“Anything truly novel is invented only during one’s youth”

This summer I read Walter Isaacson’s illuminating biography of Albert Einstein, the man who is widely considered to be the greatest thinker of the 20th Century. In 1905, when he was only 26 years old, he published four groundbreaking papers that forever changed the way people understood space, time, mass, gravity and energy.

By the time Einstein turned 40 in 1919, at a moment when he was struggling to devise a unified theory of matter, he complained to a friend that “Anything truly novel is invented only during one’s youth. Later, one becomes more experienced, more famous – and more blockheaded“.

Einstein’s frustration at his diminished capabilities as he aged is a phenomenon that is considered common with mathematicians and physicists who seem to make their greatest contributions to science before they turn 40. Einstein remarked to a colleague that as he got older he felt his intellect slowly becoming crippled and calcified.

Why does this happen? In Einstein’s case, it was partly because his early successes had come from his rebellious traits. In his youth, there was a link between his creativity and his willingness to defy authority and the universally accepted cosmological laws of his day. He had no sentimental attachment to the old order and was energized at the chance to show that the accepted knowledge was wrong or incomplete. His stubbornness worked to his advantage.

After he turned 40, his youthful rebellious attitudes were softened by the comforts of fame, renown, riches and a comfortable home. He became wedded to the faith of preserving the certainties and determinism of classical science – leading him to reject the uncertainties inherent in the next great scientific breakthrough, quantum mechanics. His stubbornness began working to his disadvantage as he got older.

It was a fate that Einstein began fearing years before it happened. He wrote after finishing his most groundbreaking papers: “Soon I will reach the age of stagnation and sterility when one laments the revolutionary spirit of the young“. In one of his most revealing statements about himself, Einstein complained: “To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself“. He found it even harder as he got older acknowledging “the increasing difficulty a man past fifty always has adapting to new thoughts”.

Einstein brilliance is beyond compare, but I can relate to his observation about doing your best work when you are young. When I look back at my personal life and work career, I recognize that I was at my most ambitious and innovative during the decades of my 20’s and 30’s.

My adult life exploded with big events in 1982, the year that I turned 22. In the timespan of that one year I managed to graduate from college, marry my college sweetheart, start my first professional job as an engineer, buy a new house and a new car, and learn that my wife and I were going to become first-time parents. I remember filling out a survey designed to measure the amount of stress in your life during that eventful year and being surprised when the calculated stress numbers registered so high that they indicated I should be dead!

But all of it was exhilarating to me at that point in my life. I was experiencing new things and accumulating knowledge like a sponge. I knew that my growing family would be counting on me to be a good provider – which gave me the incentive I needed to focus on building a stable career.

I was determined to be successful in my engineering role and threw myself into learning everything I possibly could about the company I worked for as well as the electronic test and measurement equipment that they manufactured.

Many of my co-workers had graduated from more prestigious universities than me and I felt that I had something to prove. I wanted to make a name for myself and grow my reputation and value within the company by making important contributions to the projects to which I was assigned.

I took several continuing education engineering classes at night to improve my knowledge of subject areas that I knew would be helpful to me at work, I sought out brilliant co-workers who could mentor me and give me wise advice on how to approach complex technical projects, and I questioned everything – wondering if there might be a better solution to the problems we were trying to solve.

This drive in my early career to be successful enabled me to do my most innovative and important work for the company during the decades of my 20’s and 30’s. In the span of my first 18 years working for the company, I was awarded two patents, helped develop multiple new test products which generated millions of dollars for the company, created automated software regression tests significantly lowering product development times while improving software quality, and published frequent technical articles for industry conferences and trade journals.

By the time I turned 40, I could point to many important career milestones and had achieved recognition as a top performer and leader within the company. The rewards of my hard work were a comfortable home and financial independence. With this success I began to have feelings of contentment that lessened my drive to take on new projects or solve interesting problems. I became comfortable and happy with life as it was – I no longer felt the need to over-extend myself.

I was satisfied to rest on my past achievements and to take on less tasking roles that would improve the product in evolutionary, rather than revolutionary ways. Over time, I became the wise, experienced, older mentor to younger employees who came to me for advice and direction.

I felt okay with that transition as I considered it my good fortune to be in a situation where I was able to share my knowledge with a new generation of ambitious young people who were ready to make their own marks on the world by inventing novel new solutions that were now beyond me. In some ways, being a part of those collaborative efforts made me feel better than my individual personal accomplishments.

The famous journalist Ed Bradley once interviewed Bob Dylan in 1998 on the television show 60 minutes, at a time when he was approaching 60 years old. During the course of the interview, Bradley asked Bob what the source of inspiration was for his famous early songs, the ones that led to him being recognized as the voice of a generation while he was still only in his 20’s.

Dylan replied that his early songs were almost magically written and that he felt some kind of power, outside of himself, flowing through him while was writing them. When Bradley asked if he could still tap into that penetrating magic now in his songwriting, Dylan paused and said; “No, I don’t know how I got to write those songs“. Bradley followed up and asked if that disappointed him, Dylan replied softly; “Well you can’t do something forever and I did it once… and I can do other things now – but I can’t do that“.

That is a healthy way, I believe, of thinking about what is possible for each of us as we age. My days of endless ambition and innovative thinking are past. But I can do other things now that I couldn’t do then. I can indulge hobbies that interest me, I can find new paths to hike and rivers to fish, I can help care for my mother in her old age and I can share what I have learned through my life experiences and pass it on to my grandchildren and the larger community via this blog.

There will only ever be one Einstein, none of us will ever be as brilliant as him – but if you are under 40, get busy by putting your spry young mind and youthful ambition to work! Maybe you too can come up with novel ideas and ways of doing things that will help change the world or someone’s life for the better.

And if you are over 40, you can be like Einstein in his older years; contributing in a positive way to his community and sharing his wisdom, experience and good fortune with the next generation. In the end, many of our late in life pursuits that we share with others can end up being more rewarding and meaningful to us than any personal accomplishments we achieve along the way.

Wear the World Lightly

There is a story I heard once about two relatives who were attending the funeral services of a wealthy family member. One of them, with a greedy glint in his eyes, leans over and whispers; “how much did he leave?“. The other looks back and responds…”All of it“. The point of the story was that when our time comes, we don’t take any of our possessions with us.

St. Francis of Assisi, who was born into a wealthy noble family, left his life of possessions and privileges to start a monastery and live a life of simplicity. His advice to those who wanted to join him was to “Wear the world like a loose garment, which touches us in a few places and there but lightly”. 

St Francis Statue

The Alcoholic Anonymous organization adopted this teaching of St Francis and shortened it to the simple phrase: Wear the World Lightly. Their 12-step program for overcoming addiction uses lots of sayings to help people detach and overcome their addictions, phrases like: live and let live, let go and let God, turn it over, easy does it, and one day at a time.

All of these statements of detachment are not intended to send a message that we should be indifferent or dead to the world, or have no feelings at all. Rather their purpose is to teach people to face the world with a kind of mindful disengagement.

It is this “detachment with love” philosophy that can help motivate people to create a peaceful space within themselves, separated from the never-ending incoming arrows of uncertainty, fear, anger, and other painful events that plague our life. Practicing detachment helps people look past the daily shocks that occur, producing a change of attitude in the mind and a physical release in the body.

To wear the world as a loose garment is to acknowledge that the world and our life will always press at us and around us, but that it does not have to touch us but “lightly”. Most things are either outside our control or ultimately unimportant. 

We do not need to grasp, manage, dwell on or react to everything that happens to us. We can choose instead to keep the world at an emotional distance so we can stay focused on doing the next right thing. It is an attitude that can relax the body and relieve the mind of the poisonous emotions that overcome us when we are confronted by the people, places or things that beset us.

To be in the world but not of it, is to live and move through life without being emotionally attached to everything that happens. Life can get hard, but those who wear the world lightly learn how to live in the world with their hardships, neither fighting them nor being crushed by them.

St Francis was essentially encouraging us to not sweat the small stuff. To not get annoyed or depressed when life does not go your way or when you do not get what you want. When you have lived long enough you come to understand that most of the things that bother us are small potatoes. Even death apparently, which the Dalai Lama described as a simple change of clothes.

I’ve heard it said that the secret to happiness as we age “is to care less and less about more and more“. The wise elders I have been fortunate to know in my life carried that attitude with them; they tended to let fewer and fewer things bother them as they got older. It’s not because they didn’t care, most likely it was just that they discovered through their life experience that it is possible to walk away, without anger or agitation, from some things they felt passionate about – and still live.

I happened across an on-line sermon about this same topic of wearing the world lightly by Bishop Robert Barron. From a spiritual point of view, Bishop Barron also believes that St Francis’ famous statement was an attempt to teach his followers about the importance of detachment – especially from the goods and achievements of the world.

Not because the world itself is bad – there are all kinds of good, true and beautiful things in the world – but because the things of the world are not the ultimate good and we are not meant to cling to them as though they were.

There are stories throughout the Bible about the futility of clinging on to earthly power, riches and glory. King Solomon is one of the greatest figures in the history of Israel from a standpoint of wealth and power. He was somebody who had it all; nobody was richer, nobody was more famous, nobody had richer palaces or clothes. But, as an old man, looking at all the possessions he has acquired over his lifetime, he says: “Vanity of vanities, all things are vanity!“.

