questioning assumptions, cliches and group-think, different perspectives
It occurred to me that the Chaos-Beast we call Time has probably been around as long as humans have been on this planet. How not? We made it up! In this River series of mine, I’ve been trying to get a handle on the whole amorphous conglomeration of our human ways and means of dealing with Time. (It’s been a head-twister!) One thing I’ve discovered is that because of our very long relationship with the temporal, we humans have developed…
I am re-reading Rachel Naomi Remen’s book, MY GRANDFATHER’S BLESSINGS: Stories of Strength, Refuge and Belonging. This lyrical book of the collected, very short musings and reflections by a born storyteller and wounded healer who has spent much of her life as a holistic medical counselor for people with chronic and terminal illnesses is one of my go-to books for getting myself back to clarity about how to deal with the vagaries of Life-Its-Own-Self and with our own mortality. The…
I remember when “don’t push the river; it flows by itself” was a pop-wisdom phrase on everybody’s lips. A hippie catch-phrase gone viral in the 1960s and 70s, it was likely to be used to browbeat somebody who was tense or anxious or downright scared and getting naggy behind it. Commonly, back then, the phrase usually kept company with words like “uptight” or “square” and prefaced shaming statements about being some kind of whiny stick in the mud. The river…
Elon Musk is probably right. Remote work (formerly known as “telecommuting” or “working from home”) is a challenge…for corporations and other organizational entities. It can cause massive headaches for managers and human resource people trying to round up and ride herd on all the “wild” spirits who want to do their own kind of different and were given an opportunity to try it when the world got hit by a massive pandemic that made the corporate culture standards of behavior…
We humans may be the only animals on this planet that are aware of time. In fact, humans are more than a little freaky about time. We have been fascinated and even obsessed with it for a good long while now. There’s archaeological evidence that the Babylonians and Egyptians began to measure time about 5,000 years ago. That development in human thought-constructing was probably built on a long, long line of other previously thunk thoughts and concepts. Some people say…
Here’s the most pretzel-brain-making question there ever was in the history of human thought: “Life is ___________” (fill in the blank). That’s the deceptively innocuous-looking problem that, given even just a little bit of space and time, can toss you smack-dab onto the back of the Chaos-Beast that takes you on a ride straight down the most convoluted and paradoxical rabbit hole a thinking being will ever encounter. Argh! I’ll tell you right now going in: That question actually has…
A really smart somebody or other once opined that time is what keeps everything in a story from happening all at once. Since we humans are all engaged in making up some kind of story or other, this is an important concept. I know. All kinds of people have weighed in with opinions – esoteric, scientific, and mundane – about Time. You have probably heard them all before. Basically, under all of that pretzel-brain making cascade, we are told that…
Okay, listen up all you Achievement Junkies: Measurement matters! Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ve heard it all before: “Measurement drives improvement,” it says here, and we’ve got an array of metrics that can measure just about anything…. We can measure how far, how long, how big, how high, how wide, how deep, how many and on and on and on. We can measure anything and everything and we’ve got the numbers and comparisons and indicators to prove it. Yup! Insights on…
Hawaiians have a saying: “In the word, is life; in the word, is death.” As a poet and a writer, I believe in the power of words. It’s a part of the nature of the scribblers in the world, that. We believe our words make a difference. No, I lie. Real writers and poets believe we are magicians who remake the world. When all is said and done, it seems to me, all of us humans are little more than…
I am reading Andrew Santella’s book, SOON: An Overdue History of Procrastination from Leonardo and Darwin to You and Me. Again. This little book is setting off all kinds of firecracker strings in my head. Santella, like me (and maybe you too?), is a self-confessed procrastinator so he’s at least well-practiced in trying to suss out the whats, the whys, and the wherefores of that almost universally censured habit, procrastination.