Hopeful Thinking

One might assume this column is about sex. The answer could be sort-of yes. Why not? But more. In this instance I’m specifically talking about how we literally manufacture love.              To be honest, I’d never really thought about love before as something which could be “made” in that sense. But as it occurred to me I couldn’t seem to deny that love was something about which I couldn’t imagine a finite amount either. Does it seem plausible there is a fixed and stable volume of love in the universe? Is there a rule we can’t make more?              Of course there’s the argument that an infinite amount of love exists and we over time and ages learn how to tap into it; in essence we are reminded of our eternal connection to a pre-existing love. But that doesn’t mean we don’t also make more of it. Or, that it doesn’t have value to frame it that way for practical use. ...

Is there a plan for all this? Is this normal? Is the seemingly-tumultuous state of our world a typical part of the learning curve of an ultimately civilized planet? If we could look at the histories of civilizations on other planets far more advanced than we, would we see a similar pattern? If we could read about another world in a book, would we see the birth of agriculture in their history, and with it, war? Would we see a deep pattern of atrocities against one another over territory and resources slowly ebbing over generations? What about race? Could it be that race is part of this long lesson in how to get along? Are we alone in this or is there really a plan? We are faced with contrast every day. Preferences, dislikes, affections, revulsions. Fighting and loving, both. We see war in the exact same space as compassion. Where one kills, another heals. Because love is more real than war. Where disaster strikes, relief increasingly comes. When relief does not come for them, we ...

It’s obvious that we have too much stuff. Stuff oozes from every nook and cranny of our homes, our offices, our dumpsters, our recycling bins. We especially love packaging. It’s practically half of the experience. Packaging has the unsavory job of attracting you strongly enough to purchase what’s inside only to be itself discarded. So remember, our stuff comes in stuff, meaning almost everything you buy is actually two things. At least. Which is interesting to consider when we make that an allegory to the inside as well as the out. What stuff could you get rid of? What literal emotional pollution are you holding onto? What trauma still haunts you? What breakups, breakdowns, failures or disappointments still whisper at you to shy away from excessive joy because happiness is untrustworthy? How’s that going for you? First you need to know what stuff you have. And that is the crux of the matter. We rarely know how much we carry along with us. We have gotten use...

It takes practice to use our powers of assumption for good. We assume the negative. By and large, people are not mean. People are hurt. There are reasons we’re more comfortable assuming the negative. For one, misery never lets us down. It’s reliable and predictable. Its loyalty quickly fills the vacuum left by departing happiness. Second, we never feel the need to be prepared for the best. We feel we are always ready for good. And since we are advised to only hope for the best, yet be prepared for the worst, we use our energy on preparation. But how much of it do we spend on hope? How much airtime do you give to constructive fantasy and wonder? Without it life becomes a cycle of expecting and preparing for the worst, receiving it, and then patting our backs for the wise predictions we made. We love to assume. Perhaps it is better to say we are instinctively compelled to assume. We are wired to evaluate data in order to draw conclusions. It’s a survival instinct. But our biolog...

Thank you for everything. It’s a simple prayer. One that cannot be expressed in simpler terms, actually. Thank you. Thank you for everything. For life. For even stress. For love and heartache both. Thank you. Now let’s define who “you” is. I can’t. At least not for you. You have to decide who the “you” is in that prayer. You are the only member of your faith. It will never be any other way. You are the leader of your own thoughts and beliefs. Even when you think you have been instructed, you will still have opinions about what and by whom. You may be a fully devoted Catholic, for instance, and yet will always maintain your own views about the doctrine. Blind faith is actually a misleading sentiment. No faith is blind. We can’t simply shut off our opinions. More so now than ever in history, in fact. So, who is your “you?” I prefer to assume that what people refer to as “God” is the literal connection between all life. The interdependent web of all existence. I believe that ...

On what level of our psyche does friendship occur? What part of us is doing the feeling when we have a friend? Is it an area of our cerebral cortex? Is it in the air between us? Is it an entirely chemical reaction in the body? Where are the literal threads of my friendships and to what in me are they anchored? I think most of us are comfortable with the notion that friendship is a real thing. Not imaginary. To be clear, I’m not speaking of the friends themselves. I’m speaking of the connection between them. That connection between you and your closest friend exists whether or not you are together. Across the globe from one another the friendship is no less strong. No less real. Do we form these kinds of connections online as well as in “real life?” I would have to say yes. And we regularly form them with people we’ve never met. My mother had a penpal in Australia as a child. They wrote to each other for years. Decades later they finally met in person. Were they not friends until...

There is one great overarching message which all mythology and religion tells us. It is repeated over and over. Story after story, it is drilled into us. God(s) want us to be grateful. They want our praise, our devotion. They expect total obedience and lengthy worship. At least, that’s how we have interpreted it. The haphazard character of humanity is so often ascribed to divinity. We love to believe that God feels the way we feel. That God is only interested in being praised for the benefit of an ego. Greek mythology is especially good at making the divine in their stories behave like spoiled children. Worse actually, self-absorbed teenagers. We historically sculpt the divine into a jealous reflection of ourselves. We know how we like to be praised. We know how good it feels to have a job well done recognized by people we respect. Some of us are obsessed with praise for unhealthy reasons and behave badly, even vengefully, when they don’t get what they need. We assume the same o...