The word vanity in Hebrew signifies something that is insubstantial and momentary, like wind or vapor or bubbles; something that is here for a brief time and then it is gone. Solomon has experienced everything: power, sensual pleasure, wisdom, honor and wealth. He has built up a reserve of wealth through his knowledge and skills and yet when he is gone, he must leave all his property to others who have not labored over it and do not deserve it.

It is not uncommon to hear complaints like this from men as they become old and infirm; “I gave my whole life to my business, I worked hard and I made a fortune. Now I’m an old man and I’m surrounded by ungrateful children and grand-children; and I’ve done all this work and yet these people are going to inherit all my wealth. What’s it all been about“?

If you live to be old enough, at some point, you finally come to realize that everything in this world has a quality of evanescence – it disappears and does not last. It is a good thing if you have been successful and built up a fortune – but it’s not going to last. Because you are going to fade away and it’s all going to go to somebody else.

Should we just be depressed then? Father Barron says no, not depressed, instead we should be detached. Our wealth, power, pleasure and the esteem of other people. It’s good. We should take it in and then let it go. We should enjoy it the way you enjoy a firework going off. Learn to live in the present moment, savoring what we can, but then letting it go.

Why? Because we come to realize that the truly good and beautiful things belong to a higher world. We can sense them in the good things of this world but none of our earthly things last and so if we cling to them, what happens is they disappear, they crumble as we try to grasp at them. Rather see them, appreciate them and then let them go.

We can get caught in an addictive pattern when we cling to the goods of the world. You worry about them so you say to yourself, oh no I better get more. Instead, we would be wise to remember the cautionary parable of the rich fool told by Jesus:

“The ground of a certain rich man brought forth abundantly. He reasoned within himself, saying, ‘What will I do, because I don’t have room to store my crops?’ He said, ‘This is what I will do. I will pull down my barns, and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. I will tell my soul, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years. Take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.”‘ “But God said to him, ‘You fool, this very night your soul is required of you. The things which you have prepared— whose will they be?’

Luke 12:16-21

St Francis asks us to cultivate an attitude of detachment in our life. To stop clinging and hanging on to the things of the world. The more we cling to them, the more we become imprisoned by them. We’ll become bitter, angry , empty if our only focus is on the acquisition of ephemeral things. But if we practice the proper spiritual attitude of detachment and keep our eyes on the true and beautiful things that do not fade away then we will know how to handle the goods of the world as they come to us.

Fr Barron closes his sermon by emphasizing again that wealth in itself is not the problem. He points out that wealthy people can be saintly when they know how to use their wealth, how to wear it lightly and how to become generous with it. The only thing we take with us into the life to come is the quality of our love and what we’ve given away on earth. So, we should forget about trying to fill up our lives with bigger barns; true joy in life comes through building up our treasure in heaven.

The publication of this particular blog represents a milestone for me and the achievement of a goal I set for myself way back in 2013 when I posted my very first Words to Live By blog entry. I have been publishing this monthly blog for almost 10 years now and and have managed to author 100 different blog entries in that time.

I have attempted in this collection of postings to communicate ideas and philosophies that have helped me along the way and given my life direction and meaning. It has been a wonderful mental exercise for me and a labor of love that has helped me recognize things that make life interesting and wonderful. I hope my readers have discovered some of their own words to live by that will be of specific value to them in their own life.

In the spirit of “wearing the world lightly”, I plan to cut back on my blogging activities moving forward so that I am can devote more time focusing on doing the next right things in my life that will increase the quality of my love. I don’t plan to walk away from blogging completely though, as there are always more words to live by to be discovered and examined.

So, keep an eye out for the occasional future posting from me; and until then, may the blessings abound in your life.

All Perception is Fundamentally an Illusion

Most people who stare at the image below will believe the dark oval in the middle is growing larger. But, believe it or not, it is just an illusion – a static image.

According to a study published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, this illusion has something to teach us about how our brains and eyes collaborate to see the world. Researchers tested the illusion on 50 men and women with normal vision and found that those participants who had eyes with the strongest pupil dilation response had the greatest response to the illusion; while those with poor dilation response could not see it.

The pupils in the human eye are designed to automatically adjust to the surrounding light, dilating when it is dark so they can capture more light, and constricting when it is bright to prevent overexposure. Even though the hole in this illusion is not darkening, the perception or expectation in our mind that it should be darkening is enough to make our pupils respond.

Bruno Laeng, a psychology professor at the University of Oslo and an author of the study, says: “There is no reason that the pupil should change [while looking at this image], because nothing is changing in the viewers world, but something clearly has changed inside the mind.”

The researchers hypothesize that the illusion is deceiving because the gradient on the central hole makes it look to the viewer as if they are entering a dark hole or tunnel, which prompts the participants’ pupils to dilate. Our brains are making assumptions about what it sees based on past experience and is trying to predict and prepare our senses for what it thinks will happen next.

It takes time for light to reach our sensory organs and send the image to our brain. The brain then takes more time to process the image, make sense of it, and decide what actions to take based on the collected information. By the time our brain catches up with the present, time has already moved forward, and the user’s environment has most likely changed.

To minimize this image collection and processing delay, the brain may be constantly trying to predict a little bit into the future so that it can better perceive the present. Being fooled by this expanding hole illusion is not a flaw of the human species, but a feature. It is most likely built up from evolutionary history to help humanity survive.

The information we get from our senses is spotty and incomplete, so the brain has evolved over time to try to guess what is happening in the uncertain and ever-changing world – and to make decisions based on what is most likely to happen next.

People who possessed brains with the best ability to adapt and predict what is happening at any given moment most likely had an advantage over those that lacked the capacity to adapt. When the illusion image is communicated to the brain, it anticipates that the body will soon be entering a dark place and it responds by telling the pupils to begin dilating (so the body will be able to react sooner in case there is danger lurking inside that black hole).

Researchers tell us that everything we perceive is inconsistent with the physical reality of the world. It is not just that the information taken in by our senses can be misunderstood, it is also that there is a universe of information available in the physical world that is imperceptible to the human senses.

Consider light itself. The light our human eyes can detect is only a sliver of the total amount of light that’s out there. The 0.0035% of the electromagnetic spectrum we can see is referred to as visible light, but the other 99.9% percent of the spectrum consisting of radio waves, microwaves, infrared radiation, ultraviolet rays, X-rays and gamma rays are all undetectable by our eyes.

Electromagnetic Light Spectrum

Humans have cone-shaped cells in our eyes that act as receivers specifically tuned to the wavelengths in the narrow visible light band of the spectrum. Other portions of the spectrum have wavelengths too large or too small and energetic for the biological limitations of our perception.

Evolution has not endowed us with the ability to see beyond the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum; although it is possible to feel infrared radiation as heat and employ other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum for practical uses, such as X-Ray medical imaging.

But we carry on with our lives, oblivious to the huge spectrum of electromagnetic waves present all around us. Humans have managed to survive and reproduce despite our limited view. It’s a good thing that visible light was adequate to help our ancestors detect predators that would do them harm.

But imagine if our eyes were able to detect other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum — our universe would be unrecognizable. We could glean so much more visual information if we were able to see in the radio, infrared or even X-ray regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Bees and butterflies are examples of organisms that can detect Ultraviolet radiation. Some flowers have special markings that can only be seen in UV light. Bee and Butterfly eyes are able to view this electromagnetic radiation like lights on an airport runway, to find their way to the flower’s nectar. Snakes have special sensory organs on the front of their heads that let them ‘see’ infrared waves, which they put to use with particular effectiveness when hunting for warm-blooded prey.

Consider our sense of sound. Humans can detect sounds in a frequency range from about 20 Hz to 20 kHz, though the upper limit in average adults is closer to 15–17 kHz (because humans lose some high-frequency sensitivity as they mature).

That range of sounds allows humans to hear many of the sounds produced in nature, but not all. Any frequency that is below the human range is known as infrasound. It is so low that it may be detected only by a creature with big ears, such as an Elephant or by specialized instruments designed by scientists to detect the low frequency sounds that precede avalanches and earthquakes. Any frequency that is above the human frequency range is known as ultrasound. Bats and Dolphins use ultrasound frequencies as high as 200,000 Hz to help them navigate via echolocation.

Most dogs can hear sound frequencies as high as 47,000 to 65,000 Hz which is far too high-pitched for humans to hear. That is why dogs can be trained to detect when their owner is about to experience a seizure. Dogs ears are also much more sensitive to loud sounds than ours, which is probably why fireworks, thunderstorms and vacuum cleaners send them scurrying for cover.

Consider our sense of smell. Humans have 396 olfactory receptors which are employed to help us pick up scents. Almost all animals, however, have a larger number of olfactory receptors than humans (rabbits have 768 olfactory receptors) which provides them with an excellent ability to smell. 

Among the animals with the greatest sense of smell are bears whose sense of smell is 300 times better than humans and is capable of detecting a deceased animal from up to 20 miles away; elephants who can smell water sources from up to 12 miles away; sharks who can smell the presence of a drop of blood in almost 100 liters of water; and bloodhounds whose sense of smell is 2,100 times better than that of a human’s and can detect trace amounts of drugs and explosives inside packages.

