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That was my idea.

Ever so slowly, I had been developing a storyline about a contemporary descendent of Sherlock Holmes. Named Charlotte, she was to have inherited her famous namesake’s penchant for sleuthing, applying her unusual set of skills in a modern age. A teenage force for good, this Charlotte Holmes was to be a role model of iconoclastic cleverness, an update to an old and beloved narrative, a series of mysteries written for my daughters’ 21st century world.

But then one Sunday in 2017, while skimming through the NY Times book review section, I stumbled upon a review of a new novel entitled “A Study in Charlotte”. I did not recognize the author’s name, Brittany Cavallaro. It did not take long, however, to appreciate that she had beat me to the publishing punch about Sherlock’s descendant.

“Someone stole Charlotte Holmes,” I whined.

“I told you not to wait,” my wife shrugged. “Besides, you always say that ideas, once they are thought, float around in the collective consciousness. They are out there.”

Indeed; I did – and still do – say that. Historical examples are fairly common of simultaneous discovery and invention, especially in the fields of science and medicine. Separated by geography and communication, different labs often work on solving seemingly esoteric conditions. The solutions can bear remarkable similarity. Same approach. Same idea. Almost identical submission timelines for publication.

My wife’s comment was poor salve for my wounded pride and suddenly deflated fiction writer’s balloon. I had not completed my own first novel for Ms. Holmes. In seconds, I watched her still coalescing character and storyline dissolve from my creative psyche, like an old film reel incinerating soundlessly in the furnace of forgotten dreams. It hurt to lose Charlotte to an unrealized fate.

It was not the first time I had experienced such loss. In the late 20th century, I pitched an idea for a news story to a prominent TV medical science personality. Rejected as not having sufficient public interest, that idea became the main topic of a special presentation the fellow did over the national airwaves a few months later. And no, I was neither notified nor engaged in his well-received presentation.

Now that I think of it, there was also the afternoon, early in our current century, when a friend and I came up with a concept for a website where people uploaded their own videos. We thought it best to start small, arty. Haiku for you, we called the site, laughing over a cup of coffee in a Tucson cafe. It could grow though, we said. This could be something big.

This was before something called YouTube.

Who owns creativity? There are plenty of regulations and laws regarding intellectual property, guidances and legal precedents on copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets. There is a paucity of perspective, however, on the ideallectual ether (the “ie“), that space “out there” which connects my “in here” with your “in here”. How can any of us know if we are the first to think something? “No ideas are new,” I’ve heard it said (and I’ve heard myself say). Says who? There’s no way of formally refuting the statement, only the instinct that the capacity for originality feels part of the human, even the cosmic, experience. I am unique; as far as I know, no one has ever lived with the same constellation of foibles, features, and unfascinating life plot points. You are unique as well, as are all the living things surrounding us, the bugs we swat at, the birds we marvel at, the skies we hurl our innovations into. Imagine that. Let that sink in. So much life, human and otherwise, in our collective history. And still, inexplicably, so much subtle novelty, newness, idiosyncratic quirkiness. Impossible variation within and across the marvelous range of possibility.

You might say that, mathematically, it is not surprising that Ms. Cavallaro and I came up with the same name for a new literary character. Charlotte’s ancestor Sherlock is part of the vernacular. With so many creative people wracking their brains and spare time in search of fresh looks on well-trodden tales, it was bound to happen. Heck, there could be others out there who have conceived of, drafted, or even submitted drafts of stories on the indomitable, the effervescent Charlotte Holmes. She was mine, those of us who are not named B. Cavallaro may pine. I thought of her first.

We know the assertion cannot be proved. Even if I dug out drafts of drafts from paper and computer files, it would definitively demonstrate nothing: what I had in my head and on computer disc from an old Mac is meaningless. It is also selfish. Centered on ‘me’, it misses the mark, fails to value the wondrous reality that somehow ‘we’, the summation of people past and present, brought into the ever evolving ie something fresh, marvelously pristine. Something original. Brittany Cavallaro deserves the credit; there is no doubt of that. Should I not smile though, should I not take a measure of small comfort in the most minute of chances that my mind, my creativity, connected, even if for the tiniest fraction of time, to the grand ie and, in doing so, helped birth, either through intent or inclination, an original idea?

Maybe not; I suspect that Ms. Cavallaro, or any author who publishes a new series, might be hesitant to share partial credit for that series with a person on the other side of the planet saying “I thought of that too”. Nor should they have to. Because perhaps, when we pass from this form to whatever form lies in wait, it is not about what recognition we have received from our contributions but rather what positive continuance we have left.

Gifts are for the given; the ie relies on givers. We should all teach. We should all learn. We should all create, together. We should each take pleasure in the opportunity to participate, to connect, no matter how fleetingly, with the majestic ie.

So please check out what Amazon describes as Brittany Cavallaro’s “witty, suspenseful new series about a brilliant new crime-solving duo: the teen descendants of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson“. After five years of silly grief, I am finally ready to do the same. How can something that involves Charlotte Holmes be anything but superb?

Go Charlotte! I’m proud of you.

We seek salvation from others.

“What is the world coming to?” “Society is broken.” “What is wrong with our leaders?” “We need a new social contract.”

Help me, we cry. Save us, we plead. Somebody. Soon.

None of us are God. Yet some portion of that which is God, some essence of that which is good, some small spark of what is purposeful, what is possible, what is present in this world lives within each and every one of us. It breathes in us. It springs from the very movement of individual respiration. Inhale; relax. Inspire; release. Take in the new. Hold it. Let it modify you. Let yourself modify it. Exhale. Share what you just learned.

