If there is no true void, if empty space is itself the carrier of Dark Energy, if nothing is nothing, how are we to understand the many somethings that make up our place? Is the world a solution? Are we the few grains of salt that didn’t dissolve? Are the stars also grains?
 
Why should any of us ask such questions? Aren’t they a silly waste of our time? We can easily distinguish ourselves one from another in a restless saline liquid. I stand in a place fully separate, a lump in a lumpy universe that was lumpy from its beginning as the COBE and WMAP images show. Slight differences in temperature, really slight almost 13.8 billion years ago, and here we are: Individuals disconnected.
 
Yet, in this solution of energy, matter, Dark Matter, and Dark Energy, we envision a void around us, something we always have to cross to get to another. Uninterrupted connection is a myth. We are, in our minds, separate except in one way: We can choose to cross the apparent void to connect, to merge, to dissolve with another in like-mindedness and emotional ties.
 
That’s what makes the void so special to us: We choose to void the void when we want and create it as we wish. Maybe the void exists only to the extent and in the time we want it to exist. The void protects our individuality, but its existence is always under attack in the simplest of settings. “Hey, we’re throwing a party tonight. Comin’?” “Let’s talk.” And the void reappears unexpectedly. “What’s happened to us?” “What have you become?” “I don’t know you anymore.”
 
Seems we’re always crossing the void for one reason or another, even when we try to maintain it. The human universe seems to abhor a vacuum at the same time it loves it. So, which is it for you? Running across the void or using it to disconnect? 

How much of your life is arbitrary? Certainly, your age is. “No,” you argue, “I was born in such-n-such year. I know the exact date of my birth.”
 
Relatively speaking, you do know a birthdate, but, as you also know, the contemporary way of counting starts with Christ’s birth. Supposedly, as of this writing, it has been a few months over 2015 years since that event, that is, if you accept Dionysius Exiguus’ account. He might have been off by four to six years, so….
 
The Romans had a different “Year One,” and the Satanists in Rosemary’s Baby, the Soviets in 1917, and others had, at least temporarily, other “Year Ones.” So, at least something in your life is definitely, without question, undeniably, and certainly arbitrary (gotta love an oxymoron). The year of your birth, in the grand scheme of things past, is an arbitrary marker. We’ll accept it anyway for your sense of security.
 
“From the founding of the City” is a loose translation of the idiomatic Latin expression ab urbe condita. And we could just as easily use ab initio vobis, or roughly “from the beginning of you.” Let’s make the year of your birth “The Year One.” Got something definite sounding in that, don’t we?
 
Anything else arbitrary in your life? Any philosophical ideas you might suspect are just a bit contradictory around the edges. Some oxymorons hiding in your thoughts? Don’t fret. It happens to all of us. We find out that we can’t rely on much of the underlying foundations of our personal philosophies. And the same applies to our personal psychologies. We are, for the most part, calendars of conflicting dates: Someone is on the Julian calendar; someone else is on the Gregorian. Yet another is on the Mayan calendar (Wasn’t the world supposed to end a few years ago according to that calendar?).
 
Might that arbitrariness be a reason we have so much difficulty getting along? Someone elsewhere says, “This is my point of origin,” or “This is the anchor of my thought,” whereas someone else says, “No, this is the point of origin,” or “This is the anchor.” Starting points seem to make most, if not all, the difference.
 
Well, Happy Birthday, nevertheless. And if you don’t like the one you have, just start a new calendar.

“This might happen. Or that. Or something else. Definitely, something MIGHT happen.”
 
How is it that an emperor, often away at war, found time to write a book of meditations? How bright was this guy? I’m referring to Marcus Aurelius, stoic philosopher, general, and emperor. Imagine waxing philosophical while governing an empire and suppressing threats to Rome. Maybe his innate character had a predisposition toward contemplating while administrating. Maybe his contemplative nature grew stronger after some of his young children died; they were born into an age before modern medicine could have worked its pediatric wonders to save them, to prolong their lives. Philosophical he was. Definitely, to those looking on, he was an example of stoicism and one unaffected by pettiness.
 
And he also waxed psychological. That’s where we come in. Some of us make the kinds of statements you read in the opening line above. “Obviously, you say, don’t include me in that group. I’m never anxious; I simply don’t worry, but I do know someone, ‘a friend,’ who worries.” (Is it a coincidence that you and your “friend” share the same first name?)
 
