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If someone asked, “What color are leaves?” I’m sure I would respond, “Green”, while looking at the person as if they were a bit crazy unless they asked about this time of year. But, I recently saw a post that made me realize it was an unwarranted assumption. The real colors of leaves are the beautiful yellows, golds, reds and oranges we see in the fall. The green we see is when the leaves are overwhelmed with the pigment of chlorophyll. Life is like that. We are, from birth, overwhelm...
When I was in real estate I got the kind of call folks dream about. It was a professional couple who had just moved to Great Falls and wanted to buy a house. They both had good incomes and knew exactly what they wanted in a home. They had a lengthy checklist of requirements. Over the next weeks I showed them house after house that met most of their desires. Then one day, I found it. The house had just come on the market and it was perfect in every way plus it had additional qualities that made i...
There have been, evidently, three times in human history when humanity was in danger of extinction. About 900,000 years ago the population was down to about 1,280 individuals and that number did not significantly increase for well over 100,000 years. We’ve known for a long time that hominids did not sweep across the globe in one steady progression. There were places where they existed for an extended period only to vanish and not reappear for many thousands of years. A violent volcanic e...
There are vast numbers of articles and books dealing with loneliness. It’s an odd epidemic. We are more connected than ever. We have “friends” on social media with whom we can connect anytime. And yet, even young folks are lonely. It’s as if we all walk around with our favorite snack in our pockets. We can have a snack whenever we want but miss having a real meal. We can have immediate gratification without effort. Why bother making real friends when ersatz ones are as close as our cellpho...
It's been popular for self-help and spiritually oriented books for years to borrow a concept from Asian, particularly Buddhist, thinking. We’re supposed to live in the present, don’t think about what’s past because we can’t do anything about it and, likewise, don’t worry about the future because we can’t possibly know for certain what the future holds. It’s supposed to give us a calmer life. That is a good attitude to have, at least most of the time. There are, however, exceptions. No, we can’t...
Virtually all human endeavor is, one way or another, connected to the quest for, or use of energy. Scientists and engineers have spent lifetimes in search of better, more efficient, methods for creating energy and channeling it for our purposes. The Holy Grail of research is finding a way, perhaps by cold fusion, to create more energy than it takes to produce the reaction. That may now have been, on a limited basis, accomplished. Imagine a world with cheap, unlimited energy. There would be...
Weather and time permitting, I let my dog, The Mighty Shmooie, choose the route we walk every morning. We have five basic routes and, with the exception of going into people’s yards, he gets to choose. His favorites are usually a mile to a mile and a half although, at age twelve and a half, I’ve noticed he tends to prefer the shorter walks more than he used to. There’s a two mile route but we rarely take that one anymore. Even though Shmoo doesn’t have as much energy for longer walks at his age...
Sometimes we assume we have all the answers and folks from the distant past have nothing to teach us. That’s especially true when we have to distill the meaning from unfamiliar language and expressions. Even writings from a hundred years ago in English can be difficult because the writer expressed thoughts in ways far removed from our way of speaking today. We dismiss the thinking because it isn’t said the way we would say it. Roughly seven hundred years ago an anonymous work of Christian mys...
I have read ways in which mosquitoes are beneficial to the environment but I don’t know anyone who actually likes them. The one good thing is, they are fragile. Suppose they were like beetles and had a hard carapace so a simple slap wouldn’t finish them off? What’s also annoying is what they do to us psychologically. After a bite we all get twitchy. We feel a faint sensation on our skin and instinctively slap ourselves. Then we’re annoyed all over again when we realize there was nothing there a...
The speed with which the world is changing means we cannot possibly hope to teach our young folks how to deal with it all. The speed of climate change, the advent of Artificial Intelligence, the massive increase in information about the universe, leaves us with a feeling of inadequacy in conveying the necessary information to our children and grandchildren so they can deal with it appropriately. How do we teach the best way of employing Artificial Intelligence when even those at the forefront...