Long ago many of us were taught that exhalation, the act of returning to the world our used breath, was somehow an act of discarding, of rejection, of abandonment. Our bodies extract what we need. They eliminate what we don’t. To expire is to rid ourselves of damaged air. Breathe in the new. Breathe out the old.

That perspective is so limiting, so restricted. There is much more to the breathing cycle than the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Because within each respiration is the potential of sharing, of recharging, of recognizing our common dependence on the air we exchange, the ground we walk, the journeys we chose to embark on, together. When we forget that an expiration, for every one of us, is a potential act of inspiration, or someone else, we fail to understand that salvation is not uniquely dependent on external forces.

Consequently, we take. And we wait. We take again. We wait some more.

Who will rescue us, when the flame of innocence is snuffed out by the arms of brutality forged through centuries of fear, corruptness, and greed? Is it you, Senator? How about you, Congresswoman? Can you, Judge, find some new interpretation of 27 words written some 231 years ago by a small group of men afraid of re-invasion from a distant political power? Can you, Preacher, shame contemporary political leadership into some action that isn’t so frustratingly nonsensical? Are we destined to continue on an unending cycle of violence, avarice, and hopelessness? Are we broken? Will be always be broken? Is it our nature to be broken?

Help me, we cry. Save us, we plead. Somebody. Anybody.

We scan the horizons, of our religions, our spiritual traditions, our history books, our media, straining to see our rescuer. We gulp at the air surrounding us. We use what we can. We discard. We try to discard more.

We miss what is right before our eyes, what even now fills our lungs. The divine is not a promise. Good lives within us.

There is wrong in the world, yes. There are people who would seek to do us harm, others who would seek only to bring themselves benefit. And yet – yes, yet – there is you. There is me. We are by no means perfect, no. We are, however, fairly decent. We don’t breathe so that others cannot. We take in air because our bodies need it. We release air so that the environment can replenish it. We seek good. We want to be part of the solution. We desperately want to help.

So then we should. So then we should inspire. So then we should inspire someone else. So then we should inspire someone else each and every day.

You say that inspiration of this nature comes from outside, from some prime mover force? I say that this prime mover force speaks through and with you. It breathes into you so that you can breathe into someone else.

You say you don’t believe in such a thing, that you don’t care for a concept such as God, but that you believe in something else, something you call love, Gaia, or universal consciousness? I say that love, Gaia, universal consciousness exist only because you exist. They need you. You are their manifestation.

The power for good does not uniquely emanate from interpretations of things such as religious texts, government constitutions, social laws, or political philosophies. Those constructs can advance good, they can seek to voice the nature of good, they may even be based on revelation from something I might call the Supreme Good. But they still require human choice and action. They still need you. They need your breath. They need your ability to be inspired. They need your ability to inspire those around you.

You can hold a hand. You can hold the heart of a stranger you will never meet. You can hold the memory of an innocent child, a fallen hero, an imperfect neighbor, anyone whom your instinct for good may benefit. A thought makes a difference. A lightly touched elbow. A word of solace. Gratitude. A shared tear.

I refuse to accept that we – the people – are unable to keep good alive. I refuse to resign myself to fatalistic defeat in the face of immorality, inaction, and inane social decision-making. I refuse to permit myself to drink our common air as if it is mine along to ingest.

And the God of my belief system, the power in which I believe, reminds me, all too regularly, that It/They/She/He only lives as much as I do.

I am tiny; so are you. I am inadequate; so are you. I am selfish and a sad repository for the magnificence of what is possible with love, God, Gaia, or universal consciousness. Yet we are the opportunity for the manifestation of such a force. We are its potential. We live as its embodiment.

Please – humbly, regularly, share the power that you have for good. Do so through the smallest of favors, gestures, and reassurances. Honor the memory of what is possible by never surrendering your optimism, your hope, your heart.

Inspire. Someone. Daily.

There are things of tomorrow that I could tell you, things of splendor, of wonder, of joyful relief, if I could only recall them.

The sea rolls. It moves. It is incessant. It is seeking. It is perfectly unpredictable. It is recognizably unshaped. It knows not its next form. It understands completely that its waves will be.

I watch them, my fellow travelers. We come in many shapes and forms. Some of us are bipedal. Some are winged. Some trot on the ends of cords. Some sun on the rocks, flippers pointing like guideposts. Our senses flare. At the ocean’s edge, we stretch ourselves. Something about the juncture of sea, land, and salty air beckons us. We lose boundaries. We forget to think. We breathe.

The waves, oh how they roll. They swell, they soothe, they lash out in fury, they caress like butter spreading atop warm bread. Shifting, constantly. Pausing, interminably. Nameless. Yet somehow identifiable.

Turn your face to the distant horizon! Smell the saturated air of being! Feel the sun, wind, and sound against your closed eyes, your upturned brow, your yearning soul.

Forget to think. Sink into the simple undulation of awareness.

And still the expanse of sea shifts, humming in murmurs, pounding the shoreline with emphatic phrasing. It is calling in a language you instinctively understand.

Notice – how people move on dry land akin to the rolls of liquid that roil the border between standing and floating. The currents of intentionality buoy us. We bob. We set anchor. We lean into an invisible compass of pointless yet purposeful orientation that mysteriously manipulates and guides us, as if we were magnets pulled and repelled, pulled and repelled, pulled and repelled, pulled, pulled by some massive force of attraction, some unseen but constantly present lodestone, a reminder, a susurrus, a wordless whisper.