All right, then, this doesn’t apply to you. It’s for those others, the ones who worry, those “friends” out there. They are the anxious. For their sake and on the outside chance that you can help them lessen their anxiety, consider the words of Aurelius. Writing about anxieties, he says, “Many of the anxieties that harass you are superfluous: being but the creatures of your own fancy…” (Maxwell Staniforth’s translation).
 
True, right? Fancies create anxieties. But fancies are not autonomous. They don’t operate without “your friend’s” permission. Control fancy, and “your friend” controls a great deal his or her anxiety. Unless it has an underlying biochemical cause, anxiety is, as the emperor writes, probably the product of fancy.
 
“Yeah, but how do I get ‘my friend’ to control her anxiety?” you ask. “’My friend’ gets anxious about something every day. ‘My friend’ can’t keep imagination from working.” Time to listen to Aurelius. It’s all about perspective, about using imagination to conquer the products of your fancy. And it all has to do with place.
 
The farther away from something, the smaller it seems. You get that lesson when your brain first learns to see, and someone walks toward or away from your crib. Marcus advises that anxieties will disappear “by letting your thought sweep over the entire universe, contemplating the illimitable tracts of eternity, marking the swiftness of change in each created thing, and contrasting the brief span between birth and dissolution with the endless aeons that precede the one and the infinity that follows the other.”   
 
Tell “your friend’” to take a trip with Marcus Aurelius into the far reaches of the empire. Marcus, marching through lands to fight wars, had a distant perspective on the “troubles” of those whose universe was Rome. Rome was a great city, yes, and for those within its boundaries was the center of the world. Nevertheless, Rome in the eyes of the traveling emperor was, in fact, just a city on a planet in an enveloping universe. That was the emperor’s perspective. He saw more of the world than just a city. The world as he writes, contains “the numberless herds of mankind, and all the chequered pattern of their comings and gatherings and goings.” To this he adds the distance of time incarnate in those who came before and those who will come after.
 
Time to heed the Emperor’s advice: Tell “your anxious friend” to let thought sweep over the whole universe. Distance, even mental distance, shrinks worry. Anxiety diminished is anxiety defeated, anxiety turned into a mere creation of fancy, something with little or no substance. And according to Marcus Aurelius it is a sense of place that does the trick. By focusing on the BIG PLACE, you know, the entire universe, the everywhere beyond where your “friend’s” little fancy has grown into a big anxiety, your “friend” can remove himself or herself from the fancied happening.
 
Yes, there are circumstances beyond “your friend’s” control that can cause anxiety: Loss of job, abusive, angry people, brain chemistry, and nature’s threats are among them. But if “your friend” could, like Marcus, wax philosophical even in the midst of war, then one kind of anxiety, the type that is fancy’s creation will probably fade and might even disappear over the horizon. It will be as far away as distant Rome.
 
“Your friend” might not have an empire to run and wars to wage while writing meditations, but your friend has personal conflicts to wage with fancy. Anxiety never won a war, saved an empire, or wrote a book of calming meditations.

Edward Sapir (d. 1939) is associated with the hypothesis that a source area for a language holds the most dialects. Thus, the British Isles have more dialects of English than the United States. Of course, languages are evolving entities, so American English has had some influence on modern British English.
 
Like areas with derived languages, a simpler version of YOU exists out there among those you have met. The complex YOU lies in the place of the original, speaking in multiple tongues, or, at the very least, in multiple versions of your own special and personal language. You have, however, exerted an influence and left a mark on others, those who have emigrated from your thoughts to versions of their own.
 
Thus, you carry simpler forms embedded in your personality. You could have, had you been intensely interested, tried to get every story with its multiple nuances out of those who reared you. They lived complex lives, too, though you might have seen them in their simplest form—the form that you adopted. So, given a chance to speak your “native tongue” in the manner of a person living in the source region, say someplace like England, you imitate the stereotype, either of high society (“I doo saaay…”) or a version of one well known dialect like Cockney (“Oy put the ‘ammer in thee ‘ouse”).  If Sapir’s hypothesis is correct, you would do the same regardless of the country of the language’s origin.
 
You probably did not ask for detailed stories from Grandma; maybe you got some glimpses into her background by overhearing her conversation with Gramps. Still, you are, with regard to who they were a “single dialect,” just as your offspring, regardless of your attempts to give them the full spectrum of your life’s language, will become a “single dialect.” And so on.
 