When you consider all these blind spots in our senses, it is obvious that humans live in a world in which many sights, sounds and smells exist that are beyond the ability of our limited senses to detect; and those that we can detect can be compromised by our overactive minds. It’s enough to make you think that all human perception is, fundamentally, just an illusion; or as Bob Dylan keenly observed “All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie“.

It could well be that we are each living in our own virtual reality world, bound by the limitations of our physical senses and the tricks employed by our minds. Dr Laeng believes we each do live in a virtual reality world. Much of what we see is an illusion, but we are not really being tricked – he believes the visual illusions help to reveal the mismatches between what our eyes see and what our mind’s eye thinks is happening.

So what lessons can we take away about how to live our lives knowing the limits of our senses and the tendency of our brains to trick us into seeing what it wants us to see.

One lesson is that we should remind ourselves that things are not always what they appear. It is possible for two people to witness the same event but still give contradictory descriptions of what they saw; even though they are certain their description of events are true. Knowing that our eyes are susceptible to being tricked should make the criminal justice system wary of judging guilt based solely on the testimony of eye-witnesses.

Another lesson is to be careful of letting our minds be swayed by our pre-conceived biases and political opinions. If we each live in our own virtual worlds then we need to be careful of falling into the trap of accepting information that matches our biases and opinions while discarding facts that don’t. If more people were careful to seek out an objective, agreed-upon, reality then maybe there would be less disagreement and discord in today’s society.

Finally, we should all be humbled and filled with wonder knowing that what our senses reveal to us is only a small portion of the great wide-world we live in. There is a whole universe out there beyond our human senses – a twilight zone if you will, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of the mind, one where there is so much more for us to discover.

We have a universe within ourselves

“Everybody has a little bit of the sun and moon in them… Everyone is part of a connected cosmic system. Part earth and sea, wind and fire, with some salt and dust swimming in them”

Suzy Kassem

Mankind has always possessed a deep curiosity about the ultimate existential questions of life: how is it that the world came to be and what forces in it led to my creation? Our ancestors, lacking scientific knowledge, made up supernatural creation stories to help them answer these questions and to explain the natural world that their limited human senses observed all around them.

Those of us living today are fortunate because we are on the threshold of becoming the 1st generation to ever know in great detail, and with some confidence, the answers to those great questions. In the past decade the results of several major observational studies have brought a level of clarity and coherence to our understanding of the universe that we have never had before.

The pace of recent cosmological discoveries has been truly breathtaking; especially considering that it was less than 500 years ago when man first learned that the earth revolved around the sun and less than 100 years ago when astronomer Edwin Hubble proved that the universe actually contained more than 1 galaxy.

Thanks to images taken by the Hubble Telescope over the last 30 years; and the first astonishing images produced by the recently launched James Webb Telescope – which sits a million miles away in space – astronomers now have the capability of looking back to the beginning of time – to see the actual birth of galaxies.

The Webb Telescope is 100 times more powerful than the Hubble, with six times more light collecting capability, enabling it to see objects in much finer detail. The increased clarity of the new images have led astronomers to increase their estimates of the number of galaxies in our universe from 200 billion to 2 trillion!

James Webb photo of galactic cluster SMACS 0723, the deepest infrared image of the distant Universe ever produced. The image covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground. It reveals thousands of galaxies, some of which are as far away as 13.1 billion light years. The bluer galaxies are more mature ones, containing many stars and little dust. The redder galaxies contain more dust, from which stars are still forming. Courtesy of NASA.

What really sets the Webb Telescope apart is its ability to focus on the infrared portion of the light spectrum. Most telescopes are designed to see only the small sliver of visible light emitted by stars. The problem with the visible light spectrum is that it gets blocked by the abundant amount of dust and gas that is floating around the universe.

Infrared light is invisible to the human eye but makes up much of the light that comes our way from the universe. The infrared spectrum of light can see past all that dust and gas, which allows astronomers to look with unprecedented detail at some of the earliest and faintest celestial objects in the universe, ones that were born over 13 billion years ago.

Another incredible capability of the space telescope is its ability to detect exoplanets. An exoplanet is simply a planet that orbits a star outside our solar system. Exoplanets have been historically difficult to find because they are very far away, do not emit any light, and are typically much smaller than the stars they orbit.

But astronomers have discovered innovative indirect methods to detect these exoplanets by measuring the dimming of the light of a star that occurs as a planet passes in front of it or by monitoring the spectrum of a star for the tell-tale signs of a planet’s gravity pulling on it and causing its light to subtly Doppler shift.

Using these planet detection methods, astronomers have estimated that about 1 in 5 “sun-like” stars in the Milky Way Galaxy have an earth-sized planet located within its habitable zone. This would calculate to more than 11 billion potentially habitable Earth-sized planets in our own galaxy to discover!

Incredible as it may seem, Astronomers can detect not only the presence of an exoplanet, they can also employ powerful scientific instruments on the telescope, called spectrographs, to identify the unique signatures of specific molecules in their atmosphere.

When an exoplanet passes in front of its host star, a small fraction of the stellar light passes through the exoplanetary atmosphere, where different molecules absorb light of some wavelengths while light of other wavelengths can pass through unhindered. By measuring the fraction of stellar light able to penetrate the atmosphere at different wavelengths, the chemical composition of the atmosphere can be determined.

Turning the intensity of light measured at different wavelengths into graphical signatures allows scientists to measure the chemistry in the atmosphere of distant planets and detect the presence of water or methane molecules which, if found, could provide evidence that there is – or once was – life on the planet.

I had a passing interest in star gazing when I was a boy. I would set up my cheap telescope in my back yard and focus on different celestial objects, not really knowing what I was looking at. My interest in astronomy faded over time as I became busy with the business of life. After my retirement, however, I decided to pick up my old hobby by signing up for one of the science classes produced by the Great Courses called Cosmology: The History and Nature of our Universe. The course re-kindled my interest in the cosmos and stoked my imagination about the wonders of the universe.

Here are just a few of the the things the course covered that seem incredible to me and filled me with wonder:

We can travel back in time…

Even though Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity tells us that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, the universe is so vast it still takes light from distant galaxies a long time to reach the earth. By observing light that originated far away we are travelling back in time to see how the Universe looked when it was younger (we can’t know for sure what distant objects in the universe look like today because their light is not yet observable to us).

Light travels at a speed of 186,282 miles per second, which equates to 5.88 trillion miles per year – which scientists define as the distance light travels in 1 light year. Light from any celestial object that is more than 5.88 trillion miles away from the earth takes more than 1 earth year to reach us. Earth’s average distance from our sun is 93 million miles, so its light only takes about 8.3 minutes to reach us.

The telescopes we have today are powerful enough to observe the first light that came from the hot glowing gas of the Big Bang itself, that moment in time approximately 14 billion years ago, when astronomers believe that our universe came into being.

The brilliant light from this hot gas is observable to scientists via what is called the cosmic microwave background and it shows astronomers a view of the Universe approximately 400,000 years after the Big Bang. Immediately after the Big Bang, the Universe was so hot that the gas was foggy and impenetrable, but as time passed expansion cooled the Universe, and after 400,000 years the temperature dropped enough for the fog to clear and for atoms to form.

So, looking outward (and back in time), our vision is limited by this bright, glowing wall of fog. As the light crosses the expanding Universe, its waves are stretched 1000-fold and arrive as microwaves. So the microwave background reveals the universe in its “pre-embryonic” state right after the Big Bang!

The Laws of the Universe are constant…

Einstein once famously said “The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible.” How is it possible that humans could have developed the mental capacity to understand such a vast and utterly remote cosmic realm? How can something that emerged out of the atoms and evolutionary forces of Nature come to comprehend itself?

The answer is that we all are, in a sense, children of Nature. Much of the character of the universe is all around us here on earth. We’ve evolved in an astronomical setting that is itself beholden to the same laws of physics that span all of space and time. The laws of physics are the same everywhere, and there is much that is cosmic even here on Earth. For example, humans have evolved within Newtonian space and time, which is identical to 99% of cosmic space and time, and this has resulted in our ability to comprehend things like location, distance, size, light and speed.

As far as we know all objects in the universe obey the same universal laws of nature (gravity, motion, thermodynamics, electricity, energy). Because we have studied these topics here on earth for centuries, we can apply our understanding of these laws to everything we observe in the universe.

The nature of matter is constant…

Not only are the laws of physics the same throughout the universe, so is the nature of matter. As far as we know the atomic elements that make up all the matter on earth exists everywhere throughout the universe.

Us, and everything around us, are made of atoms. Atoms are incredibly tiny and numerous. There are about 100 kinds of atoms that we have discovered, each making a particular chemical element, such as hydrogen, carbon, gold, or uranium. The elements are ordered in a periodic table so that elements with similar chemical properties line up in columns.

The Thermonuclear fusion occurring inside stars causes them to become “atom factories.” The huge weight of a star makes a hot, dense core like a furnace: The star burns lightweight fuels into heavier ones. This fusion burning releases energy, which heats the core further and keeps the reactions going. Heat also moves up to the surface, which glows brightly. In the core, the ash from one reaction becomes the fuel for another.