A remembrance of things to come.

We belong – the ocean knows it. We have always belonged – the tingle in our skin declares it. Hark! the breakers bellow. Release! the undulating tide admonishes. Reconnect! the unbounded essence of the sea, sand, and sky urge.

I am fastened to the future, which holds tight to the past, both balanced atop the most minuscule pin of a point I call the present. Somehow I stand tiptoe on this moment with you, with everything, each and all of us straining to extend ourselves, individually, from the tiniest touch with terra firma to the most fragile attachment with intangible etherea, collectively. There is a true lingua franca in our world, an actual bridging language of being; we can sense it. Awash in a daily plethora of dialects for living, we long for a common form of communication, a wordless reassurance that you, me, us, this – all of it – that it has coherence, that it has meaning, that it makes sense. And then we smell the salty sea, we lose focus on its heaving horizon, we close our eyes and we breathe, we inhale, we keep inhaling, we inhale like each gulp that fills our lungs is the first one, inhaled for the first time, we do all of us, without thinking, and we know, we understand, we feel comfort. We forget to remember to be.

The waves are us. When time looks and listens, it sees and hears how we moved together, not how any of us somersaulted, spun, sank, or spiraled aloft as solitary droplets. The surges, the swells, the rollers of today recede into the collective memory of tomorrow, not with regret, never with remorse, but with relaxed acquiescence, with humble acceptance. A myriad of ripples rejoice in their partnership with the breakers they form, all exquisitely formed curls of nature that spread out and over the shores of this present, and then this one, and the next one. And the next.

We are all bridges that the stream of time’s consciousness dares to cross. Feel the connection. Let the future flow through you. Let it be you.

Twice in my life I have felt fully released from my body. The first time occurred following a blood donation. About to leave the mobile medical vehicle, cookie in hand, I suddenly was overcome with a powerful sense of impending doom. Some time later, I awoke wrapped in ice, lying on an examination table, with my feet held high about the level of my chest. In addition to a set of horrible physical sensations, I felt a bit disappointed; the minutes between syncope and recovery of consciousness were filled with a suspended state of being, a weightless experience of uplift, like a balloon lighter than air drawn toward a welcoming sun.

The second time was uniquely different. Asleep, I had an encounter with a van full of people traveling, I learned, to the afterlife. During a moment of panic, I was touched in the center of my forehead by a disfigured yet gentle matriarch, a woman with gnarled joints, cloudy eyes, and an ageless expression. Immediately upon her touch, a flood of tranquility washed over and through me. I knew I was dreaming; yet I knew I was awake. I knew I was alive; I also knew I would never be completely dead.

Both experiences left me with an unshakable realization and faith: there is more to being than our bodies. And there is more to life than our human lives.

Yesterday, my wife and I discussed what we would do if we were presented with a choice: our individual death or the death of someone we loved. Maybe it is a function of our ages or maybe it is something more basic to human existence. Regardless, without hesitation, we each understood that we would willingly, gladly, even rejoicedly offer our physical lives so that someone dear to us might remain in theirs.

In a heartbeat, I said.

During an average lifetime, a human heart beats over 2.5 billion times. For someone who lives 100 years, the heart beats about the same number of years that earth and life are known to exist – over 4 billion. Perhaps it is a coincidence that a centenarian’s accumulated heart count somehow matches human measurements of earthly time and biological existence. There are so many things that seem accidental, occurrences which are similar yet not demonstrably associated. We have to be careful not to attribute causality to temporal correlation lest we draw conclusions that are borne from myth rather than math or science. History is replete with such mistakes. Co-occurrence does not mean connection. Still, doesn’t the similarity strike you as interesting? Does it encourage you, even for a moment, to smile?

In a heartbeat, my wife agreed.

From whence springs the impulse to sacrifice ourselves in order to save another? A choice, the offer of one’s own life for another might be explained by certain theories of species survival. I can see that; during a situation of limited survival resources, people above a certain age might voluntarily prioritize the lives of those younger or more fit than themselves in order that the whole continue, instead of some of the parts. The split second recognition that one’s own life would or should be laid down for another, however, feels more than some type of species perpetuation instinct ingrained in human DNA. Something greater is required for such an immediate decision, something bolder than the biological. There is something behind that such a drive called love.

“Our own life,” Thich Nhat Hanh once wrote, “is the instrument with which we experiment with truth.” Basho noted: “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.” From the Bible: “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God, and every one that loveth is born of God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.” And, finally, from Jesus Christ: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Today is Easter, a celebration across many cultures of renewal and a commemoration among people of Judea-Christian heritage of salvation and resurrection. Whatever you believe about the religious Christ, you probably acknowledge that the historical version practiced what he preached: he died so that others might be saved. Do you believe that his man rose from the dead? Do you believe that anyone or any being is capable of such a miracle? I used to get lost in the rational maze of intellectual solutions to these questions. Then I felt myself suspended free of my own body, at first when I should have been conscious and then when I should have been asleep. I also experienced, as a physician, the departure of spirits from human bodies at the time of physical death. I have heard, inaudibly, the voices of deceased ancestors and loved ones through the mystery of earthy synchronicity and immaterial messaging. Informed by these graces, I have no doubt that some part of me – of us – precedes and persists beyond our human form. And I am immensely grateful for the teachings and sacrifice of Jesus Christ, of Thich Nhat Hanh, of Basho, of Ghandi, of Buddha, of Mohammed, of all the earthly embodiments of a Godforce in our world that is peace, that is harmony, that is love.