Of course, we lose something of tradition. We can’t relive the lives of others when those lives occurred in both another time and another place. You might, however, want to consider passing along a little of your “language” to those whom you rear and those whom you meet. It will be your way of adding complexity to the future of those who emigrate from your mind. 

Milestones line the National Road. The old and replaced milestones are small obelisks about a meter tall, each with distances to the next significant destination. So, along the road travelers might encounter an obelisk that indicates, “Cumberland 42 miles” on the western side and “Uniontown 20 miles” on the eastern side. The milestones tell the traveler accomplishment and goal.
If you set milestones along the path of your life or your daily activities, do you see them as distances traveled or as distances to be traveled? Of course, nothing except attitude stops you from seeing both sides of a roadside obelisk. Which do you prefer to see? What you have done or what you have to do? And when you reach a particularly difficult goal, do you say to yourself, “Who would have thought?”
What if you don’t consider the journey successful unless you reach the destination inscribed in the stone on the side of your past travel, the side that indicates the distance to the next significant destination? Does failure to reach the next obelisk indicate overall failure?
What if the line of obelisks stretched into an indefinite distance? Isn’t that what life is? One more obelisk, one more obelisk, one more obelisk—anything short of reaching the next one is failure! Not necessarily.
 
The National Road (Route 40) was initially an outgrowth of trade when the Ohio Company needed an extension beyond the navigable portion of the Potomac River. Then the European Seven Years’ War spilled into the New World as the French and Indian War. Sites along the road could actually be thought of as milestones along the course of American history. National Road travelers encounter the place where General Braddock lies buried after a failed encounter with the enemy and where he gave George Washington the sash the young soldier cherished and wore throughout his presidency. Braddock’s last words, spoken to George Washington, were, “Who would have thought?” A few miles east of Braddock’s grave is Great Meadows, the site of Fort Necessity where George Washington lost a battle against the French and Indian forces.
Washington’s failure at Fort Necessity is a milestone in American history. For some, failing on that scale would mark the terminus of a journey. Obviously, Washington chose to see the failure differently. He did, after all, become the decided “Father” of the United States. Who would have thought?
So, let’s say that on a particular day you fail to reach the milestone you were determined to reach. How do you take the “failure”? Is that next obelisk standing as testimony to your failure? Or, rather, is it a potential for future attainment and achievement? In what context will you say, “Who would have thought?”

“The New York Times reports…”; “Time magazine ranks it in the top ten of…”; “The NBC poll says…” “Scientists say…”: What do these statements have in common? No real, tangible, identified people. A media entity or group states something, and we listen. But to what (or to whom) are we listening?
 
Newspapers, magazines, and TV networks are not—I know, this is not profound—entities outside the people in the company. How did we get to an intellectual point where we listen to or take the word of an essentially anonymous source? Thank Gutenberg.
 
Gradually opening their eyes to new intellectual possibilities in the early Renaissance, Europeans were largely illiterate. Gutenberg, mid-fifteenth century, said, “Try this,” and introduced them to the printing press. Walla! Literacy for the masses! Literacy for you and me. Widespread communications. Communications beyond individual one-on-one interactions. I speak to you from a distance. You don’t need to know me any more than I need to know personally eighteenth-century writer and critic Dr. Samuel Johnson. Boswell tells me about him in his detailed biography. I don’t even know Boswell, but he speaks to me, conveys his thoughts, and influences my mind. And that’s the way with all distant communication. No two people have to be in the same place to communicate with each other. No two people have to be in the same time to communicate. Gutenberg did that for all of us. That’s the upside of a printing press introduced to Europeans about 575 years ago.
 
But there’s a downside, also. You don’t, as I said, necessarily know me. You read a blog. I communicate. I, a disembodied voice, somehow get into your mind, possibly influencing you, possibly making you think of a topic you had no interest in prior to reading the blog, and possibly effecting change in others through you. All thanks to Gutenberg and the inventions, including the Web, that have become our virtual books. That downside I spoke of? “New York Times reports…” is not a disembodied entity. There are people behind the reporting just as I am behind this blogging. But thanks to Gutenberg, we have taken the entity for the people responsible for it. We don’t know them personally, but we trust that all the disembodied communicators are giving us information germane to our effective living. I call that the Gutenberg Effect. We have transferred or projected the role of individual to entity. We listen to “what” not to “whom.”
 