For example, hydrogen burns to helium, which then burns to carbon, and so on. Reactions further down the sequence need ever-higher temperature, because nuclei with more protons repel more strongly. Ultimately, how far along this sequence a star gets depends on its mass; stars of higher mass
can make heavier elements.

How do these freshly made nuclei get out of the star’s core and into the matter that makes up our universe? The remarkable journey starts when the nuclei are brought to the surface in huge, hot currents of gas. On their way up, at lower temperature, the nuclei acquire their quota of electrons and become atoms. These atoms are finally ejected into space when the fuel runs out, the nuclear reactions cease and the star dies.

We are made of star stuff…

When the astronomer Carl Sagan said his famous line that each of us are made of star stuff, he was reminding people that much of the matter of our bodies was created within the stars long ago. He wanted people to know we are marvelous and our story is, too.

Modern cosmology doesn’t just deal with huge things like stars and galaxies; it must also consider the creation of atoms and the planets and people that atoms make. It is a story that takes us from the hearts of atoms to the hearts of stars, and out into the galaxy to watch the birth and death of stars and planets.

It is complemented by the the billion-year mechanism that slowly coaxes these tiny atoms into assembling plants and animals and people – and even the brain reading this sentence. We are no less a part of the Universe than any star or galaxy.

The atoms in you and me probably drifted around in the interstellar medium for 1 or 2 billion years before joining a denser cloud. Within such clouds, small pockets collapse to form stars, and around these stars, disks of dust and gas, which in turn form planets.

In the case of the Earth, some atoms ended up in a spherical ball, with a barren, cratered surface heaving with volcanism. During the next 4.5 billion years, an extraordinary transformation took place, enabled by atoms’ amazing ability to stick together and form molecules which can combine in complex ways.

It’s easy to feel small and insignificant when you consider the vastness of the universe and the timescale of celestial events, especially in comparison with our meager human lifespan. We become awestruck while looking at telescopic images and realizing that a single picture representing one minuscule sliver of the universe is filled with thousands of galaxies, each with billions or trillions of star systems and each of those with its own planets.

Deep field images like those produced by the Webb telescope show us spectacular moments frozen in time. We can see galaxies wrap around one another, colliding and tearing their dusty, star-riddled arms apart in a violent ballet. It’s no wonder that people all over the world stare in wonder at the majesty of it all.

Space exploration is one of the few things that our divided society can agree is overwhelmingly positive. It reminds us of our inherent connection with the universe, but it can also lead to feelings of a profound sense of insignificance – showing us, on a grand scale, just how small we are.

However, despite the vastness of the Universe and our small place in it, we should not feel insignificant. A diagram plotting mass versus complexity would show that living things are enormously more complex than astronomical objects. If objects shone with a brightness in proportion to their complexity, then galaxies would be dim light bulbs, while our brain alone would be a beacon of light visible across the whole Universe!

When you think about it that way, we are very special – and we should be grateful to the stars above that we are one of the most complex things the universe has ever made!

“We are survival machines… blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes”

The picture of human nature painted by Princeton Professor and science journalist Robert Wright in his book “The Moral Animal: Why we are the Way We Are – the New Science of Evolutionary Psychology” is not a very flattering one.

According to Wright, the human animal spends its life desperately seeking status because we crave social esteem and the feel-good biological chemicals that flood our bodies when we impress people.

Though we claim to be independent thinkers who hold fast to our moral values no matter what the consequences, the reality is that we become self-promoters and social climbers when it serves our interest.

What generosity and affection we bestow on others has a narrow underlying purpose, aimed at the people who either share our genes or who can help us package our genes for shipment to the next generation.

We forge relationships and do good deeds for people who are likely to return our favors. We overlook the flaws of our friends and magnify the flaws of our friend’s enemies. We especially value the affection of high status people and judge them more leniently than strangers. Fondness for our friends tends to wane when their status slips, or if it fails to rise as much of our own and we justify this by thinking “He and I don’t have as much in common as we used to“.

Wright says that we do all these things, mostly unconsciously, because of the evolutionary roots of human behavior that have been passed down throughout the 2 million year evolution of the human species – these behaviors are programmed into our genetic molecules.

The book explores many aspects of everyday life while looking through the lens of evolutionary biology. It borrows extensively from Charles Darwin’s better-known publications (including On the Origin of Species) to provide evolutionary explanations for the behaviors that drive human social dynamics.

Below are just a sample of the provocative questions Wright tackles in his book:

Why are humans more monogamous than other animals?

The birth cycle of the human species, unlike most animals, takes a long time. Human mothers carry their babies for 9 months and their children require years of caring and development before they are capable of living independently.

Due to the long birth cycle, women only have a limited number of chances to pass on their genes to the next generation (about a dozen or so during their lifetime). Men, on the other hand, have unlimited chances to pass on their genes given enough supply of women.

From a male evolutionary point of view it makes sense that their genetic drive would be to have sex with as many females as possible. However, this is not in the best interest of the female. To increase the chances of survival, and the well being of her children, it was in the female’s best interest to select male partners who were high in a genetic trait that Wright calls “Male Parental Investment“. Men with high parental investment traits have loyalty characteristics that make them more likely to invest in a monogamous relationship with a single woman and their children.

Men who women perceived were more likely to stick around after their baby was born became more appealing to women and therefore more likely to successfully mate with them. As a result of this preference by females, the trait for high male parental investment evolved over time to become more genetically prominent in men across thousands of generations.

Why is a wife’s infidelity more likely to break up a marriage than a husband’s?

Jealousy is a natural emotion for human beings, but a 1982 experiment which asked participants to picture their partner either having sex with another person or forming a close emotional bond surprisingly showed that men and women experience jealousy very differently.

For the men, picturing their mate having sex with another person led to feelings of intense rage and anger while the idea of their mate being close friends with another male didn’t bother them as much. Women, on the other hand, showed the opposite reaction. They were much more distressed with the idea of their partner forming an emotional attachment with another woman than they were with the idea of one-time sexual infidelity. 

Wright attributes both of these responses to a natural built-in evolutionary reflex of the human species. It is the male’s unconscious desire to propagate their genes that drives their sexual jealousy. Picturing their partner in a sexual act with another man was enraging to them because of the possibility that another man could impregnate their partner, potentially resulting in them rearing a child that had another man’s DNA.

For females, it is not so much the thought of their mate having sex with another female that is upsetting to them; it is the danger that her mate will form an emotional bond with another woman and it will lead to him withholding some of the resources that her man provides to her and her children (so that he can share them with the new woman).

What makes a family prefer some children over others?

Wright claims that evolution has a role in influencing which child and specifically, which gender children the family prefers. Evolutionary psychologists explain that parents will tend to favor the child/gender that has the greater potential to carry on their family’s genes.

This ability to pass on genes historically differed based on what social class the family came from. In a poor family of low status, it was usually the girl who had a greater chance to marry “up” into a family that was wealthier. In wealthier families, it was the boys who were favorites to spread their family’s genes because of their power to find any woman or even multiple partners.

In a study of medieval Europe and nineteenth-century Asia, anthropologist Mildred Dickeman reported that killing females before their first birthday, was much more common among rich, aristocratic families than it was among poor and low-class families. And rich families much more frequently gave inheritances to their eldest son rather than their eldest daughter.

This evolutionary influence still carries on today. A 1986 research study of the island families in Micronesia found that low-status families spent more time with their daughters while higher status families spent much more time with their sons.

Why do humans have morals?

Why is it that humans seem to exhibit a higher sense of morals than other species? Is it because we are conditioned to do what’s right from a very young age, or is it something we are born with? If you ask an evolutionary psychologist, they’ll say that humans behave in a moral way simply because it helps us to fulfill unconscious Darwinian urges for the survival and propagation of our species. 

Our moral behavior is an evolutionary instinct from our past that helps us to survive while enhancing our image. In essence, doing good things for other people is to our advantage because it establishes a debt in our favor that we can cash in at a later date when we need help. For example, if you give food to someone who is desperately hungry, they are much more likely to assist you in the future when you need help to survive.

Wright refers to this concept as “reciprocal altruism“. Our altruism is not selfless. We will readily do good things for other people when it will improve our image and standing in the community or raise our overall social status.

On the other hand, we are not so quick to help others when doing good for others carries no benefit to us. It is clear that human moral sentiments are used with brutal flexibility, switched on and off in keeping with our self-interest.

Evolutionary Psychologists conclude that there is scientific evidence that what we do can be explained by the evolution of our species and the unconscious urges we have to pass on our genes. Altruism, compassion, empathy, love, conscience, the sense of justice — all of these things, the things that hold society together, the things that allow our species to think so highly of itself, can be shown to have a firm genetic basis.

That’s the good news. “Given that self-interest was the overriding criterion of our design, we are a reasonably considerate group of organisms”, says Wright. The bad news is that, although these things are in some ways blessings for humanity as a whole, we need to keep in mind that they didn’t evolve for the “good of the species” and aren’t reliably employed to that end.

Although I found this book thought provoking and many of its insights fascinating, I still like to believe that we are more than just animals doing things instinctually or robots running a program that was downloaded into us. I believe we are all endowed with a spirit that makes it possible for us to rise above our nature and resist the urges of what Biologist Richard Dawkins calls our “selfish genes”.

