mean we best burn down our libraries and universities to replace them with sophisticated Orwellian human hatcheries....?
Friday, April 9, 2010
UNAVAILBLE ON iPHONE OR iPAD
They say once our bodies grow cold enough, we slip into a state of painless semi-consciousness, and gradually die. Is this what could be happening with today's cynics? The what-the-hell shrug of those convinced to go with the flow inasmuch as it can't be changed anyway?
Often this is the cue for the old-timer to step in and say something like, "In my days, the world was a lot better place to live in." But the young cynics have heard that and refuted that many times before with, "The good old days were old, not good. You just don't remember, old man."
Here's what I remember...
Each age has a role model for its times. In the 18thC, Washington and his cherry tree. In the 19thC, Tom Sawyer and his whitewashed fence. In the 20thC, Mickey Rooney as Andy Hardy in the movies. Please -- no knee-jerk reaction about how all those images are only fictions. Of course they were only fictions, but fictions whose influence was far greater than mere facts!
If you intend to really know a country, don't tell me about its laws and its GNP. Tell me about its songs and especially its popular role models. We can't bring back George Washington, and Tom Sawyer seems a long way ago. But most nights you have one of the 16 "Andy Hardy" movies from MGM, produced in glorious black&white between the years 1937 and 1958. Years when America was deep in a depression. Deep in a world war. Deep in a cold war.
In other words, Americans weren't a naive society dancing their way through buttercup times. And still, Rooney's puckish, irrepressible Andy Hardy was the number one box office hit in the world. City after city. Year after year. What did these cotton-candy scripts have that so held the hearts of kids, parents, politicians, and soldiers alike?
Ahh, now here's where the old-timer has the edge over his hard-living, hard-loving iPhone and iPad generation going with the flow. He remembers something from America they can't access on their technology. Exactly what...? Well, there's really nothing exact about it....! You simply have to immerse yourself in these small-town USA Andy Hardy films, and sorta get the feel that 200 million Americans back then sorta felt.
Careful, though! The experiment doesn't mean you have to believe 150 million Americans believed everything Andy and his family believed. But for the experiment to work, you do have to believe this is pretty much what 150 million Americans wanted to believe, because they felt these were the right things they should believe --
America is a good place to live...neighborhoods and neighbors are good to have...parents love their kids...kids love their parents....everyone respects their teachers, their police and their president....boys and girls fall in and out of love more than in and out of bed...goals are good...honesty is right....honor is rewarded...happiness is possible...God smiles over our nation...oh, and we're still trying to learn how to make this Equality thing work.
Music up. Fade to black....
Often this is the cue for the old-timer to step in and say something like, "In my days, the world was a lot better place to live in." But the young cynics have heard that and refuted that many times before with, "The good old days were old, not good. You just don't remember, old man."
Here's what I remember...
Each age has a role model for its times. In the 18thC, Washington and his cherry tree. In the 19thC, Tom Sawyer and his whitewashed fence. In the 20thC, Mickey Rooney as Andy Hardy in the movies. Please -- no knee-jerk reaction about how all those images are only fictions. Of course they were only fictions, but fictions whose influence was far greater than mere facts!
If you intend to really know a country, don't tell me about its laws and its GNP. Tell me about its songs and especially its popular role models. We can't bring back George Washington, and Tom Sawyer seems a long way ago. But most nights you have one of the 16 "Andy Hardy" movies from MGM, produced in glorious black&white between the years 1937 and 1958. Years when America was deep in a depression. Deep in a world war. Deep in a cold war.
In other words, Americans weren't a naive society dancing their way through buttercup times. And still, Rooney's puckish, irrepressible Andy Hardy was the number one box office hit in the world. City after city. Year after year. What did these cotton-candy scripts have that so held the hearts of kids, parents, politicians, and soldiers alike?
Ahh, now here's where the old-timer has the edge over his hard-living, hard-loving iPhone and iPad generation going with the flow. He remembers something from America they can't access on their technology. Exactly what...? Well, there's really nothing exact about it....! You simply have to immerse yourself in these small-town USA Andy Hardy films, and sorta get the feel that 200 million Americans back then sorta felt.
Careful, though! The experiment doesn't mean you have to believe 150 million Americans believed everything Andy and his family believed. But for the experiment to work, you do have to believe this is pretty much what 150 million Americans wanted to believe, because they felt these were the right things they should believe --
America is a good place to live...neighborhoods and neighbors are good to have...parents love their kids...kids love their parents....everyone respects their teachers, their police and their president....boys and girls fall in and out of love more than in and out of bed...goals are good...honesty is right....honor is rewarded...happiness is possible...God smiles over our nation...oh, and we're still trying to learn how to make this Equality thing work.
Music up. Fade to black....
Thursday, April 8, 2010
THE iPAD COMETH!