Yes, Gutenberg gave us all the ability to communicate beyond personal relationships and beyond interpersonal feeling. That was good in that I can, in fact, open my mind to yours even though you might never want to open yours to mine. I can read Boswell’s eighteenth-century work, maybe learn something, maybe be entertained or inspired without knowing Boswell. But in giving us communication at a distance, Gutenberg also opened us to trust communication from a disembodied entity.
 
So, the next time you read or hear “such-n-such says” or “such-n-such reports,” ask yourself the one question you should know before you are influenced: Who?

Is place medicine? You might argue that it is by citing the tale of Doc Holliday. With his lungs plagued by tuberculosis, he left Georgia to prolong his life in the drier climate of the American Southwest. He lived to be 36. That’s a miracle in an age before antibiotics, isn’t it? Was it place? In fact, he was lucky to live as long as he did. Trained as a dentist, Holliday had two avocations: gambler and gunfighter, the second of which put him by the side of the Earp brothers at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone. Is there a more famous gunfight?
 
Then there was the famous village inside Mammoth Cave. Supposedly, the air of the cave would cure victims of tuberculosis. At least, that’s what Dr. John Croghan thought when he built some housing inside the cave. Initially and temporarily, his patients seemed to improve. Ah! The placebo effect! They moved into their dismal dwellings in expectation of cure. The plants they took with them died. Then five of the patients died in the damp, cool air that was polluted by smoke from cooking fires. Medical experiment over: The mummifying air of the cave that worked so well to preserve the bodies of dead bats, didn’t work to preserve the living as Croghan had surmised it would. That place wasn’t the good medicine it was supposed to be.
 
But let’s go back to the “initially and temporarily.” Whether or not place has an actual medicinal value, it has, in all our experiences, a placebo effect. Why bother with vacations? Why have favorite rooms with favorite furniture to sit on? Why feel peaceful in churches or in “nature”? Why are there places where the essence of the environment alone is a catalyst for healing? Place might not be a medicine in the scientific sense, but it is an effective placebo. 

​Where are your favorite placebos?  

​Oh! How times have changed! Plutarch, writing in his Morals about the role wives should play in marriage, says they should reflect their husbands' moods. If the old man is happy, then the wife shouldn’t be sad; if sad, then she shouldn’t be happy. His mirth should be her mirth; his sadness, hers. Where did Plutarch get such ideas? Doesn’t matter. He’s dead, so you can’t change him. Rather, let’s look at his way of looking at this “moral.”
 
Plutarch writes that a mirror adorned with gold or precious stones is rather useless unless it reflects a true likeness, but then he writes something that most of us would find contradictory. He says the role of a wife is to be a mirror for her husband. Was he just expressing wishful thinking? In the Forum, Mrs. Plutarch might have appeared by her husband’s side as a mirror of his opinion. But in privacy? My guess is that Mrs. Plutarch wasn’t a passive reflection at home. She probably expressed herself. “Pick up your toga, Plutarch, and don’t pass gas in public.” Maybe times haven’t changed in that regard.
 
In some ways we are all mirrors of some kind. Yawn. Yes. Yawn. Yawn in a gathering and others will yawn. Smile; others will smile. We do reflect mood. Watch two people talk over a cup of coffee. Watch them place their arms in similar positions. Watch laughter spread like the concentric waves emanating as from a pebble tossed into a pond. Yes. We do mirror one another. And we do so with opinions. Find yourself drawn to like-minded people?   
 
Is it wrong to want the mirrors around you to send back a faithful reflection of your thought? Probably not: Evolution might have geared us toward seeking similarity. Mirrors that reflect our ideas confirm them to us. No one has to spend energy defending thought when all thought is a single bouncing photon in a hall of gilded mirrors.
 
Time to discard the ornamented mirrors. Time to go into the funhouse, see the distortions from the wavy mirrors, and question whether or not you really look like—or think like—that. Time to seek your image in smoky or broken mirrors or in those without a smooth silver backing. Possibly even time to see your reflection in plain glass that allows some of your thought to pass through while sending back a ghostly semblance of you.
 
Plutarch’s dead; it is time to bury his ‘moral’ that anyone should simply reflect the ideas of another. You neither have to see the world through reflections nor have to mirror the thoughts of others. Crack some mirrors. Get to the truth behind the reflective surfaces. There are already too many useless mirrors adorned with gold and precious stones in the public forum.