In the movie “The African Queen“, there is a scene where Humphrey Bogart claims that he can’t change his bad behaviors because “it is only nature”; but Katherine Hepburn responds smartly to the captain’s statement by saying: “Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”

May you experience all the benefits and wonder of our miraculous genetic past, but also have the strength of spirit you need to overcome our built-in selfish instincts and motives. If you can do this you will become more than human!

Can Do Attitude in a Can’t Do Body

One of the things my wife and I like to do together is attend performances at the Merrimack Repertory Theatre. We consider attending plays one of our better date activities because it provides us with an opportunity to break out of our normal routines and have engaging conversations together about the moments in the performances that stirred our emotions or stimulated our minds.

Recently we attended a two-man play called Best Summer Ever that was written and performed by Kevin Kling – an accomplished playwright, storyteller, and contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered. Kling is an ebullient personality and there is something childlike, mischievous, and endearing about him that works to win over his audiences from the start.

One of Kevin’s most admirable qualities is his attitude towards overcoming the physical disabilities that are a part of his life. He was born with a congenital birth defect that shriveled his left arm and left it without a wrist or thumb. Then, at the age of 44, Kevin was in a motorcycle accident that completely paralyzed his right arm and disfigured his face.

Kling is open about his disabilities and tries to explain, with humor, the blessings he has derived from his misfortunes and the benefits that can come from tackling life’s obstacles with faith and a positive attitude. His family and friends stood by him while he recovered from his motorcycle accident and years of rehab.

“It’s hard to deny the power of prayer when you’re on the receiving end of it. I know it helped me heal. At times it was like skiing behind a power boat — all I had to do was hang on… As terrible [as my injuries were] and as scared as I am sometimes, I still feel blessed. And when I get discouraged I just look at my two wiener dogs because they are the best example of a ‘can do’ attitude in a ‘can’t do’ body.

Kevin Kling

Kling separates the disabilities that we are born with from those disabilities we acquire later in life and he points out that being so-called “able-bodied” is always just a temporary condition – sooner or later we are all likely to suffer from life’s frailties. He feels that when you are born with a disability, you grow from it, but when you experience a loss later in life, you have to grow toward it; you need time to grow into the new person you haven’t yet become.

Kevin wrote “The Best Summer Ever” as a way of growing toward the new person he was becoming after his accident. He does this by going back and telling the heartwarming story of his 9 year childhood journey growing up as the son of Norwegian immigrants in rural Minnesota. Exploring his childhood from this perspective became a kind of therapy; helping him to find pieces from his past to fit, not the person he was, but the new person he was becoming.

There were two moments from the play that stood out in my mind as reflections of the kind of positive wisdom Kevin had to share about life with his audience:

We all have a deep desire to feel connected, no matter what age

There is a scene in the play where 9 year old Kevin tries his best to comfort his aging grandfather who is grieving the death of his brother. Kevin is trying to understand why his grandfather is so sad and comes to the realization that his grandfather must feel like an orphan now because his mother, father and all his siblings are now gone. He is the last one of his family left.

How must it feel when the people you had the strongest connection to throughout your life are no longer here? I wonder about my 93 year old mother. After living through the deaths of her mother, father and seven siblings, does she feel like an orphan in some way? Despite her many children and grandchildren, is she happily looking forward to re-establishing connections again with her family on the other side?

Kevin talks fondly about his grandparents and the role they played in his life, saying his relationship with them was one of his strongest connections and one that most shaped who he became:

“I connected with my grandparents. And I think we were in the same light. I mean, I was in the dawn, and they were in the twilight, but we were in the same light. And because of that, they were heading to the creator, and I was coming from the creator. And it seemed, because of that, we spoke a very similar language.“

Live so that your Light outlives you

At the conclusion of the play, Kevin is looking at a nighttime sky full of shining stars and marvels that since the stars are so far away it takes hundreds or thousands of years for their light to reach the earth. This means that those of us left on on earth will continue to receive light from the stars even after they are long dead.

Kevin believes that the light from people can live on after they die too. The good that we do, and the light we share will outlive us if we act to make a positive difference in the lives of the people we love and take meaningful action against the injustice we see in the world.

When Kevin looks up at those stars at night he is happy to feel the presence and memories of his grandparents and parents shining down on him. I hope when you look up at the stars, you too can take comfort and feel gratitude for the connections you had with your loved ones. But more important I hope you are living the kind of life that will continue to shine light long after you are gone. When you think about it, being a light for someone else is one way for us to become immortal.

Industry is the Enemy of Melancholy

I was fortunate to retire from my traditional work career at the relatively young age of 56. Retiring early had become a goal of mine ever since I observed how much my father enjoyed his 30 year post-work life. My father was perfectly content to leave the working life behind and fill up his days with fishing, tending his vegetable garden, solving the daily crossword puzzle, taking naps and watching the home town Sports teams on his television.

When the time came for me to retire, I had an idyllic vision of spending my days in similar fashion. Finally, after 56 years, I was looking forward to being my own boss – thrilled to have the opportunity to wake up every day and do whatever it was that interested me. I believed that every day would feel like Christmas!

And those first few months of retirement really were magical. Gone was the stress of having to be available 24/7 to my company’s sales and management teams who were battling to close million dollar deals, gone was the daily 3 to 4 hour commute in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and gone was the chronic sleep deficit.

It was goodbye to all that. What replaced it was the pleasure of deciding which book to read from my list of “books I always wanted to read“, fly fishing in the beautiful rivers of New England, taking long rides on my electric bike, spending quality time with my grandkids, and attending stimulating concerts and plays with my wife.

Something begin to happen, however, that I was not expecting about six months into my retirement. As the novelty and thrill of being retired began to subside I began to notice that I was experiencing melancholy moods and moments of soul searching. I was spending time reflecting on topics like past loss, the certainty of my physical and mental decline, and the uncertainty of how future generations will deal with the big existential challenges the world is facing.

Without the rigors of work to occupy my attention, my mind was set free to wander where it wanted to go and to my surprise I discovered that it often wanted to contemplate dark and doleful topics. I was not that concerned about these sometime melancholy moods because I reasoned that it is one of life’s natural reactions to harbor feelings of both happiness and sadness; and I remembered the wise old grandmother who once said: “A good day is a laugh and a cry“. Still I wondered why my pensive thoughts were increasing in frequency at a time in my life when I expected to be most content.

Then I happened to read about a study conducted by Harvard psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert which could help to explain the phenomenon I was experiencing. These researchers developed a smartphone app that allowed them to collect the thoughts, feelings, and actions of a broad range of people at random moments as they went about their daily activities.

Using the app, Killingsworth and Gilbert asked people what they were doing and how happy they were while doing it. They sifted through 25,000 responses from more than 5000 people and reported that 46% of the people were thinking about things other than what they were actually doing at the time (in other words, they were daydreaming about something other than what they were doing). They discovered that those people who were daydreaming typically were not happy; while those who were fully engaged in their activity were the happiest. 

The researchers wrote that unlike other animals, human beings spend a lot of time thinking about what is not going on around them, contemplating instead events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or will never happen at all. This “stimulus-independent thought” or “mind wandering” appears to be the brain’s default mode of operation.

Although this ability is a remarkable evolutionary achievement that allows people to learn, reason, and plan, it apparently comes with an emotional cost. “We see evidence that a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind,” they said in their report. The bottom line is that we’re more likely to think negative thoughts when we let our minds wander.

Maybe that is why people who are waiting in line or stuck in traffic appear to be more irritable. And maybe my melancholy moods have increased in frequency since leaving work simply because my mind is no longer required to spend 10+ hours a day focused on the demands of my job.

This study confirms that many philosophical and religious traditions are on to something true when they teach that happiness is to be found by living in the moment, and by training their practitioners to resist mind wandering and concentrate on the here and now. Yoga teachers and those teaching meditation practices usually stress the importance of “mindfulness” or “being present” for a good reason — because when we do, it usually puts us in a better mood.

When I look back at my work career, I can see now that those moments when I felt most fulfilled was when I was in the middle of product development activities, being part of a team inventing electronic test solutions to solve complex manufacturing challenges. During those moments all the powers of my mind were fully engaged in solving the problem at hand and there was a sense that the results of the team’s collective work would have a positive impact on the company, our customers, and to a certain extent, society in general.

William F. Buckley put his finger on the unique ability that meaningful work has in preventing the onset of depressive feelings when he wrote “Industry is the enemy of Melancholy“. Simply put, if we are busy doing work that requires a focused mind it becomes difficult for the mind to wander and contemplate spirit dampening topics that are likely to cause the blues.

I happened to listen to an online homily about work that touched on a similar theme from a spiritual point of view that was given by Bishop Robert Barron. Bishop Barron made the point that our very being is deeply influenced by our actions and that the kind of work we do has a lot to do with the kind of people we become.

People who have no work usually struggle with depression because our sense of dignity often comes from work. Those who suffer from unemployment feel not just the financial burden of a lost paycheck, but also the loss of dignity brought about from the loss of their livelihood.

When you are feeling down one of the things psychologists recommend is to get to work on a project. It tends to make you feel better because work engages the powers of mind, will, creativity, and imagination and we become awakened when we give ourselves over to a project.

