Most people know minerals in the form of semiprecious and precious gemstones. Minerals, however, are everywhere, even in the form of clay on the bottom of your shoe. More than 2,500 minerals on the planet make up the rocks that underlie everyone everywhere all the time.

Minerals are both useful and, as evidenced by our attachment to them in form of jewelry, fascinating. To be classified as a mineral, some natural element or combination of elements has to be crystalline, that is, on a molecular level, made of a regular arrangement of atoms. Each mineral has identifiable characteristics, some of which are shared among similar minerals and include the hardness of the mineral and the way it reflects light.

Salt, which is the mineral halite, is a cubic arrangement of sodium and chlorine. Want to see the effect of the crystalline arrangement? Just look through a magnifying glass at some salt from your saltshaker. Fascinating! All those little cubes and broken cubes lying there, and all of them composed of two substances that separately could kill us: Beauty and danger bound together in a neat package useful to melt ice on winter roads and to flavor foods.

What in your life is like a mineral? What is both useful and fascinating? What is both dangerous and useful? How about anger?

Anger seems to underlie many people like the minerals on the planet. As a mechanism for safety in the face of danger, it appears to be helpful. As a mechanism of uncontrolled aggression, it appears to be harmful to both the angry person and to the one who is object of the anger.

So, what is this emotional mineral that appears everywhere over the planet like outcrops of rock? What are its components and how do they fit together? What are the characteristics of this emotional mineral? We should examine it because, as I said, it appears everywhere and everywhen.

We have, all of us, the potential of being angry. We have, all of us, the potential of being angry without being aggressive. We have, all of us, the means to examine our anger whenever it surfaces. We can look at its components: Our predisposition toward it, our emotional nature, our rational or irrational thoughts about it, our desires to act on some statement or event, and our outward manifestations of anger (the things others can observe when we are angry).

If you find yourself a bit angry, see whether or not your can assay your anger mineral. Maybe there’s something useful in it, maybe something harmful to you or to someone else. 

The next time you think you have too much to handle, go read the story of Otto the Great. While he was trying to run an empire, he had to fend off conspirators—one was a son; another, his brother—foreign armies, and maverick dukes. There’s more. He had to defend one pope, depose another pope, and install a third pope, arrange multiple treaties with a neighboring empire, and ensure his son’s succession to the throne. Otto had a bunch of stuff on life’s plate, including the death of his first wife. He appears to have handled all the emergencies and daily problems relatively well. Maybe that’s why he’s called “Great.”

So, today you have six things to do. Yesterday, you had five. Tomorrow, you’ll have eight, or five, or three. Think of yourself as an emperor with an empire to run. You really don’t have time for any “wo-is-me-ing.” Tomorrow’s task will come as surely as yesterday’s and today’s tasks. Probably and unlike Otto’s, most of them aren’t life- or empire-threatening. Most likely, you don’t have a sibling or offspring plotting your death or exile. Of course, it is possible that you do have to handle a number of dire circumstances, but most of what comes along doesn’t rise to the level of the stuff on the old emperor’s plate.

Survey your empire. Be vigilant. Be active. Anticipate tasks and threats and handle them as they come. Know that your job as emperor (or empress) is your life’s work. In your own way, you, too, will be Great.

There you are, sitting at your computer just reading through news and blogs, just watching a few videos or checking some tweets. There you are possibly listening to your library of music. There you are, maybe drinking a coffee you just made from your single-cup dispenser. Comfy.

There they are, all those others out there. Some are doing something similar to what you are doing, but others are running for their lives, lying in illness, wishing not for a coffee but for a drink of water.

To whatever the world is physically as an entity in the cosmos we add what it means for us. We share a planet but not world lines. Your world and mine run as lines sometimes parallel, sometimes perpendicularly to each other. Some of the world lines corkscrew or bend sharply. Paint all the world lines on a single canvas and you end up with a Jackson Pollock artwork.

As you encounter other people today, think of their world lines and how they lie on Earth’s canvas next to, and sometimes intersecting with, your world line.

Mazes are confusing and disorienting places. On the inside they give no clues to the outside. Those wandering the maze strive to be outside, of course, so passageways without clues to the exit can be frustrating places.

As you move through life, you pass from one complication to another, much like passing from one maze directly into the next. You are always in a maze that has no exits save doorways into other mazes or into death. But think of that latter exit for a moment. That one exit changes the whole process to which you have grown accustomed. You are used to going from one maze directly into the next. Some of the mazes through which you pass are exciting, some frightening, and some just plain boring. Passing through the death exit, from all we can truly know, leads to a maze that actually has NO EXIT.

Maybe everyone should rejoice in wending through mazes that lead to other mazes. 

Every language undergoes some kind of word shift, as a reading of eighteenth century documents would reveal. Words acquire new meanings as foreign influences penetrate a culture and as native speakers change their locations. New words derived from technological advances can pour into a culture like floodwaters. Yet, there is one aspect of language that seems to stay the same over centuries: naughty words (I’m trying to be delicate here).

