SHEE, IT'S A SECRET

Everyone loves secrets, right? Well, I have one of the biggest you'll ever hear....

But first we have to set the stage for the big reveal. The "stage" is called the news-of-the-world. News has been tumbling out from every corner of the planet from the atolls in the Pacific to the mountains of the Urals, from the deserts of the Middle East to the plains of the American Middle West. Only now it's all right there smack dab in your face 24/7. On television...in the newspapers...on the Internet...on your cellphone, IPad, and whatever whatchamacallit you just bought yourself for Christmas.

Lot of ways to describe this experience. Information. Education. Interpretation. Yeah, they sound about right. Only they're not entirely right. Shock might be a better definition. The palpable shock of your sensorium being hit like heat-seeking missiles. One after the other after the other.

Admit it -- you're pretty much left dazed. Overwhelmed. Another natural disaster, another bank crisis, another job crisis, another terror or war crisis. So much going on so relentlessly. The suppressed sensation: Oh God, I hope they can handle this one!

This is where the secret comes in: "They."

Whether we live in a dictatorship or a democracy, we the people intuitively assume -- presume! -- there is always a "they" in charge. A mayor, a president, a pope. Oh really...? Picture this example. You're riding on your morning commuter train as usual. Gradually you sense the car is speeding up. More and more so that it seems to be rocking on the rails. Everyone around you keeps reading their morning editions, but you're concerned. Actually, you're becoming downright scared. And so you quietly get up, move through the car, then the next, then finally reach the driver's cabin so you can ask the person in charge for yourself: "What's going on...?"

Now here's the secret, friends. You open the cabin door...and no one's in there...!!!

THE EVOLUTION OF REVOLUTION

We don't know who invented fire, the alphabet, or agriculture. We do know who invented the printing press, gun powder, radio, television, the polio vaccine and now Facebook. However, with or without authorship, such moments in human history have been appropriately defined as "revolutions."

Revolutions mean everything after is now fundamentally different than everything was before. Which, when you think about it, also describes less heralded events such as the moment you fell in love or the day you buried your parents. Fulcrum points on the teeter-totter of existence from which you now either teeter or totter for the rest of your days.

The young scrappy gang of revolutionaries at Facebook have recently announced their revolution will become one of the most defining in human history. In some ways, it's hard to disagree. If Facebook continues to emerge as a force, and to submerge competing forces, its revolution will be prodigious. For the very first time you and I will be in convenient and continuing contact with anyone anywhere anytime. In ways that forever destroy the understood limits of time and space within which we have grown up.

America's favorite boy genius, 26-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, puts it this way to his half-billion Facebookers: "Communication 2.0 is becoming seamless, informal, immediate, personal, minimal and short." As the recent explosion of Wikileaks makes clear, Communication 2.0 is coming to mean -- for better or for worse -- there are no longer any doors, gates or secrets that can stand very much longer between you and me, between my feelings and your feelings, between my religion and your religion, between my nation and your nation.

In some ways it means we are walking the world virtually naked. Transparency or trouble...? That is the question....! A question we can refuse to answer, but soon even our refusal will be documentable. Accessible. A profile that others can choose to work with or against, massage or manipulate, embrace or destroy.

Like all great revolutions, you're the tail on the tiger. So if nothing else, it's incredibly dangerously exciting...

IS THERE ANY GOOD NEWS LEFT?

What do we mean by "the news?"

The question is old, but the scope is new. Right now there are more ways and means of gathering and distributing news than ever before in the history of humanity (see the Wikileaks trauma for debatable details). The computer coupled with the Internet has now made everything and anything accessible at anytime anywhere to anyone.

But why, we wonder, must it always be bad news? Yes, yes, we understand the flawed schadenfreude nature of humanity that can't resist gnawing on the carcasses of other lives. But is there ever a time and place where we can savor the good stuff rather than the bad? That is to say, more than just the pre-requisite 90 smiley seconds at the end of the newscast?