No argument here! Steve Jobs and his new iPad have all the makings of the second coming of Moses on the mountain top, carrying brand new tablets for the people. "Time," "Newsweek," "The New York Times" and virtually every print medium was quick to salute their own demise...!
Well, not exactly demise. However, from now on it's very likely that millions more each year will be reading, watching, computing and gaming on this, Apple's revolutionary evolution of the personal computer. Ever since time began, there has been Male and Female. Now there is also iPad.
There will be few people at the foot of this mountain who will challenge the new Moses. Or his sacred tablets. Progress is progress, and the iPad is surely progress in every way. Except, maybe, for two among us. The Monk and the Amish. While I have no personal relationship with either, I'm imagining how a conversation among the three of them might sound:
Steve: "I have come to set you free."
Monk: "Free from what?"
Steve: "From the time&space limits of your everyday world."
Monk: "But I am not of this world; my world is in the life of the spirit."
Amish: "And in my world, time&space are not something we try to overcome; instead, to take in stride."
Steve: "I'm not saying everyone needs the iPad; but I am saying, everyone can gain something with it."
Amish: "Ahh, but gaining things like faster and easier isn't quite what we're all about."
Monk: "And actually, Steve, gaining something makes no sense once you've already found everything."
Steve: "Well, thanks for listening, fellas. [LONG PAUSE] But, you know, maybe I should come down from here, and listen to you for awhile!"
Cue the lightening...! Oh, and also the enlightening...!
Well, not exactly demise. However, from now on it's very likely that millions more each year will be reading, watching, computing and gaming on this, Apple's revolutionary evolution of the personal computer. Ever since time began, there has been Male and Female. Now there is also iPad.
There will be few people at the foot of this mountain who will challenge the new Moses. Or his sacred tablets. Progress is progress, and the iPad is surely progress in every way. Except, maybe, for two among us. The Monk and the Amish. While I have no personal relationship with either, I'm imagining how a conversation among the three of them might sound:
Steve: "I have come to set you free."
Monk: "Free from what?"
Steve: "From the time&space limits of your everyday world."
Monk: "But I am not of this world; my world is in the life of the spirit."
Amish: "And in my world, time&space are not something we try to overcome; instead, to take in stride."
Steve: "I'm not saying everyone needs the iPad; but I am saying, everyone can gain something with it."
Amish: "Ahh, but gaining things like faster and easier isn't quite what we're all about."
Monk: "And actually, Steve, gaining something makes no sense once you've already found everything."
Steve: "Well, thanks for listening, fellas. [LONG PAUSE] But, you know, maybe I should come down from here, and listen to you for awhile!"
Cue the lightening...! Oh, and also the enlightening...!
RICHARD ROPER & DAN BROWN -ODD COUPLE
FREEDOM OF THE PRESS, RICHARD ROPER STYLE
Richard Roper is a thoughtful journalist, and yet in his April 15 column he offers us a perfectly thoughtless idea. An idea that ripples far beyond his own self-promoting purposes. He defends his appearances on any and all outlets (Fox, Leno, Stern), because as he instructs us: "This is the land of opportunity...so I believe it's perfectly acceptable to tell your stories on a wide variety of stages."
It's not his instructions here that bother me; it's their implications. Roper weighs his book-promoting appearances based on a "I go by how people treat me" scale. By implication, that tells me he would therefore cooperate with any City Council member who treats his parking tickets helpfully...vote for any candidate who treats him and his career generously ....support any general and his war who treats his opinions favorably.
Richard, this may be "a land of opportunity," but using your logic, I wonder what kind of news favors you would have shown Nazi candidates running in the elections of the 30s? I mean, if they had "treated" you nicely, would you have felt comfortable returning the favor? See -- this is what I mean about the ripple-effect implications of your logic. A logic my three grandchildren unfortunately just read and quoted...
THE "LAST SUPPER," WITHOUT DAN BROWN
When Dan Brown invited himself to daVinci's "Last Supper," he concocted a colorful collection of villains for the price of his headline-making book. But for all his jaw-dropping implications about the famous painting, he forgot the meal itself!
Nowhere does his "DaVinci Code" address what the food on the table might have been telling us. I mean, while he was busy de-constructing 2000 years of researched religious history, why one wonders didn't he find something conspiratorial about the food itself?
Turns out he didn't have to. Others now have. Not authors, but art experts. The "Los Angeles Times" reports they can document that in the "52 renderings of the Last Supper painted between the years 1000 and 2000 (eg. El Greco, Rubens, etc), the size of the loaves of bread grew by 23%. and the meal itself by 66%."
So here's the thing, Dan...! What you may have missed is the "conspiracy" of how the Western world has been seduced into eating bigger, and growing fatter ever since that long ago Seder.