I hope that I may live a human lifespan that is at least average in years while being rich beyond decades in love. But if given the choice between experiencing the wealth of love through the offering of some physical years versus extending my life when an expression of truth might enable others to extend theirs, well, I hope that the universe and its God know my preference. While I have every intention of joyfully experiencing as many heartbeats as I am given, the belief, nay the awareness, that there is more you in me, more then in this, more growth in giving than I might ever know in one individual lifetime; that purpose is embodied by the experience of loving release; that a Godforce is alive in me through my embrace of your wellbeing – all these fill me with an ineffable sense of wonder, gratitude, and peace.

The rhythm of our individual bodies and organs can be counted. The flow of spirit freed from the confines of form is immeasurable. Both live inside the moment of a single beat of the human heart.

After recently straining my back, I decided to get back to a daily practice of plank position exercises. The postural technique is not new for me; whether in yoga or martial arts training, I’ve held the pose countless times in work-outs and classes. My physical frame is not that large. So the position known as ‘plank’ has always come easily. Over the years, I’ve found that I can hold it quite long, often more dependent on the fatigue in my arms rather than my abdominal-lumbo-hip muscle complex. Consequently, I’ve always felt that my core was fairly strong.

How wrong I have been! Guided by an on-line recording which urged me to flatten my back as if I was holding a plate of food atop it, I realized, quite suddenly one day, that I’ve not been engaging all of my core muscle group when I have previously moved into plank position. In fact, my back has not been flat, my lower body not aligned with my head and shoulders. Only some of the core muscle complex were previously activated when I’ve somewhat indifferently lifted myself into position. A key component of my core strength complex – my abdominals – were not pulling their weight at all.

Where I thought I was strong, I was, surprisingly, weak.

It’s not fun to discover new frailties, especially ones that once felt were our strengths in our routines. Sure, the insight can enable a person to improve; there is power in the uncovering of potential. But it is also humbling to be shown by life that, no matter the number of years we have breathed, we always have so much more to learn. And things which we thought we knew, some of which we understood to be easy, are not so straightforward after all. What is simple becomes hard. What is known is once more mysterious.

When I first realized the error in how I held plank position, I felt as if I was experiencing my body anew. How could I have missed this? Wow, the proper position was not so effortless, how I breathed not so comfortable, how long I could hold the posture not so predictable. I dropped to my knees after half a minute, and rolled onto the floor in laughter. Just one more example of the insidious influence of arrogance in my life! How many more such conceits had I yet to uncover?

The list appears to be long. Beginning with muscle mechanics, I reach when I shouldn’t, don’t lift with my legs to protect my back, rely more on one side of my body to perform certain functions when I have two fully capable and complementary sets of physical tools. Slow down, my awareness reminds me. Bring attention to action, I tell my seemingly autonomous extremities and digits. You don’t know everything. You didn’t even know what plank position actually was.

Of course there are other areas in my life where routine has been substituted for mastery, assumption replaced insight, pride masqueraded as purposeful engagement. And those parts of my life are not as easy to recognize and change. How I judge, for example. How I compare. The silly desire to succeed – and to be seen as succeeding. The fear I carry for the world and the people I love. Memories of my mistakes. Maybe even a deeply held belief that I am not worthy of unconditional acceptance by the Creator of this world and the prime moving force and spirit behind my being.

Am I really as adept and capable in the central parts of my life where I may think I am most fit and vital?

I know I am not. Fortunately, that is not weakness, at least not necessarily. Because when I am able to experience my days and the world through fresh eyes, I am able to grow. When I am able to grow, I am able to let go. When I learn to let go, I am able to better be: to better be versus always trying to be a better me. I don’t fully appreciate the difference there. I know, however, that an important distinction exists, instinctively sense that ‘being better’ involves a deeper level of participation in my daily habits and activities. It means an openness to learning new things – and to relearning things that I thought I knew. It involves releasing the embrace of the past on the potential for the future.

There can be wonder unveiled by weakness, fresh renewal possible through fragility. My physical plank position is much improved following the realization that I had not understood its form properly. Perhaps other parts of my core, once re-examined, can find similar strengthening.

Shine through. That’s what we all can do.

Some of my best moments in life have been the ones in which I’ve been the most transparent. I’m not necessarily talking about stark “truth-telling”; the full expression of our thoughts or the way that we feel at any point in time is often fraught with bias, loaded with emotion, and misguided by self-righteousness. The question “can I be honest?” is not uniformly followed by insightful, compassionate, and supportive commentary. Rather, it can be an entree to “let me tell you how I really feel”, a typically quick slip on the slick slope of bitterness, jealousy, and other selfish impulses. What I may be thinking or feeling at any moment should be subject to filter – or perhaps only shared with a counselor, spiritual sage, or some other objective professional or person whose role is only to listen, not to be changed.

The state of being ‘shined through’ is very different. In such a state, I am neither self-serving nor judgmental. There is no desire to be right. There is only presence. Like a bulb turned on from an influential source, there is current, then connection, and finally light. The incandescent bulb in your table lamp takes no credit for the current coursing through it. It seeks no reward for its role in day-to-day activities. It simply bridges, a thin filament of linkage converting electricity into luminescence. A switch is thrown and a resistant thread of metal heats until it glows. Electricity, thrust into an airless or inert space, is transformed into light.