Well, we have our answer. And she is a lovely one. She goes by the name of Kate Middleton -- the chosen princess-to-be at the royal hands of the UK's Prince William. The felicitous intersection of love, royalty, and fairy-tale grandiosity.

Right now the British and the American media are appropriately gaga over her. (Gaga as in thrilled not trashy). And why not? For a refreshing change -- don't tell me anything bad about her just yet, for that will surely come in time -- for a refreshing change, we have something other than paper mache' Hollywood starlets to ooh over. Here we have beauty without bawdiness, Charm without cheap. Sensuality without sleaze.

Please, world, don't ruin this! For just a brief shining moment, perhaps the Anglo-American media will dare to fuss over the tender rather than the tragic. Not to worry, fellas, the bad stuff will always be there waiting for you...

A SNOWY REALITY CHECK ON REALITY

Reality is a big thing these days. You find it everywhere. Reality shows, reality checks, reality thinking, the real-deal. But what is reality...? Really...?

Empirical-minded folks quickly parade statistics. The ultimate real-deal, they say. But as anyone past puberty knows by now, stats are not facts, because facts are not always the facts. Statistics are like bikinis: What they reveal is suggestive, what they hide is vital.

What then about our culture's obsession with reality-TV? In some ways the putrefaction of democracy, these shows pretend to let real people do real things really right there in front of us. Even if what they were doing were of actual interest to me, why in heaven's name would I care to have it in my living room? Turn the channel, you say? No help there, six more of the same.

OK, lets consider the ultimate reality: Deity. Is there or is there not a supreme being? Atheists and theists debate this endlessly. (Agnostics take the easy way out and shrug "Who Knows?). At the end of the theological day. each party goes his or her own way. Meanwhile, if there really is a supreme being, he/she/it must surely be amused by our small,pinched sense of reality down here.

Finally, let us consider the season's first snowfall. Herein rests the true test of what each of us sees as reality.

When I look out I see trouble, trouble right here in River City. Walks to be shoveled, roofs to be checked, streets to be navigated, expressways to survive. Hateful! On the other and sweeter hand, there are the children. The children whose wondrous eyes look out upon this wondrous white Panamas as beautiful. joyful. a play-land just for them.

Conclusion...?

The reality of stats and facts, of television and theology, are all well and good. But the reality of a first snowfall in the mind of a child has just gotta be the best reality of all. Snowballs, anyone...???

BORROWING LINUS' LITTLE BLUE BLANKET

The organ music was soaring...the stained glass windows were glowing...and the christening service was eloquent. Still, all I could really see here was the little blue blanket in which the infant had been so tenderly swaddled for this moment.

Was it irreverent to be thinking of Charlie Brown rather than God...?

By no means are the two mutually exclusive. You see, Charlie's little brother Linus sometimes speaks with the wisdom of God. Always, though, clutching his little blue blanket. A blanket which speaks volumes about the world into which this beautiful infant will be entering. A world that Chekhov described as "a tragedy filled with joys."

To ponder the tragedy we have Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Camus among others. To anticipate the joys we have baby Stephen. Then, to protect the fragile joys, we each have our own little blue blanket. A metaphor for all the threads woven into the tapestry of our lives that we have designed to clothe us against adversity.

Stephen's adversities today are easily staved off with woolly blankets, soft diapers and warm milk. As he and we travel through life, adversity comes not in single sentries but in legions. Physical, mental, financial, societal. As Bette Davis famously reminded us: "Growing up and growing old ain't for sissies!"

Fortunately, Stephen, we, and Linus can cling to our respective little blue blankets as need demands. Perhaps it is that place called home where they can't turn you out...that room or church or temple where your tears and terrors can find respite...and especially that mind and heart we have nurtured so as to explain and manage our fears.

With luck, we will continue to explain and manage them. At least just enough so we like Linus can return for another day's strip....

SHOPPERS & SAINTS

Every December I walk Chicago's Michigan Avenue. It calls itself The Magnificent Mile due to its glistening trees, decorated stores, and inextinguishable crowds of shoppers. Quirkally, all this modernity is anchored on one end by the subdued splendor of the old Drake Hotel, on the other by the gray classicism of the Tribune Tower.