Richard Roper is a thoughtful journalist, and yet in his April 15 column he offers us a perfectly thoughtless idea. An idea that ripples far beyond his own self-promoting purposes. He defends his appearances on any and all outlets (Fox, Leno, Stern), because as he instructs us: "This is the land of opportunity...so I believe it's perfectly acceptable to tell your stories on a wide variety of stages."
It's not his instructions here that bother me; it's their implications. Roper weighs his book-promoting appearances based on a "I go by how people treat me" scale. By implication, that tells me he would therefore cooperate with any City Council member who treats his parking tickets helpfully...vote for any candidate who treats him and his career generously ....support any general and his war who treats his opinions favorably.
Richard, this may be "a land of opportunity," but using your logic, I wonder what kind of news favors you would have shown Nazi candidates running in the elections of the 30s? I mean, if they had "treated" you nicely, would you have felt comfortable returning the favor? See -- this is what I mean about the ripple-effect implications of your logic. A logic my three grandchildren unfortunately just read and quoted...
THE "LAST SUPPER," WITHOUT DAN BROWN
When Dan Brown invited himself to daVinci's "Last Supper," he concocted a colorful collection of villains for the price of his headline-making book. But for all his jaw-dropping implications about the famous painting, he forgot the meal itself!
Nowhere does his "DaVinci Code" address what the food on the table might have been telling us. I mean, while he was busy de-constructing 2000 years of researched religious history, why one wonders didn't he find something conspiratorial about the food itself?
Turns out he didn't have to. Others now have. Not authors, but art experts. The "Los Angeles Times" reports they can document that in the "52 renderings of the Last Supper painted between the years 1000 and 2000 (eg. El Greco, Rubens, etc), the size of the loaves of bread grew by 23%. and the meal itself by 66%."
So here's the thing, Dan...! What you may have missed is the "conspiracy" of how the Western world has been seduced into eating bigger, and growing fatter ever since that long ago Seder.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
I'M ONLY LETTING YOU IN ON THIS!
Of course you're all busy. But here's a quick test for you anyway....
How can a 21stC American adult measure happiness? I realize that's an imperfect question to a perfectly immeasurable inquiry, but bear with me a moment.
In scanning today's news, literature, and screens, I submit there is one recurring answer. Happiness has something to do with a creative combination of the following: Power...Wealth...Beauty...Military/Political/Corporate Status. Name a headline or a storyline or a songline that doesn't say this!
OK, now meet 13-year-old Aaron Gyllenhaal who lives near where I grew up on the westside of Chicago: Columbus Park. Leafy, lovely, green Columbus Park is one of the last to have been created in Chicago's splendid panoply of public parks. Now, every year, Aaron does what I used to do. Count the White-Fronted Geese that use this turf- grass habitat as a stopover snack bar on their way between Central America and the Arctic Circle.
Aaron and I don't know each other, but over an 80-year period we somehow have shared the very same tiny green happiness from tracking these magnificent heather-colored birds. He knows all about them, because he's part of the Audubon Conservatory Sanctuary Program out there. In my time, I didn't have access to such data. And yet, I'm sitting here imagining our uncelebrated happiness-quotient strolling Columbus Park was (and is) higher than any that will be reached by the world's rich-and-famous.
Big unsubstantiated boast, you say...? Well, just go ahead and see how many of the rich-and-famous know anything about White-Fronted Geese families chomping across the green green grasses of our Columbus Park...!
How can a 21stC American adult measure happiness? I realize that's an imperfect question to a perfectly immeasurable inquiry, but bear with me a moment.
In scanning today's news, literature, and screens, I submit there is one recurring answer. Happiness has something to do with a creative combination of the following: Power...Wealth...Beauty...Military/Political/Corporate Status. Name a headline or a storyline or a songline that doesn't say this!
OK, now meet 13-year-old Aaron Gyllenhaal who lives near where I grew up on the westside of Chicago: Columbus Park. Leafy, lovely, green Columbus Park is one of the last to have been created in Chicago's splendid panoply of public parks. Now, every year, Aaron does what I used to do. Count the White-Fronted Geese that use this turf- grass habitat as a stopover snack bar on their way between Central America and the Arctic Circle.
Aaron and I don't know each other, but over an 80-year period we somehow have shared the very same tiny green happiness from tracking these magnificent heather-colored birds. He knows all about them, because he's part of the Audubon Conservatory Sanctuary Program out there. In my time, I didn't have access to such data. And yet, I'm sitting here imagining our uncelebrated happiness-quotient strolling Columbus Park was (and is) higher than any that will be reached by the world's rich-and-famous.
Big unsubstantiated boast, you say...? Well, just go ahead and see how many of the rich-and-famous know anything about White-Fronted Geese families chomping across the green green grasses of our Columbus Park...!
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