It is no easy task to be airless. The space of our consciousness is anything but inert. We are constantly surveying our environment with our senses, processing a steady stream of information from the world around us, thinking, thinking about our thinking, assessing our situations, reasoning, reacting. We are so busy staying busy that we too easily can mistake what is us versus what is flowing through us. Consequently, we can miss opportunities to be filaments in the cosmic flow of interconnectedness. Or, when we serve as those bridges, we can misinterpret the experience. That was me, I might think. Look at me. The light from your table lamp never asks to be looked at. Instead, it allows you to see.

“That was great advice.”

Like most of us, I’ve been thanked for my advice more than once. It warms me to remember such occasions now. But some of my best advice I don’t recall giving. For others, if I do remember the situation, I am reminded of how I felt after I shared the perspective than of the insight itself. Where did that come from? I distinctly recall thinking at different times in my life. Oh gosh, I hope that was helpful. Who was I to say that? It feels good to be appreciated, yes. It feels strange, however, to be thanked for something that I either have forgotten or something for which I have no reason to be extended acknowledgment.

“I have no idea why I said that,” I once told someone, in response to a time-delayed note of thanks. To someone else: “I said that?” To another: “You may be remembering that wrong. It was probably someone else because, well, honestly, I think I was probably too focused on myself to have given anything resembling good advice for someone else.” That last statement still applies today.

Which is perhaps why I am drawn to the word “diaphanous”. And to the current circumstances in Ukraine, to the combative nature of communications in the United States, to the seemingly cyclical propensity of our species to overlook the advice of our ancestors. Some of best and worst guidance in history is memorialized in print, in audio recordings, and even in film. It is there, it is right there, before us, and with us. How can we let the past teach us? How can we seek to learn from both it and the present in a spirit of giving, of growing, rather than one of owning, of holding?

“Seeing through” something is very different to “shining through”. The first is potentially intrusive, is proudful, is more about what I can perceive rather than how you can benefit. The latter – shining through, the original meaning of the PIE word root bha – embodies the potential for radiation, for luminosity, for participation in a causal chain that depends on me but is not about me. Who or what wants or needs to ‘shine through’ our current world and its challenges? We can answer “nothing”, or resort to the breakthrough of “evil” or “tragedy”. But those are excuses, aren’t they. They represent a refusal to stretch ourselves in directions and ways that we are born to do. Because can choose to be part of the solution, not just bystanders to or recipients of the challenges. We can decide to reach out, in smalls moments and large, to others. We can answer the call of our time with a declaration in favor of goodness, of virtue, of the spirit that binds us to each other, to everything around us, to what has come before us and what will come after us. We can be the conduit for goodness to shine through.

It is nice to learn in our lives that we have made a difference in the world. It is nicer to know that we sometimes have made a difference despite our individual desires or needs to do so. Instead of indifference, or inaction, let’s try consciously to become part of the path of what is good and what is possible. Let’s never forget that light only shines when there are filaments of change willing to reach out and be energized.

When the cell phone industry announced 3G some years ago, I had to look up what “G” meant. “Oh, right”, I recall saying aloud, after reading online that G stood for generation. “I knew that.” Of course I had no idea what constituted arrival at the 3rd G and the next level of technical telecommunication capability. It could have been part marketing and part improved information technology. But it was something new, a layer above. It was another generation.

It is odd how much faith we place in generational change, either through time or via knowledge breakthroughs. Our stories read like an arc drawn over human history in some celestial blueprint, always pressing forward, ahead, surging, sometimes in spurts, towards improvement instead of deterioration. While not everyone feels that today is better than the proverbial yesterday, most of us believe that it should be, that, in principle, each generation should build on the lessons from the previous one, that every age should learn from its predecessors, that progress should define the human enterprise rather than stagnation or, worse yet, deterioration and regression. In the face of the occasional ‘one step back’, there should always be two steps forward – or at least a step and a half.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Penned in 1905 by philosopher George Santayana, this exhortation to remain conscious of time and things past was paraphrased four decades later by Winston Churchill when he famously replaced “remember the past” with “learn from history”. The alteration may seem minor; it has, however, fairly massive significance. Because to learn implies something very different from to remember. Indeed, a study of experience through the lens of impact can bring valuable insight into lessons learned from such experience. Even if imperfectly gained, sharpened understanding of yesteryear can bring benefits for both the present and then future, helping us individually and collectively from repeating prior missteps and mistakes, guiding us, haltingly yet gradually, to something better.

“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.” Clutching the skull of the dead court jester, Hamlet gives voice to the frailty of life, the vanity of human experience, and our difficulty seeing beyond the moments of our individual lives to the grander sweep and scope of our history. There is a certain sad resignation in this scene, a surrendering acceptance that what we do seems to be of little consequence, that as we are all destined for the soil following our final breath then the things of this life, of this world, of this time, well, all of it is, perhaps, inconsequential, that we and the silly meanderings of our lives do not matter.

How untrue.

It matters, what you and I do. We need not understand how or why our choices matter to believe, as a fundamental value, that they do, to hold in our hearts an ethic of virtue that manifests in our words, our actions, our desire to rise above ourselves, and our previous actions, and do better.

