It’s a survival thing. When a person is an Outsider — someone who doesn’t “belong” to a group of one sort or another for whatever reason — there is a kind of invisible barrier that rises up between them and the people who do belong to that group. It’s a very real divide. “Same” is good, the prevailing culture code says; “different” not so much. It’s a built-in herd thing, I suppose. Every group has a culture code. Every group…
The Light of My Life teases me. He says my eyeballs are getting square. A Luddite of the most determined kind – the man doesn’t even own a phone – he worries that this one-eyed monster, my computer, will eat my days and steal me away from Life-Its-Own- Self.
Starting is a series of events. You decide to walk to Cleveland and you aim to do it on your own two feet – no bike, no bus, no train, no plane or helicopter…not even a hot-air balloon. You’re going to walk to Cleveland. So you take a first step in the right direction. That’s starting. At the end of the day, however far you’ve gotten, you might stop at a hotel and rest. And what happens the next morning? …
It’s been a quiet sort of shift. More and more people are moving away from the “work-and-spend” mentality that characterized the latter half of the last century. They are looking for more meaning to add to their lives, they say. Gregg Easterbrook, in his book, THE PROGRESS PARADOX: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse, has pointed out, “A transition from material want to meaning want is in progress on an historically unprecedented scale—involving hundreds of millions of people…