A child comes in, “Can I have a popsicle?” Adult who is fixing dinner, “No, dinner is in fifteen minutes.” Two minutes later, “Is dinner ready?” “No, I said fifteen minutes.” Two minutes later, “Is dinner ready…” When we give a small child a time frame for something we might as well tell them to go taste the number nine. It literally makes no sense to them. As we grow older we, hopefully, begin to grasp the passage of time. If children don’t have an increasing concept of time they are destined f...
Scientists, philosophers, theologians, and regular folks like you and me all search for truth, for absolutes. However, science is not simply a matter of collecting facts. Science is a method of asking questions and then studying the answers to make sure they are accurate. Philosophers and theologians have systematic ways of analysis to determine the logical consistency of their Truth but they also give us ways of looking at reality in a way that makes us comfortable. We seek psychological...
Since the advent of 24 hour per day, 365 days per year news cycle we’ve become accustomed to being inundated with so much news that we easily ignore news of great importance to someone else but doesn’t affect us directly. Sometimes there are problems we hear about but ignore even though the folks who know best try to alert us that it is going to get so big that it impacts everyone. Those are the problems we need to pay attention to sooner rather than later. There are 10 million refugees in the...
Human interactions can, generally speaking, be reduced to either force or mutuality of respect. Arguments can be made as to where we draw that line but we behave in certain ways either because we feel forced to do so or because we wish to nurture respectful relationships. If our behavior is based on wishing to have a society that functions in a manner which nurtures relationships we behave in a certain way regardless of whether or not there is a reasonable expectation of any further...
Sometimes it seems as if humanity lurches from disaster to disaster with brief periods of enlightenment in between. As we look back through history we learn about the so-called great conquerors. We hold up as persons of note men like Alexander, Genghis Khan, Attila, on and on. We build statues to these “great” men. Somehow the fact that their fame rests on the slaughter of untold millions of people who were just going about their lives before being butchered to serve the megalomania of a con...
A friend is taking music lessons from a talented teacher. She’s in Japan, he’s in New York. That, by itself, is utterly astonishing to many of us older folks. She assigned him a piece of music which he thinks is too difficult for him. In encouragement she told him she wants him to relate to the music, not the individual notes. He’s focusing on trying to get the notes right. She’s telling him to get out of his own way and play the music. We’ve all had moments when we did something exceeding...
My mother was born on May 19th, 1913. When she was born 110 years ago, World War I hadn’t happened, the Civil War was a recent memory for many. There were ex-slaves who still worked in the family fields and household. The whole idea of the Civil Rights movement was unimaginable to virtually anyone. Radio had been invented but I don’t think it had reached rural Mississippi. Television and computers were things of which few folks could imagine. We can go back some 2,500 years to get some per...
When Rabbi Harold S. Kushner died last month my mind went back some 40 years to the publication of his book, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People”. It remains, to me, one of the very best books ever written on the subject of human suffering and how we think about God. Rabbi Kushner spoke from experience, he wrote honestly and compassionately. His son died of progeria shortly after his 14th birthday. I heartily recommend his book for anyone dealing with grief and the unfairness that so oft...
I saw a clip from the old show All in the Family. Meathead is putting on his socks and shoes. He puts on one sock then puts on that shoe. Archie, who is watching, goes ballistic because he believes it is only acceptable to put on both socks before putting on a shoe. The debate is ridiculous. The point made is not ridiculous. Archie, in his supreme narcissism and narrow mindedness, cannot conceive of anyone doing anything that doesn’t conform to his idea of how things should be. If social m...
A friend put in a request for a column addressing a sensitive subject. Over the years numerous folks have expressed similar emotions and there’s always guilt in their voices when they’ve told me about it. When a loved one dies, the one left behind feels grief but, frequently, also relief. Our relief produces guilt. “If I truly loved him or her, how can I feel relief that they’re gone?” Grief is a complex issue. It is neither simple nor is there a standard that applies to everyone. People ma...
A reader, who clearly didn't care for columns devoted to science, said, "You know, science gets things wrong." She was, of course, correct. Science does get things wrong sometimes. The difference between science and opinion though, is when science is shown to have made a mistake it seeks to correct the mistake rather than digging in its heels and defending the indefensible. An example of scientific methodology was observation of the planet Uranus, discovered in 1781. As scientists studied it...