A month ago, a memory device came to mind while I was hiking in the high desert, a way to remind myself each day of the power of perspective in my own life: generosity and gratitude. Just two words. Yet within each lies a range of ability, humility, and reference. And it helps that they begin with the same letter. I decided I could remember to think of both values by recalling “two g’s” when I took my daily walk. It has worked. Every day, I remind myself that as long as I am fortunate to feel the effects of earthly attraction, I can remember to extend generosity, even in small doses, to the world and to be grateful for the opportunity to do so. Last week, the perhaps obvious extension of the memory device occurred to me: what other g’s might I consider? Was there an equivalent, evolutionary “5G” in my values to the generational stack in wireless telecommunication capability?

Consultation with a dictionary was not required. Nor did it take much time for me to settle on additions to my mnemonic. Gentleness jumped into place as my 3rd G, followed by grace, and then, grandeur. “Wait!” an internal voice called. “You should take your time with this. There are many other possibilities.” True, I am sure there are many worthy candidates for a place in my 5G framework. But I like the ones that my unrestricted consciousness served me. They seem to move in some sequence and order that feels, strangely, generational.

And there is room to grow, should I decide to add to my own 5G standard before the telecommunications industry adds to its. That is the beauty of having references and structures in our learning: we can evolve them, refine and improve them. But to do so we must remember them, just as we must recall, through clear eyes and unvarnished viewpoints, the lessons of our past lest, or even when, we find ourselves relearning those lessons, sometimes painfully, often unnecessarily.

What is a 5G history equivalent for the contemporary world? Europe is again at war. Our climate slides further into worrisome waters. Those who would divide us from a common cause hold noisy megaphones. In the face of such challenges, we must give historical reflection its due, past experience its present potential, so that our children do not, like Hamlet, find themselves contemplating the graveyards of their ancestors with the same resigned remorse. We can learn. We can embrace our inadequacies. We can embody what is good and what our past has taught us is the best in ourselves. We can accept that the force binding us – a force we might call the Creator, the prime mover, Allah, Buddha, the great spirit, God – is more powerful than any oppositional influence which might shatter or splinter us.

We should all feel the same gravity. 1G should be a mighty motivator.

Small divisions of continuity, the minutes of the clock. Our lives are filled with them. They are how we measure our movements through space, through aging. Sixty seconds make a minute, sixty minutes make an hour, 1440 minutes make a day, and over 10,000 minutes make a week. There are over half a million minutes in a year. A human being who lives for seventy-five years lives through almost 40 million units of sixty-second time. A person who lives to be one hundred gets over 52 million of them. Those are big numbers. They remind me that, for most of us, we have plenty of minutes in our lives. Although many of those minutes may be of limited quality, they are not, for an average person, of limited quantity. We seem to have plenty to spare.

So suppose we took one of those minutes, just one, and devoted it, just once a year, to a common goal. Suppose an entire state, or country, or even the planet identified just one minute per year to stop, pause, and reflect, pray, or breathe together at the same time. What might that experience be like?

You might be thinking that we already do this, on New Years Eve. Not really. Yes, we often count together each December 31st at 11:59pm but we do it in different time zones and we do it with different purpose. We are counting towards the next minute, a new year, when we count down, mechanically, mostly mindlessly, the terminal minute of last year, a final allotment of seconds as we transition, thankfully, often longingly, from one number on a calendar to the next. The concluding minute of most years is something to get through, something to be done with, rather than something to savor, something to embrace, something to be experienced – as one.

“Let’s take a moment of silence to … (you fill in the blank)”. Many of us have been asked to do this, at funerals and memorials, or in prayer services, or perhaps in civic and community meetings. We dutifully respond to such requests, often standing, relaxing our hands and minds, closing our eyes, bowing our heads, or maybe even turning our faces to the sky and our sun and the aspirations of our spirits. The silence that follows is often saturated with life. We hear the shuffling of feet, the sighing of breath, coughing, the cries of infants, the spaces between the noise of being and the desire of the human heart to be heard. I used to be uncomfortable when asked to do this at the beginning of large meetings or conferences. Was I being asked to pray? Why should I be asked to do that? Only when I learned to acknowledge the importance of intentional pause did I come to appreciate the power in the request to collectively listen, to be quiet with others purposefully, to sometimes remember or consider something together without any one human voice speaking. It is a very grounding experience. We can be loud, us humans. We shout too much. We tell each other what is wrong too much. We think we know so much that sometimes we talk, and we talk, and we talk without thinking, without listening, without remembering to simply and softly be.

Last summer, I attended a training for health leaders on professional fulfillment and wellbeing. It was during the June lull in the coronavirus pandemic, a window of weeks when we believed, mistakenly, that much of the COVID virus and its tragedy was behind us. Most of us in the room had not been physically present in such a setting with other health professionals in quite some time. There was a buzz associated with the return. There was a verbal acknowledgement of the buzz from the speaker’s podium when the meeting began. But there was not a opportunity for the depth of feeling beneath that palpable hum for us to take a shared breath. We were not offered the comforting cloak of a mutual moment of silence. The tragedy, the loss, the frustration, the grief so pervasive in the communities we respectively served was not mentioned. It was disorienting for me, even a bit destabilizing. I felt a distinct desire for a temporary standstill, a longing for connection to others through an opportunity to simply think, internally, about the preceding sixteenth months of life and history and to do so, externally, purposefully, with others.

Might we schedule such a time still?