So, twenty-first century speakers of English, for example, cuss and swear much like their predecessor generations. Ancestors that established a culture’s underlying values and idiom probably never considered that their naughty language would pass almost unchanged through generations of descendants.

As every generation moves from points of origin, such as neighborhoods and cities or homelands, it carries rudiments of the ancestors’ values in slightly modified versions and the ancestors’ naughty words in virtually the same form and spelling.

Such words seem to transcend the vicissitudes of both time and place. I find that damn interesting. What the **** do you think? 

Fetch. No, it’s not what you’re thinking. We’re not about to throw a stick for Fido to retrieve. Instead, we’re about to take a trip over water.

Oceanographers use the term fetch to describe the distance over water that the wind blows. That might not seem to be important to someone in New Mexico, Nevada, or Burkina Faso, but for anyone on either a big body of water or its shore, the term has real meaning. The reason lies in the connection between wind and waves.

Most surface waves on bodies of water are wind driven. Acquiring energy from unequal heating of Earth’s surface that causes differences in air pressure, the winds carry that energy to whatever they encounter, such as surface water. As they travel over the water, the winds impart some of their energy to the water. The water becomes a medium for the energy transfer, and, in turn, conveys that energy. Essentially, the energy travels through the water, and as it does, the water rises and falls to make the crests and troughs of waves.

Now here’s were fetch comes to play. The farther in distance and length of time that winds blow over the water’s surface, the more energy they transfer to the water, creating bigger waves. Circling a storm that might be 300 miles in diameter, winds of a hurricane have a very long fetch, and they are also high-speed winds. So, hurricanes generate big waves.

Now look at the human analog. Brief encounters between people can generate some waves, but long exposures can disturb the medium to a great extent. We’re talking storm waves capable of destroying seemingly durable structures. Think about the effects of human fetch. Years of nagging build to resentment. Years of degrading build to depression and lack of confidence. The waves of human emotion might start because of gentle breezes, but persistent breezes, stronger continuous winds, and even gales can have devastating effects.

Would that we could, as the National Hurricane Center follows hurricanes, closely monitor these human winds and map them. We might be able to make predictions on the size of the waves and warn of their potentially destructive effects.

Mental mapping is a survival mechanism built into clusters of neurons. That this mechanism is “built in” can be demonstrated by the simplest organisms that can find food, shelter, and, to put it in human terms, love. Today, your big cluster of neurons will map places, events, and feelings and associate them with values and judgments.

We don’t often think about the mapping process of our brains. We just map what appears to be important, and we store the maps in a faulty memory that mixes perceptions, misperceptions, knowledge, biases, feelings, ignorance, belief, and imagination. Our memory maps are even modified by false memories and forgetfulness. The result of the mixing we take as a “truth” about the world.

Today, stop just for a moment after any event in any place, and ask yourself how you mapped that event. What were your feelings going into the event? What was your physical state? On what scale, large (up close) or small (far away) did you experience the event? How did the physical surroundings affect your perception of the event? Did the event reinforce or contradict one or more of your accepted values? Did you pass judgment? How has the event shaped your attitude toward the place of its occurrence? Gosh! You do much in a moment, don’t you?

There you are, going around the planet from place to place, mentally mapping moment by moment, storing some information as accurately as a camera and other information as inaccurately as a sketch artist will little skill at drawing. There you are, lumping together the accurate stuff with the inaccurate stuff, the somewhat objective observations with the very subjective ones.

Just stop to examine one of those numerous maps you will make today. You might find the exercise enlightening. 

You, and every organism out there in the big Everywhere needs to be proprioceptive. Being proprioceptive enables you to map your world and stay safe.

At Ohio Pyle State Park in Pennsylvania a scenic small waterfall on the Youghiogheny River has been the site of picnics, kayaking, white water rafting, and splashing in the shallow river for generations. There are two ropes and warning signs stretched across the river upstream from the dangerous rocks of the falls. They provide a handhold for anyone who might slip in the fast-flowing water that runs through eroded grooves in the sandstone and conglomerate. The park has constructed overlooks for people to use when they want to capture the scene on camera.

Ice forms on the rocks near the falls during winter, making the area more dangerous in winter and spring than in summer. So, you can probably guess where this is going: It’s not prudent to step over the warning signs and barriers to walk into the danger zone just to get a picture. Nevertheless, Ohio Pyle saw yet another tragic loss of life in March, 2015. Someone walked onto the icy rocks to get that perfect picture, a picture that he will never see. Slipping on the ice, the photographer fell into the cold water of the falls.

When we are not proprioceptive, we spill glasses of milk, trip on steps, or teeter on a stool. When we are not proprioceptive, we slip on ice, bang our heads, glide with the water’s flow, and disappear beneath the falls.

You live in a universe of icy waterfalls. Tread with care, and be aware.