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There are folks who endeavor not to feel emotions. We’ve all known people who hide their tears, their sorrow, even their love. We mistakenly call that “being strong”, but it isn’t. Burying emotions is corrosive and ultimately erupts in some way, as anger, as depression, some other way. I’m no expert but I do know what grief feels like and, of one thing I’m certain, it doesn’t just disappear once and for all. I know folks who do their best to overcome grief by chasing constant distraction. They f...
NASA tells us Mars once had plentiful water which evaporated when its atmosphere thinned. Life, as we know it, requires water. It is supposed, given the presence of water, microbial life could have existed at one time on Mars but we haven’t found proof. As we humans begin to touch the barest fringes of the universe, it seems clear we would go absolutely nuts at the first sign of non-earthly life. Whether a microbe or a larger creature of any sort, we would be transfixed. If we actually d...
There are words which are used as if they mean the same thing but are, in reality, vastly different. Two words which are often used interchangeably are “alone” and “lonely”. They occupy similar emotional spheres but, like railroad tracks that run along side each other but never ever meet, they are forever separate. I saw a short clip recently about Michael Collins. He was the pilot of the Apollo 11 spacecraft. While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went to the surface of the moon, Collins continue...
I don’t know anyone who says they’re looking forward to the politics this year. We’ve been inundated with so much negativity we’re sick and tired of it long before the campaigns really get going. There are, however, two things which we all can do to improve our feelings about this year. They go hand in hand. The first of these is hope. We can focus on all the bad stuff shoveled endlessly through the news and assorted partisans who do their best to create fear and distrust or we can focus o...
There’s an old saying, which, when I first heard it, I mentally objected and pushed the thought aside. The saying is, “Let go, or be dragged.” The Buddhist idea that it is our attachments which causes our suffering makes it a likely origin. I couldn’t accept it because, like everyone, I am a child of my culture. Our culture teaches us from birth that we are valued according to our achievements. We are molded by culture to believe we must continually do more, be more, or we’re not achieving...
A friend and I were discussing the difficulty all of us have growing up in learning to ask for help. Especially, when we’re young we don’t like to admit we don’t know things and need someone to give us a hand. My friend recounted a time when he was about nine years old watching his stepfather, who was about forty, attempt to iron plastic curtains. At nine he already knew that was a wildly illogical thing to do. Needless to say, they didn’t have curtains over that window when he was done. W...
The news has a repetitive theme these days about folks dreading this election season. Even political junkies who thrive on every twist and turn of elections confess to dreading how divisive and vitriolic it will almost certainly be. People are rightfully worried about a return of the violence that occurred in 2020. I’ve attempted to reassure some folks that we’ve gone through rough political waters before and survived but that doesn’t help much. There was a time in our history, known as the ...
Whenever I head for Great Falls I always make sure I have my cell phone, my wallet, and my truck keys. Those are important. By the time I’ve been on the highway for even two minutes, I remember something else. I wish I had some eye drops with me. There is some micro-dust in the air between here and there that causes my eyes to feel irritated. It wouldn’t be advisable to put in eye drops while driving but, theoretically, if I had eye drops with me I could use some before I start driving and bef...
Because I like articles that make me go, “What?” I dove into an article in “Aeon” recently that made the case that time is an object. Since I’m still trying to wrap my poor head around the concept of “spacetime” I confess I have no ability to even begin to explain what I read. What I did take from that article is the idea that evolution is necessary for things to come into being and the evolutionary principle demands we recognize time as an object rather than a mere conceptional framework by...
The children’s Christmas pageant at my church this year had one of those unexpected moments we don’t forget. Among the sheep gathered at the Manger was a tiger. The image of a tiger, the most fearsome of predators, at that iconic scene of peace and goodwill, definitely brought smiles. What were they to do when the little boy really wanted to wear his tiger costume? Sometimes we can really enjoy something that breaks the routine, something that alters the trajectory of what’s expected. We are a...
Although change is a constant, there’s one thing I can count on. Every day my 5 year old grandson will ask, “How many days until Christmas?” Everything beyond about three days is, to him, an excessively long amount of time. On the Christian calendar, we’re in Advent. It’s the season of anticipation and preparation for the birth of Jesus. Different groups down through history have traditions associated with this time. At least one actually included fasting! Thankfully, that horror was never pop...
It has been noted for many years that television has contributed to our being a very impatient people. We have been accustomed to very difficult problems being solved in a half or an hour-long show. We watch movies in which the world is saved from catastrophe in under two hours max. The Internet has made that tendency worse. Want to get information? It’s only a click away. Want something? No need to even drive to Great Falls, you can order online and it will be at your doorstep, assuming the del...
My Thanksgiving involved 2,000 miles of travel. I drove to Utah to see a friend, then we went to Denver for Thanksgiving, then back to Utah and finally home to Cascade. The myriad of experiences makes simple evaluation a bit complicated. As I was thinking about it, a post on Facebook by Willie Sloan caught my attention. We’ve all been exposed to the concept of “triggers” over the past few years, those words or actions that cause someone to feel threatened and angry. We’ve seen that in folks w...
I like to cook. To me cooking is like playing with the chemistry sets my parents bought me when I was young. They undoubtedly thought I would do the experiments in the accompanying books. The truth is, I rarely, if ever followed the instructions. I liked to try different things to see what would happen. Some results were good, some not so much. A couple were more dangerous than advisable. Likewise, I cook the same way. Some results are delicious, some acceptable, a few disasters. Over the years...
When this is published we’ll be a week away from Thanksgiving. As I’ve said often, it’s my favorite holiday. I’m sure for some of you, that’s not true. Some folks don’t like Thanksgiving, of course, those same people probably dislike puppies, kittens, fall foliage, and springtime and, are obviously, tastebud deficient. Just kidding. Some folks have legitimate reasons for not caring for Thanksgiving, or any particular holiday. Some folks honestly don’t feel like they have anything for which to...
In the holiday season we often find ourselves besieged by the necessity of making decisions. We are supposed to adhere to family traditions, some of which don’t really fit what we need or want for ourselves anymore. We always go to this place or that for Thanksgiving, we must bring the dish everyone assumes we will bring. We have to keep buying presents even for adult relatives, cause that’s what we’ve always done. The list is endless. This a good time to think about how we make decis...
Don’t tell but I have a confession to make. I’m well aware that my opinions may be wrong! My first editorials, opinion pieces, were written some 25 years ago for the Los Angeles Times, and I’ve written over 500 just for the Cascade Courier. I’m sure some folks think I’m completely goofy on a regular basis but, I assure you, I never intentionally write anything I don’t consider true. The thing is, truth is somewhat flexible. Some truths hold up under scientific scrutiny. They are subjected t...
The Earth rotates at 1,037 mph. The Earth orbits the Sun at 67,000 mph. Our solar system whirls around the center of the galaxy at 490,000 mph. The speed at which our galaxy is moving through the universe is about 1.3 million miles per hour. All that is beyond comprehension even though we know it is true. We don’t feel the speed, if we did we could not function. We exist in an infinite void, travelling at an incomprehensible speed. There are no words capable of fully expressing our place in s...
Every political season people suggest we ought to institute some other political system, usually they say we should have a parliamentary system. Yes, parliamentary systems do have some advantages but also some drawbacks. We only have to look at the United Kingdom, Israel, or India to see where problems lie. No one, unless they’re hopelessly biased, would ever call Boris Johnson, Netanyahu, or Modi as being good national leaders. They were, and are, highly polarizing power seekers who believe i...
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...