Imagine that we are all given an opportunity, later this month or next, to stop, for just one minute, and be. Together. Pick a day and time, say next Saturday at noon. The time zone doesn’t matter. What does is the sense of collective intent, identity. Think of the sadness that others have felt, we might offer as guidance. Or think of the sadness you personally have felt. Try to pause from your busy lives and think that millions, perhaps even billions, of other people are doing the same. You only know a sliver of the people presently living on the face of our earth. Individually, you have encountered, loved, and lost an infinitesimal percent of the total number of people on this planet. But together, all of us, we have known and we still know all of these people. Everyone knows someone. The chain of knowing links us all. So let’s pause, be still, and be silent. Think about people or whatever power you want to think about. Think about people you love, miss, or want to honor and do so silently, without speaking, and with humility, open hearts, and whatever feelings that arise. For just one minute – only sixty seconds – think about someone or some power who represents or has represented goodness in your life. And know that, while you are doing this, everyone else you know, and everyone else you don’t know, is doing this also.

What common strength might we find in a single minute of shared silence?

Lately I’ve been thinking about non-thought.

It’s not some trick of the brain; a person can actually think of what it is like to not think. Take, for example, your reaction to the color lilac. First, you have to get a picture about what color that is. If you’re like me, you may start with a category: purple. Then you may do some word association with all the various shades of purple you can remember. Words connect with images, images remind you of other pigments in the purple range, and, before you know it, or is it more as you know it, you find your internal awareness awash in a tidal flow that is hardly a simple bifurcation between the color lilac and everything else. And, while I’ll grant you that thought can include images as well as words (an admission which may lead you to wonder if thinking of lilac is actually a good example of non-thinking at all), I hope you will agree that there is something more to the experience of pondering the panoply of hues purple than meets the conscious eye, something richer, deeper, more complex. There may be memories. There may be aspirations. There may be emotions, musings, even transient timeless disconnections with the present ,interlinked with the simple experience of the thought of the word ‘lilac’.

What does it mean to be rationale, really?

Perhaps it’s not surprising that we prefer a conscious experience of precision, of clarity. Of this and that. Of right and wrong. Of on and off. Of black and white. Of you and me. We do, it seems, interact in so many seemingly binary ways. We categorize, often for the sake of making sense of so much complexity. We observe symmetries all around us and hence seek rules that may help us better understand certain fundamental foundations to this wild, weird, and wacky thing we call life. Rules can be nice. They help us structure, distinguish, predict. Such organizational schema enable us to study, observe, learn – and predict some more.

Until I ask myself to think about the color lilac. Because the journey of thinking lilac can lead me, if I let it, into a disorienting swirl of somehow being lilac, almost as if you’ve dropped me like some teardrop of conscious intent into a colossal paint can that softly spins as the essence of lilacness, a swirling hue of acceptance that resembles at first our solar system, then our galaxy, then the cosmos itself, borderless, limitless, and yet so very tangible, so very here, so very –

now.

This morning I read an excerpt online of “Beyond the Self: Conversations between Buddhism and Neuroscience”. The topic is the unconscious. The perspectives are the subjective experience of meditation and the observational objectivity of science. Both have insights. Each offers useful frameworks for understanding a world that seems to idle if it routinely run beneath the surface of our awareness. The article is fascinating; I hope to read the entire book. Yet the premise of the article, how it was framed, implied a certain dichotomy between the vantages, a dynamic push-pull tug-of-tension in which, ultimately, we may learn or decide that one side wins. I doubt this is the intention of either the article or the full published conversation. I could not help, however, wondering how, and why, we predictably prefer to refer to the ‘un’conscious as if it so eerie, ethereal, and separate to its intellectual alternatives. The predilection to compartmentalize allows scientific study, to be sure. It helps me remember an occasional few of the myriad of facts about how things work in the complex cosmos around me. Those facts can be applied in tangible if not always productive ways. The results are staggering, in terms of technology and our evolving capability for building, communications, and environmental impact. But do they advance our ability to make decisions about how we live together, how we care for the whole instead of its parts, how we collectively embrace the capacity we have to experience beauty, mystery, and love?

You may know that lilac, the flower, has quite the storied history. To the Celts, it was magical, a trait resulting from its alluring aroma. In Russia, it is thought to bring wisdom, if held over a newborn. It signaled old loves to Victorians and stands for the robust nature of New Hampshire residents. It has held a prominent place in paintings, perfumes, natural health therapies, and ancient Greek mythology. It also has a very short bloom time, flowering briefly, for just a few weeks, in early spring, making it elusive, ephemeral, almost fleeting. I wasn’t thinking of any of these things when I first presented the example of lilac, the color, at the beginning of this essay. I wasn’t thinking of anything at all actually, except that a world of binary existence is a bit like television before color. We called it black-and-white TV back then – as if there were only two shades of contrast available for viewing. How much more dynamic it was though to watch TV when it was first invented. How much better that encounter became when color was added. And how much more we continue to try to expand the experience of viewing life through technologic form factor advancements in virtual reality. Now that is a world truly created by zeros and ones, the language of computer programming. I’ve got nothing against that world; it offers many benefits. It’s only that there is a more complete one, a more holistic one, awaiting me right outside my front door. That world, the one I can step into at any moment, the one that I step through at every moment, doesn’t differentiate between zeros and ones, between consciousness and ‘un’consciousness, between on and off.

It just is.

Some things happen against unusual odds.

I was hiking with my wife two weeks ago, across a path in the high country Arizona desert. It was a nice afternoon, albeit one with a bit of winter’s bite in the air. We enjoy our treks through this land. It is filled with color, texture, big skies, and quiet. In one section of the path, there is a brief traverse of rock and sand that is neither flat nor steep but inclined to the occasional slip of the shoe. On this day, my right foot indeed slipped, only a fraction, and I stumbled, if only partially.