But it's the images and music in between that's worth the walk.

Images like the wind-burned faces hidden inside swaths of colored scarves...pony-tails flapping behind giant woolen caps...leather boots clicking emphatically down the pavement...adult eyes fixed resolutely forward toward appointments or downward toward privacy...children eyes popping and flashing at everything they can see....traffic cops keeping it all flowing, some of them with military precision, others with patented flair.

Occasionally you even catch a glimpse of something that has to do with Christmas. An angel, a star, a crib. Of course, these are not what most shoppers are here for. Or even allow for. Isn't that unconstitutional or something...?

The music along the Magnificent Mile has in recent years become a mixed bagatelle. Yes, some sanitized Christmas songs having to do with reindeer and snowmen, but gotta watch the sacred stuff. Too many folks can be too offended by the sacred too close to the secular. Doesn't that have to do with Thomas Jefferson or something...?

A country's music can tell the story of its history. Yankee Doodle in the Revolutionary War...When Johnny Comes Marching Home in the Civil war...Over There in WWI...When the Lights Come On Again in WWII.
Of course, mixed in with the essential is the other. Which may come to some minds here as loud speakers occasionally pipe in "holiday music" by Lady Gaga, Eminem, or Jay-Z.

Near the end of the stroll appears this twentysomething lugging hardware that is clearly not a holiday gift. The hardware slips. I help. For a few moments we talk to one another through clouds of cold breath. She works for the nearby Rehabilitation Institute, and she's carrying a portable oxygen unit to her job. A job she loves, "because you really get to help and love people."

Waving goodbye, you have the feeling you just found the feeling you were looking for here. The feeling and the passion which started all this back in that shepherd's stable. As they say: All stories are true, some even happened!

And yet, I didn't even get her name...

TAKING ON HARVARD IN DAY-DREAMING

When it comes to me versus Harvard, odds will always be in favor of Harvard. But maybe not this time.

In a recent New York Times article by Harvard dream researcher Matthew Killingsworth, he reports: "People's minds are elsewhere 47% of the time. Tracking 2200 volunteers on what they were doing at various times of the day, we found that everyone caught daydreaming expressed the same degree of unhappiness with what they were doing at the time."

The research conclusion: "The rate of mind-wandering is lower when engaged in enjoyable activities,"

If I may be so bold, two problems with Harvard here: (1) It shouldn't take expensive research to prove the obvious; day-dreaming is the mind escaping whatever you're doing at the moment (2) if recent research on "lucid dreaming" is valid, perhaps there's such a phenomenon as "lucid day-dreaming"

Lucid dreaming is learning how to achieve a state of partial consciousness during one's dreams, in order to learn from these dreams. For some of us, lucid day-dreaming is pretty much the same thing. With practice, a person can learn how to conjure up pleasant memory-bursts anywhere, anytime. Little dreamscapes of past places, people and events that have given you pleasure.

I don't have 2200 volunteers to rely on here. Just one. My experience has been that conjuring up such little explosions of mental pleasure can afford some of the same rewards as a puff of marijuana or a shot of whiskey. But without the after-effects. The mind is an astonishing instrument which can defy the laws of space and time, swooping us into little scenarios of private pleasure without anyone around us even suspecting.

And while the mind often engages in such occasional flights-of-fancy, the challenge here is to train it to do it on demand. In times of danger, stress, or boredom, this cerebral flying carpet can be snatched for whatever ride you command. Best only when for a few moments at a time, but always lucidly so your consciousness is working enough to draw out the pleasure from the memory-bursts.

It's the old pleasure/pain syndrome of life. Seeking to minimize the pain and maximize the pleasure. And in the case of lucid day-dreaming, it's not only free. It's anytime, anywhere, and with any degree of functional pleasure you need.

Come to think of it -- this is how the celebrated Count of Monte Cristo did it. And look, he ended up getting his very own novel and movie out of it...!