Let’s talk worldviews. Facing the reality of a world war, Woodrow Wilson said in his second inaugural address, “matters have more and more forced themselves upon our attention, matters lying outside our own life…and over which we had no control…It has been impossible to avoid them….” Ever feel that way? You know, things, circumstances, and events are out of your control? That a storm of war is upon you?
 
In that speech, Wilson said Americans could no longer consider themselves provincials, “We are a composite and cosmopolitan people…We are of the blood of all the nations that are at war.” And now here you are, a hundred years later trying to mind your own business while “matters” force “themselves upon your attention.” So, you, like the Americans of the early twentieth century, have a dilemma. Do you get involved? Can you insulate yourself from all that swirls in the encompassing hurricane of problems? Can you pull in, say “I’m not getting involved,” and remove yourself? Arguing friends, arguing relatives. My gosh! Arguing neighbors and townspeople. Arguing. Arguing. Arguing.
 
You want an easy answer, don’t you? You want me to give you an easy guide. Would you be happy if I said, “The right thing to do is to follow Woodrow Wilson’s steps and get involved, because, as he says in that speech, ‘armed neutrality…is worse than ineffectual.’” Or would you be happy if I said, “Chill; it’s their problem. Just get out of the way and go about doing your own stuff.”
 
You really do have a dilemma. You say to yourself, “I didn’t start all this stuff; I didn’t start the bickering or all the petty foolishness. If I get involved, I’ll be drawn into a protracted ‘war.’ If I don’t get involved, I’ll be drawn into a protracted ‘war.’” So, there you are, just like Woodrow Wilson. The guy didn’t want to get involved before the war started, but he found out that he couldn’t maintain the provincialism that had been his view. Germany was violating the peace on the high seas in its “warfare against mankind.” Its ships attacked American commercial vessels and even “hospital ships.”
 
You can run, but only in the life of a hermit will you find a nonthreatening provincialism—that is, if you are totally resigned to who you are at the moment. You and I both know that there is a self-belligerency in the questions that always arise: “Am I happy?” “Is this all there is to life?” “Is this what I want to be?” “Am I happy just watching a world in turmoil?” “Do I really live in the eye of the hurricane?”
 
Maybe you think you live in the eye. You think not getting involved is always the best course of action. For me the best course is cosmopolitanism. The winds of a hurricane are most violent at the boundary of the eye, at the eyewall. That’s the tough part to get through, but then the winds lessen. You know that you are going to be hit by the storm, regardless of your desire to remain in the peaceful eye. Either you get involved on your terms, or the storm will involve you on its terms.  

In the introduction to his1941 The Art of Caricaturing Mitchell Smith says, “The necessary material used in drawing caricatures are few and inexpensive if we compare them to the tools of some of the professions, such as surgery….” We get it. Drawing a caricature isn’t brain surgery.
 
Caricatures have something in common: They exaggerate a feature, usually in some whimsical way and often for comedic effect. Smith’s book explains the process of drawing caricatures, and gives advice. His chief advice is to study an accomplished artist’s work. You get no guarantee, however, that by reading the book, you will be able to set up an easel in a mall and make a living by drawing the children of busy shoppers.
 
Smith’s book is filled with typos, but we can still draw something from his insights. He writes about expressions, and two of those expressions exhibit anger and pain. In regard to both he writes, “The eyebrows in Pain are knotted [somewhat] as in anger.” Pain and Anger. They share a common appearance in the eyes of a caricaturist.
 
Is anger related to pain? Faces seem to show that relationship. What would happen if the pained and angry were to adopt the expressions of smiling and laughter. For those, Smith writes, “Laughter is very similar to smiling. The only difference being, [sic.] the brows are higher…” Is there a lesson in eyebrows? Could we change mood by changing their position, by exaggerating the caricature of happiness?
 
Of course, getting an angry, pained person to alter the position of “knotted eyebrows” seems impractical in the midst of high emotion. But what if the changing of eyebrow position were a practiced, motor memory? Would that work?
 
Obviously, the exaggerations of caricatures are simplifications, examples of reductio ad absurdum. But then, maybe an emotion like anger is itself a reductio ad absurdum. Certainly, the results of anger in which an emotion simplifies behavior are often absurd.
 
Anger is itself a caricaturist. It reduces a person, event, or circumstance to a dominant feature, and then exaggerates it. Just remember that whereas most caricatures are drawn in fun, not all caricaturists are funny, and one portrays pain.