“You stepped on this poor cactus,” my wife noted. She stopped to bolster the tiny plant’s precarious hold on its history. I inspected my shoe. There was no evidence of damage, no protrusion of cactus thorn, no remains of former plant life suggesting anything more than a light brush with nature’s pricklyness. I shared the results of my self-inspection, to which my wife replied: “cactus needles can get through shoes like those pretty easily”.

Her observation was a mix of indirect chiding; I probably had worn the wrong shoes and I definitely needed to pay more attention to where I was going.

“Well, the little fellow seems ok,” I said, refocusing her attention back to the barrel cactus. “And it appears I was lucky.”

She said nothing. This is not always a sign of agreement.

We completed our walk, returned home for a cup of warm tea, and settled into the late afternoon sun. The cactus encounter had left my mind, a state unusually predisposed of late to clutter from too many other sources. Between past and future, there are some days when a hike fails to calm it, when directional movement is insufficient distraction from the vagaries of image, idea, and memory that jump into and out of internal view like excited children repeatedly leaping into a swimming pool on a hot day. In the midst of this mental melee, my right big toe softly signaled for attention, ever so subtly informing me that something was different, awry. Inspection of sock, foot, and toe revealed nothing. My gait felt ok. Yet when sock re-enveloped foot and foot re-nestled within slipper, that tiny call for notice resumed.

You no doubt anticipate where this is heading: the brush with cactus may have had more significance than originally appeared. Indeed, once bright light, glasses, and a magnifying lens were engaged in a detailed re-inspection, a tiny needle was located just beneath the nail of the big toe. Only a few millimeters in length, the broken spine was wedged precisely into the niche separating nail from its bed, its tip protruding just past the end of the nail. A tweezers and light touch extracted the glochid; a soak in hot water soothed the insulted toe and nail. But my amazement grew as my toe forgot about the matter. What were the odds of that happening? I could hike the same trail the rest of my life and that almost impossibly rare sequence of events might never recur. No evidence of cactus spine in sock or shoe. Nothing else anywhere on my foot. Just a single tiny probe of plant defense slipped into a sliver of human anatomic vulnerability. A one in a gazillion event.

Our lives are filled with cause and effect occurrence. Such linked experience is part of the nature of things and the ways things are connected in nature. A push here results in a give there. A pull there may be connected with a release here. We expect that a stumble into a cactus, regardless of the plant’s size, will have thorny consequences. Some minute portion of those encounters will deposit cactus needles in the most unusual of locations. It is like that with life. Run the possibilities for each day in all of their splendor and our experience is littered with rare events, strange and odd incidents, amazing strokes of bad and good luck. Many, even perhaps most, of these oddities are coincidences, “remarkable concurrences of circumstances without apparent causal connection” (from the New Oxford American Dictionary). But must they all be so? Just because something is rare, should it necessarily be seen as random?

I’ve had the good fortune to recently reconnect with someone from years earlier in my life path. This person has had an impressive journey since I last knew him. On the list of his achievements includes a continuous commitment to learning, to thinking, and to reading. His emails remind me of the difference between being widely read and being well read. I used to consider myself widely read; a range of titles and topics has peppered my bookshelves like intellectual trophies. This friend is well read; he understands and recalls the content of some challenging texts. A humble person, he also ascribes to me more cleverness in cognition than I possess. Have I read a certain book? I often cannot recall. He, on the other hand, can summarize the book’s thesis. He has done so sparingly, with gentle humility, for a philosopher or two of some historical repute, in the hopes that I can respond with a insightful rejoinder. Sadly, I’m too busy tripping over cacti, and wondering about the odds of having their spines implanted beneath toenails, to muster the courage to adventure into such worthwhile fields of inquiry.

But our brief electronic communications have opened up a topic which is perhaps informed as much by life listening as it is by complex thought: fate vs. free will. It seems so binary, does it not, the question of whether our stories are told through unfettered individual decisions or in accordance with the the pre-destined plan made by some grand wizard of the cosmos. We should have one or the other, full freedom to chart our paths or the patience to accept the course upon which we find ourselves. I know I should read more on this. I recognize that there are reams of brilliant perspective bound in the compressed pages of published texts and treatises. That legacy, however, is neither presently accessible or of interest for me and my interpretation. Because I believe, based on my experience, that what I do every day is a strange and marvelous blend of fate and free will. All the choices I make are exactly that: choices I make. And I make them all the time. Still, the options often placed before me, the alternatives I seem to have for things large and small, well those do not always seem random or solely influenced by decisions I have previously made. There is more at play in my day than me, my brain, and my agency. There is you, there is the natural world, and there is something beyond you and the natural world that we cannot yet observe or quantify or agree to name yet we still cannot ignore or discount or simply reject.

No, I don’t believe that I was meant to recently trip on a cactus, hours later find one of its swords tucked within a toe, and weeks later share that experience with you as if it were some event of existential import. Nonetheless, here I am, musing on the connections of cactus and book spines, wondering where I end and the world begins, awaiting the arrival of words that somehow produce themselves on this page beneath my eyes through the unusually rare ability of my fingertips to birth the immanent I neither understand, know, or fully control.

What is really natural in our world? What is the nature of wonder in our routine experience? Life is indeed a remarkable concurrence of circumstances and choices. The lack of apparent causal connection does not mean there is none. That uncertainty brings me comfort, and joy.