It doesn’t have to be a grand or complicated project. In fact, Bishop Barron mentioned that he found that one of the things that brings him the most satisfaction is doing the dishes. His day is usually filled with meetings and intellectual activities, so it is a relief for him to do some simple physical work at the end of the day. It brings him satisfaction to make order out of a dirty kitchen and to see everything clean and in its place when he is done.

The Bishop referenced this lyric from Bob Dylan’s song “Forever Young” to emphasize that work is a blessing and that souls can not fully prosper when their hands and feet are idle.

“May your hands always be busy, may your feet always be swift, may you have a strong foundation when the winds of changes shift”

Bob Dylan; Forever Young

Not all work is physical, though. Pope John Paul II categorized different kinds of work for the faithful. There is physical work (the work of the body), intellectual work (the work of the mind), spiritual work (the feeding of one’s soul), and moral work (charitable work on behalf of the poor and mistreated). When we are attentive to each of these categories of work in our daily life, it is then that we best fulfill our divine potential and become collaborators with the purpose of God.

I like that idea. May we all come to see our work, in all its different manifestations, as collaborating with the purpose of God and as bringing us into a more perfect union with a higher power.

“I do not understand; I pause; I examine”

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) has been recognized as one of the most significant philosophers of the 16th century. Born into a privileged family and raised during the period of the French Renaissance, he was educated in a private boarding school where all his lessons were taught in Latin. Because of his family’s great wealth, he was free to devote the first half of his life to jobs serving the public sector; including volunteering as a legal counselor, advisor to King Charles IX and mayor of the town of Bordeaux.

In 1571, at the age of 38, he retired from public life to his estate, where he isolated himself from all social and family affairs so that he could dedicate his time to reading, meditating, and writing. It was in his castle’s round library room – which contained more than 1,500 books – where Montaigne probed his mind and produced two highly influential books titled simply Essays; which he published in 1580. Montaigne wrote that “I am myself the matter of my book“, and his stated goal was to describe humans, and especially himself, with utter frankness.

Some of the key topics Montaigne explored in his various essays include:

• Mankind’s dangerously inflated claims to knowledge and certainty
• The assertion that there is no greater achievement than the ability to accept one’s limitations
• The problem of trying to locate truth in commonly accepted ideas that are false or unexamined – especially since many things we held yesterday as articles of faith today we know as fables.
• The importance of freeing ourselves from outside influences, customs and opinions
• His belief that the best path to understanding truth is by a careful exploration of one’s own body-and-mind.

Montaigne believed that the self, even with all its imperfections, was the best possible place to begin the search for truth, even though our identities can’t be defined as a stable thing because it is always changing. The most obvious example to him was the struggle of living with the infirmities of a human body. “Our bodies smell, ache, sag, pulse, throb and age regardless of the best desires of our mind“. It is only in acceptance of these traits that we can remain faithful to the truth of one’s being.

Montaigne isolated himself while writing his Essays but maintained the importance of maintaining contact with the outside world of other people and events because one can learn much that is useful from others. He described human beings as having a front room, facing the exterior street, where they meet and interact with others, but also with a back room where they are able to retreat back into their interior private self to reflect upon the vagaries of human experience and consider how it impacts their intimate identity.

Montaigne was refreshingly different from other philosophers and academics of his day who believed that their advanced powers of reason were a divine gift that gave them mastery over the world and a happiness that was denied to lesser educated creatures. He mocked those philosophers who were proud of their big brains and his writings come across as wise and intelligent – but also as modest and eager to debunk the pretensions of learning.

He wrote of his fellow academics and philosophers: “On our highest thrones in the world we are seated, still, on our arses” and, “…in practice, thousands of little women in their villages have lived more gentle, more equable and more constant lives than us.

He mocked books that were difficult to read. He found Plato boring and just wanted to have fun with books. “I’m not prepared to bash my brains out for anything, not even for learning’s sake – however precious it may be. If one book tires me, I just take up another“.

[note: I must admit that this sentiment makes me feel somewhat better about my decision to hold off reading the notorious difficult novel Ulysses by Irish writer James Joyce].

Montaigne was honest about the limitations and usefulness of his own intellect and attacked his prestigious academic friends for studying difficult things that were not useful to our lives.

“Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies. Intellectuals would prefer you to study other people’s books way before we study our own minds. If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life”

I can’t help but wonder if Montaigne’s admiration for the working class – and life’s simple things – stemmed from the decision his humanist father made to leave him for three years when he was a small boy in the sole care of a peasant family in their town, in order to “draw the boy close to the people, and to the life conditions of the people, who need our help“.

Whatever the reason for his modest and humble personality, Montaigne comes across as one of the world’s first examples of a tolerant mind; a breath of fresh air in the cloistered and snobbish corridors of 16th century academia. He became an inspiration and encouragement to all those who felt put-upon and patronized by the arrogance of self-proclaimed clever people.

Montaigne tells us that each one of us is richer than we think. We may all arrive at wise ideas if we cease to think of ourselves as unsuited to the task just because we haven’t been classically trained or happen to lead an ordinary life.

The inscription Montagne had placed on the crown of the book shelf in his library was “I do not understand; I pause; I examine“. He had the inscription placed there to remind him of the limitations of his own knowledge and to caution him about the dangers that can result when one hastily forms opinions without careful consideration of all the facts.

Too many people today, especially since the advent of social media – which allows anybody to pass themselves off as experts – form their beliefs by adopting commonly accepted ideas or by making broad generalizations. Outside influences and political talking points trigger knee-jerk reactions from those who fail to take the time to study all sides of a topic – or to consider what is the truth and what is morally just.

It would be refreshing if more of us today, before forming our opinions, would like Montaigne, acknowledge the limitations of our knowledge, admit that we don’t fully understand a topic and then take time to examine all aspects of the issues in question using qualified experts in the field as our guides.

The danger of operating a society with uninformed or half-informed subjects was identified as early as the 2nd century by the Roman writer Publilius Syrus who said that it is “Better to be ignorant of a matter than to half know it“.

Today there are so many competing sources of information, where anyone with a computer can offer their uninformed opinions. Few people check the credentials of writers or the authenticity of the facts, and foreign actors can easily spread misinformation along via unregulated social networks.

The next time we are asked to form an opinion or make a decision about subjects we do not fully understand, we would do well to follow the sage advice of Montaigne: Do not let somebody else speak for you and do not fall prey to the pressures of biased outside influences. Instead take a moment to pause, study all sides of the issue, consult qualified experts and sources, and endeavor to reach true understanding.

If you can summon the conviction and discipline to do this, then you will be able to take solace knowing that even though you can not govern external events, you at least govern yourself.

Dancing Our Sorrow Away

When I was in College, the Jackson Browne album “Late for the Sky” was in heavy rotation on my apartment turntable. The album’s introspective songs had a certain appeal to a young man growing up and just starting to make his way in the world because they asked big questions about the purpose of life and how to think about all the tricky emotions that come with adulthood.

His song “For a Dancer” acknowledges one of the sad truths about life: that one day everyone and everything we love will be gone. Knowing this, Jackson sings that we owe it to those we love to make a joyful sound with our lives while we are here – and to do our best to spread seeds that will blossom long after we are gone.

Listen on Youtube to: Jackson Browne: “For a Dancer”

The final verse of the song reminds us that we all know people who have had a positive impact on our life (a teacher, coach, parent, friend) and who helped us to become who we are. Those people did great things for us, usually without knowing it. We are likewise called, Jackson sings, to have a positive impact on the lives we touch – even though we may never live to see the fruit of our labors.

Into a dancer you have grown
From a seed somebody else has thrown
Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own
And somewhere between the time you arrive
And the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive
That you’ll never know

Jackson Browne “For a Dancer“

The song was written as a moving meditation on the death of Browne’s friend; who died in a fire at a young age. Browne explained that his friend was an interesting guy; a great dancer; a great tailor who would make his friend’s clothes; an ice skater who skated for the Ice Follies. “He was a Renaissance man and when I wrote him the song – I was trying to express the idea that your life is a dance”.

I like that image of our life as a dance and that we never know when it will be our last time on the stage. When I think of dancing, I think of being uninhibited, of letting my body react to the beat of the music, and of sharing a joyful personal moment with my dance partner.

When you are busy dancing, you are not worrying about your troubles, or the problems that that you will face tomorrow. Dancing is one of life’s rare human rituals; a moment of pure expression when you are able to forget about your ultimate fate and just focus on making a joyful noise.

A recent Youtube video created by the School of Life Company echoed a similar philosophy about the benefit of living life in the moment. The video was a commentary on the cultural expression “…rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic“, that is often used by people when they want to convey the futility or meaninglessness of a task.

Those familiar with the fate of the Titanic know that the hull was damaged and that the ship was destined to sink; so for the passengers on that ship to concern themselves with the position of the deck chairs is a failure on their part to recognize the true hopelessness of their situation.

Our life situation can become a little like passengers on a doomed liner. Our larger hopes in life have not come to fruition. We have come to see that our career won’t ever flourish; our relationships will always be less than ideal; we’ve passed our peak in terms of looks; our bodies begin to fall prey to ever more humiliating illnesses; society is becoming more dysfunctional than ever and political progress looks highly improbable.

It can start to feel like our ship is going down and that it would be silly trying to improve our condition, let alone find pleasure and distraction in our daily life. It would be to live in denial of the facts. Our instinct instead is to become pessimistic and gloomy about our ultimate end.

However, there is a crucial element which makes our predicament different from that of the passengers who lost their lives on the Titanic. Those passengers only had a few hours to contemplate their fate before the ship broke apart and sank into the icy waters of the North Atlantic. Our ship is going down too, but much more slowly. It’s as if the captain has let it be known that our ship is sinking and we can’t be rescued… but it will likely be a decade or more before we meet our final fate.

So, though we can’t be saved, though the end will be grim, we still have options as how to use our remaining time. We are involved in a catastrophe, but there are better and worse ways of passing the time and filling our days. Under those different circumstances, expending thought and effort on ‘rearranging the deck chairs‘ is no longer ridiculous at all, it becomes a logical step; one that can be turned into a higher calling.

When the larger hopes for our lives become impossible, we can learn to grow inventive around lesser, but still real, options for the time that remains. Keeping cheerful and engaged, in spite of everything, can bring some light through the dark storm clouds that you know are ahead.

Consider, for example, that you are on a very gradually sinking luxury liner in the early 20th century, you might every evening strive to put on a dinner jacket, dance the Foxtrot to the music of a string quartet, sing a cheerful song or settle into the ship’s library to read a good book – even as the water begins to pool at your ankles.

Or you might try to engage in a friendly game of shuffleboard on the slightly tilting deck; or decide to drop-in on a wild party in Steerage; help to comfort some despairing fellow travelers; or just try to have a deep and comforting conversation with a new friend – even though you can hear the sound of dishes smashing somewhere in a galley down below.

Of course your life would – from the big picture perspective – still remain a thorough disaster; but you might find that you were at least starting to enjoy yourself.

This kind of attitude and inventiveness is precisely what is need to help us cope with our state. Can we invest the days we have left with meaning even though everything is, overall, entirely dark? Our culture teaches us to focus on our big hopes, on how we can aim for everything going right. We crave a loving marriage, deeply satisfying and richly rewarding work, a stellar reputation, an ideal body and positive social change. What remains when those things are not attainable – when love will always be tricky, politics compromised, or the crowd hostile?

What is our equivalent to seeking the best spot for a deckchair on a sinking Ocean Liner? If marriage is far less blissful than we’d imagined, perhaps we can turn to friendship; if society won’t accord us the dignity we deserve, perhaps we can find a group of fellow outcasts; if our careers have irretrievably faltered, perhaps we can turn to new interests or hobbies; if political progress turns out to be perennially blocked and the news is always sour, we might absorb ourselves in nature or history.

In doing this, we would be turning to what our society might dismiss as Plan-B’s (what you do when you can’t do the things you really want to do). But there’s nothing wrong with that! It just may turn out that the secondary, lesser, lighter, reasons for living are, in fact, more substantial and enjoyable than we imagined.

And after a while we might come to think that they are what we should have been focused on all along – only it has taken a seeming disaster to get us to realize how central they should always have been.

My mother has always been a model to me of this kind of inventive thinking and an example of someone who has always been able to discover new things to do when she can no longer do the things she loves doing.

Now in her 94th year, she has good reasons to be gloomy about her present condition. Her ship has been slowly sinking over the last two decades. She is the last surviving member of her large, close knit, family; she lost her beloved husband after 66 years of marriage; she reads about the passing of friends and acquaintances almost every day in the obituaries; she has lived through several strokes and cardiac operations to place stents in her arteries; she struggles with gradual loss of hearing, eyesight, teeth and memory as well as the humiliating indignities of incontinence and lack of mobility that come with aging.

Despite these life difficulties, it is not in my mother’s nature to be gloomy. She laments what she has lost, yet she finds a reason to be optimistic about her situation and to be happy with the things that she can do. Here are some of the ways my mother has learned to stay cheerful, smiling and engaged in her diminished old age:

• She has learned to navigate an iPad so she can keep track of the Facebook lives of her eight children and dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
• She has become a late-in life sports fan, following with anticipation the exploits of her favorite New England Patriots and Boston Red Sox teams.
• She volunteers for her Church prayer line ministry, spending time each day praying for those in her parish who are in most need.
• She visits her husband’s grave regularly to sit in contemplation and tend to the flowers and plants.
• She tries to include some form of bodily exercise every day. Short walks with her walker outside on nice days, elderly chair exercises, rubber band stretching exercises.
• She communicates with her smart speaker to listen to music or hear the news (even though she worries about Alexa eavesdropping on her conversations).
• She stays engaged by reading books and bingeing her favorite TV shows.
• She visits French Youtube language web sites so she can enjoy hearing and practicing the French language that she grew up speaking.
• She has become the project manager of her house, assigning her children work to do around the house that she has historically done in the past and overseeing it to make sure it is done to her standards.
• She takes short field trips with her children to places from her past and shares happy memories of the people and events that shaped her life.

I co-share caretaker duties with my siblings and I feel blessed to spend one or two days every week with my mother. It has been a privilege for me to watch how she accommodates the frailties of old age without sacrificing her spirit. She knows the end is near, but she is not afraid; and until the end comes she is determined to wake up with a reason for living – and make sure the deck chairs are properly arranged on the deck.

May we too always find a way to dance our sorrows away.

Doughnut Economics

I recently read an article in TIME magazine about an interesting new economic theory called Dougnut Economics. The concept was first introduced by the British economist Kate Raworth in a 2012 Oxfam report and then developed more fully in her 2017 book ‘Doughnut Economics: Seven ways to think like a 21st century economist‘.

Raworth proposed the new economic model as a way to address one of humanity’s most challenging problems: how to reduce global poverty without depleting or damaging the planet’s limited natural resources.

The economic theory comes by its name because it is visually represented by two doughnut-shaped discs as shown below. The disc in the center represents a social foundation consisting of the basic fundamental rights all humans ought to have, like access to food & water, housing, education, work, etc. The outer disc represents earth’s ecological ceiling consisting of the environmental thresholds which cannot be exceeded if we want to guarantee the future prosperity of the human species.

The middle green area represents the doughnut, the space where humanity can thrive and progress if the planet’s boundaries are respected. Society’s goal should be to bring all of human life into the “goldilocks zone”; that sweet spot area where everyone has what they need to live a good life, but without overshooting the ecological ceiling limits which would cause further degradation of the environment and jeopardize the health of the Planet.

Capitalism has been the world’s dominant economic system since the 16th century and its adoption by the world’s fastest growing countries has transformed life on earth by helping to lift billions of people from poverty. It is an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.

Proponents of the Doughnut economic theory argue that capitalism is an imperfect system because it emerged during a time when humanity saw itself as separated from the web of life, one where ecological issues were ignored or labeled externalities.

The broad measure used as an economic scorecard in capitalist economic systems is the Gross Domestic Product or GDP. It is a measure of the total monetary or market value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country’s borders during a specific time period.

The Doughnut economic theory recognizes that economic prosperity depends not only on growth as measured by GDP but on human and natural well-being as well; and it encourages societies to shift to an economic model that is more regenerative and distributive than today’s capitalistic system.

They argue that continued application of 20th century economic thinking is not sustainable or responsible now that the world is aware that the planet is teetering on the edge of a climate breakdown and we know we will witness the death of the living world unless we transform the way we live.

In a doughnut world, local economies would sometimes be growing and sometimes shrinking. It recognizes that growth is a healthy phase of life but endless uncontrolled growth, like cancer, can be harmful to our overall health. Significant GDP growth may be very much needed in low and middle income countries to ensure that their communities can overcome the shortfalls that create deprivations for their citizens, while richer countries would focus not so much on growth but on maintaining their thriving social foundations but at a reduced ecological cost.

Adopting such an economic theory would help balance the inequities that are present in the world today – one where the high living standards of the people in rich countries have them overshooting the planet’s ecological ceiling, while people in poorer countries fall short of the fundamental human rights that comprise the doughnut’s social foundation.

Many economists are skeptical of the doughnut economic theory because in order for it to work it asks humans to magically become indifferent to wealth and income or how well they are doing compared to others. That is a difficult ask when the world includes 7.3 billion people.

Different class and national interests are always fighting one another and it is naïve to believe that globalized capitalism will suddenly transform itself to become more cooperative and gentle; especially when all indicators point towards citizens today becoming more commercially motivated, self-centered and focused on money and success.

I too am skeptical that something as revolutionary as a Doughnut economics system could be universally adopted given today’s political divisiveness, uncompromising culture wars, and money-fueled corporate lobbying interests. Too many rich and powerful people benefit from the economic status quo – and would use their influence within the halls of power to protect their self-interests.

However, the encouraging thing about doughnut economic programs is that they can be run at a grassroots level. Since its introduction many homes, towns, cities, and states have bypassed their national governments and done what they could to apply the concepts behind doughnut economics from the bottom up – to try and help their local societies become more resilient.

Cities have become the laboratories of doughnut economic programs. The simple way that the doughnut economic model captures both the needs of the people and the needs of the planet makes it a convenient tool for leaders to have big conversations about reimagining and remaking the future. Ideas based on doughnut economics are now being discussed, debated and put into practice in academia, business, and in town, city and national governments worldwide.

Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen, Dunedin, Melbourne, Berlin, Portland and even Austin TX are examples of cities applying the new economic concepts as a way to help their cities attain social and environmental sustainability. Since the theory doesn’t lay out specific policies or goals, stakeholders are free to have constructive conversations to decide what benchmarks would help bring their communities inside the doughnut.

Amsterdam’s lofty ambition is to bring all 872,000 of their residents inside the doughnut, ensuring that everyone has access to a good quality of life, without putting more pressure on the planet than is sustainable. They have implemented a true price initiative which takes into account the carbon footprint of the goods and services they produce as well as the living wage requirements of the workers. To satisfy the dual need for more affordable housing and reduced CO2 emissions, Amsterdam has implemented laws making the use of recycled and natural materials mandatory in the construction sector and they have started transforming neighborhood parking lots into community gardens.

Without a series of universal solutions, which do not exist and will probably never exist, it will be up to the politicians and economists to determine which elements of the donut system can be implemented successfully and to what extent. Amsterdam has made a start by applying this litmus test question to all their municipal project decisions: “Will doing this project actually make our community healthy and happy?”

To all my readers, wherever you may be: I hope you are healthy and happy and living comfortably in the sweet spot of the donut – and I hope that you are thinking about what life decisions you can make today to ensure that future generations will have that same chance to have a bite out of the donut as you.

Sorry is a Sacrament

One of the year’s pleasant surprises for New England baseball fans everywhere was the Boston Red Sox winning of the 2021 American League East Division Series. It was supposed to be a rebuilding year for the home team and none of the baseball experts predicted them to be in a position to compete for a playoff spot this season.

The 2021 Red Sox team was a scrappy and likable bunch of players, fighting until the last out and often coming from behind to win games. They were underdogs all year but managed to squeak into a wildcard playoff position; where they then proceeded to defeat their arch-rival New York Yankees, and odds-on favorites Tampa Bay Rays – before finally losing in the championship series to the Houston Astros.

A lot of the credit for the team’s successful season was given to their young manager, Alex Cora. Alex had previously coached the Red Sox and was praised for leading the team to the World Series Championship in 2018. He was suspended by Major League Baseball for the entire 2020 season, however, when it was discovered that he participated in a scheme to steal the opposing team’s pitching signals back in 2017 when he was working as a bench coach for the Houston Astros.

Trying to steal your opponents signs is a tradition as old as baseball because it can give batters a significant advantage when they know which type of pitch is coming (Fastball, Curveball, Sinker, Breaking Ball, Splitter, etc.). Stealing signs is not against the rules as long as the players manage to decipher the signals using personnel that are on the field.

The most common way teams try to steal signs is for a runner on base to peek in and study the hand signals the catcher sends to his pitcher prior to every pitch and then relay the sign to his teammate standing in the batting box. If a team does not disguise their signals effectively or change them up occasionally, then the opposing team is usually able to decode them.

What made the sign-stealing scheme devised by the Houston Astros and Alex Cora against the rules is that their efforts made use of on-field technology. They used a dedicated camera in the center field stands of their home stadium that was focused directly on the opposing team’s catcher. The video was sent to a monitor near the Houston dugout where Houston players could examine it and quickly decode the signs being sent to the pitcher. Various methods were then used to communicate the decoded pitch signs to the batter, including hand signals, whistling and banging on a trash can. Alex Cora even received the stolen sign information on the smartwatch he was wearing.

Condemnation was swift when the scheme was first revealed to the public in 2019 by a traded Houston pitcher. The whole Houston Astros team was immediately branded as cheaters and the World Series championship Houston won in 2017 came to be seen as illegitimate, tarnished forever by the cheating scandal. Major League Baseball conducted a retroactive investigation in 2019 and punished all the managers it found participated in the scheme with a one year suspension.

This included Alex Cora, who had moved on to manager of the Boston Red Sox and led them to the 2018 World Series Championship. Cora paid a high price for his decision to participate in the cheating scheme. The once proud man lost his job, his sterling reputation, his dignity, and the respect of his friends, family and colleagues. He spent a year exiled away from the game he loved while he watched the media attack his character and his young children suffer because of his sullied reputation.

Despite the harsh judgement, Cora never complained. He sincerely apologized for his actions, admitted his fault in the sign stealing scheme, acknowledged that what he did was unfair to the teams they played against and accepted his punishment as well deserved. It was clear he truly felt remorse for his role in the whole affair.

I found myself becoming emotional while watching Alex Cora lovingly embrace his young 14 year old daughter Camilla in the immediate aftermath of the Red Sox victory over the Rays in the Division Series. A postgame reporter asked Alex what that moment meant to him after serving a year of suspension. Here is the video clip of that special moment courtesy of the MLB Network (along with a transcript of his remarks about his family):

“I’m happy for my family. I put them in such a tough spot last year and for them to be able to enjoy it is very gratifying, I’m very very happy for them. She [Camilla] suffered a lot and it was my fault, and sometimes we make bad decisions, and I made a horrible decision in baseball and I paid the price. But what really hurt me was for them to suffer because of my mistakes. And for her to enjoy this is very gratifying.

Alex Cora, Postgame interview, 2021 ALDS

So many people today are afraid to say they are sorry or admit they have done something wrong. They view apologizing as a sign of weakness and surrender; therefore their egos prevent them from owning up to their mistakes or attempting to repair and heal the hurt they have caused.

Still other people never develop the moral compass or sense of compassion and empathy that is necessary to understand how their actions negatively affect others. They feel entitled, believing that the world revolves around them – and they are so used to thinking about themselves that they have no capacity to think about anyone else.

That is why it was so refreshing to watch how Alex Cora handled the fall out from the cheating scandal. Here was a rare example of an authentic apology, one where Alex confessed remorse for his mistake, admitted that it was wrong, fully cooperated with the investigators, accepted his punishment and attempted to make amends with those who were most hurt.

I can’t help but contrast Alex Cora’s apology with one recently made by the quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, Aaron Rodgers. Aaron was widely criticized when it was discovered that he lied to reporters at a press conference when he told them he had been fully “immunized” against the COVID-19 virus. The truth that he had never received a vaccination was only revealed after he became infected with COVID and was forced to go into NFL quarantine protocols.

Rather than apologizing for lying to reporters and his failure to follow mandated COVID-19 safety protocols, Rodgers first tried to explain that when he said he was immunized he meant he had taken some (ineffective) home treatment and he didn’t actually say that he was vaccinated. He inferred that the reporters were to blame because they assumed immunized meant vaccinated.

When that explanation was roundly ridiculed, Rogers tried again by issuing a statement saying that some people might have felt misled by his comments and that he takes full responsibility for the misleading comments.

Notice in this example of a fake apology Rogers never says he is sorry for putting people at risk and he never says he regrets what he did. He apologizes only to those who “felt misled,” as if it was just their feeling, and not his own actions, that were to blame. The reality is that people felt misled because Rodgers misled them.

Rodgers elaborated further, explaining that he believed strongly in body autonomy and that he wasn’t up-front with people because he didn’t want to acquiesce to a “woke culture” or a “crazed group of individuals” who harass those who choose not to get vaccinated. With this explanation, Rodgers again shifts the blame for his wrongdoing. It is not his fault that he lied and exposed others to potential risk, – it is the fault of a group of crazy people and the toxic culture.

After this explanation was also criticized, Aaron Rodgers just refused to talk anymore about the subject. This was probably his wisest decision since bad apologies that blame the victims usually make things worse than saying nothing at all.

Looking in someone’s eyes and offering a sincere apology is not easy. Many people, like Aaron Rodgers, attempt to get by with with fake apologies which seek to avoid responsibility by making excuses, shifting blame, downplaying what was done, invalidating the hurt person, or trying to move on prematurely.

By contrast, Psychologists say that authentic apologies have most or all of the following elements:

• It is freely offered without conditions or minimizing of what was done
• It conveys that the person apologizing understands and cares about the hurt person’s experience and feelings
• It conveys remorse
• It offers a commitment to avoid repeating the hurtful behavior
• It offers to make amends or provide restitution if appropriate

During my lifetime I have given more than my share of ineffective apologies, but it is a life skill that I’m still working to improve because it is impossible for any of us to go through life without hurting someone. As Bob Dylan once sang: “I hurt easy, I just don’t show it; you can hurt someone and not even know it“. We are all human and in the daily course of our existence, no matter how hard we try, there are going to be moments ahead when we are guilty of hurting people. During those moments of our life, we should try, like Alex Cora, to put aside our egos and summon the humility and dignity that is required to repair the damaged relationship and make it stronger.

A good apology is like an offering or a gift that has a supernatural power to heal. The Catholic faith believes that admitting to our faults and seeking reconciliation with God and our neighbors is so important that they have established it as one of the Church’s seven sacred sacraments. The practice of Confession and forgiveness are referred to as a healing sacrament, one in which a spiritual power is believed to be transmitted through channels of divine grace.

During this season of thanks giving and gift giving, may you too come to experience the holy and redemptive power of the Sacrament of Sorry that is just waiting for all of us who seek it out sincerely.