During the United States Civil War, Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in all territories that were still at war with the Union in 1863. He did not free the slaves in some places, such as Arkansas and some Louisiana parishes where the Union military had defeated the Confederate soldiers in victories that returned the territory to Federal control. The why of this action is well known: Lincoln knew that freeing slaves in territories subject to Federal law would also enable slave owners to contest the proclamation in the Federal Court System. He chose getting less than full emancipation over struggling to impose full freedom. It proved to be prudent move. No effective lawsuits challenged the proclamation.
 
Sometimes doing less means accomplishing something feasible. Trying to do more jeopardizes overall success. Lincoln waited to hear from his generals that they had captured certain territories before releasing the document with the territorial exceptions. 
 
No doubt the slaves that remained slaves in Arkansas and Louisiana until the end of the Civil War were disappointed that they were excluded. The terrible injustice called slavery has continued to be a black mark on the soul of America, but we can’t change history. Should Lincoln have made the proclamation universal? Remember Lincoln’s concern: Anyone within the federally controlled lands had the right to contest the Emancipation Proclamation, and slave owners in Louisiana’s recaptured parishes were sure to do so, tying the Proclamation up in courts for years.  
 
Is it natural for us to take an all-or-nothing approach to achieve our goals? Are you an all-or-nothing kind of person? Lincoln’s course of action was dictated by his insight that, at the time, universal emancipation would have been blocked within the Federal slave territories. He chose less, but he did act.
 
We live in an age of almost instant gratification with encompassing images of people who have attained much in very little time. Patience is rare in such times. “If So-n-so became wealthy fast, got this thing or that right away, or attained success overnight, shouldn’t I?”
 
No. That’s not the way of the world. Given that there are seven billion people on the planet, the chance of some few attaining their goals rapidly seems highly probable. Most attainment is hard won, achieved through steps or stages. What is it that you want? What is it that you are doing to attain it? Partial attainment frees some of your energy to achieve further attainment and possibly your ultimate goal. Time to write your own Emancipation Proclamation—just follow Lincoln’s model. 

The average life-span of a species is an estimated four million years. That seems like a long time to a species only 200,000 years old, but remember, that’s an average. Some species survive for hundreds of millions of years, numbers large enough to offset the short existence of other species. Lampreys, for example, have been around for more than 300 million years, and some mollusk and arthropod species appear to equal or exceed that duration. Average guarantees nothing for the individual.
 
The recent discovery of Tritylodontid teeth in Japan lends evidence for the contemporaneous lives of transitional reptiles and mammals millions of years ago. A recent genetic survey seems to indicate that the modern Y chromosome descends from one man who lived 190,000 years ago. He was himself a descendant of Mitochondrial Eve, the mother of all of us who lived 200,000 years ago.
 
“And, your point?” you ask.
 
Regardless of jokes to the contrary, men—and women—are complex organisms whose genetic roots go back to transitional forms that led to the rise of mammals. Regardless of the race or culture with which men identify, they—and women—are here because all those life-forms that were ancient ancestors somehow survived to reproduce over and over and over, not just for the couple hundred thousand years of human existence, but for the millions of years of mammalian existence. Imagine the chance.
 
Maybe you play the lottery. You have a fantasy that you will win the big money prize when your numbers magically arise from the chaos of numbered, bouncing Ping Pong balls. But winning is very chancy. The Powerball, for example, has an estimated winning chance of one in 175,000,000. Not very good odds for your $2 ticket.
 
But think of how you have the won the lottery of life. Mammal-like reptiles led to mammals that led to primates that led to humans that led to you. One in one hundred seventy-five million is nothing by comparison. Maybe something like billions of individuals in the forms of different species had to have an unbroken line that led to you. That means getting through the filters of genetic mutations, accidents, diseases, volcanic eruptions, droughts, storms, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, landslides, and impacts from space rocks. There have been uncounted life-forms with even more potentially life-ending circumstances that might have prevented the rise of genetic offspring that includes you; yet, here you are: Lottery of Life Winner.
 
One of the truisms of winning the lottery is that it brings troubles with dollars. A significant number of lottery winners have lost their winnings, their friends and families, and their short-lived happiness derived from winning a jackpot. Sorry state of affairs, isn’t it? To have won, but to have subsequently lost, to be rich, then broke.
 
Here’s the point. There’s no denying that you won the lottery, and no avoiding the choices that winning imposes. You can squander your winnings like so many lottery winners, or you can use those winnings prudently, making them last as long as they can and using them for the greatest good. Think of your ancient ancestors, from part reptile/part mammal through four-legged to two-legged bipedal relatives: Many squandered their winnings. Would Mitochondrial Eve and that ancient chromosome-Y Adam be proud of you, their distant offspring, for the way you are handling yours? 

Your failures leave destructive and constructive features on the landscape of your life.
 
The Monongahela River is not a big river, but it is an avenue for barges carrying coal from the bituminous mines of western Pennsylvania and western West Virginia. As a waterway, it ranks proportionately high in tonnage because of the coal barges. Along its narrow valley, trains pass on either side of the river, also mostly for the transport of coal. It is not, however, as a throughway for coal that the Monongahela is the focus here.
 
In the Native American language of the pre-Colonial region, the little but important Monongahela means “river of falling-in banks.” The hilly region that includes not only the Mon, as it is locally called, but also the lower Allegheny River and upper Ohio River is known for its numerous landslides. The falling-in banks occur not only along the main river courses, but also along the tributary Youghiogheny River, Cheat River, Beaver River, and on the sides of now dry valleys that once hugged their own streams.
 
Hills in the region give way at unexpected times and places, so landslides aren’t very predictable phenomena though one might hazard a guess that this hill or another seems prone to giving way to gravity, particularly after saturating rains. Sometimes cracks in the ground foreshadow a slide, but not all slides give forewarnings.
 
When a hillside undergoes a slide, it usually leaves an arc-shaped steep wall where rocks and ground let loose. That arc-shaped steep wall is called a scarp. You can think of it as a concave cliff at the uppermost boundary of a landslide. The material that was once part of the hill slumps or falls below the scarp to cover the lower part of the hill and to fill the valley beneath the scarp with debris: Rocks, soils, and plants that grew on the side of the hill.
 
Old landslides reveal themselves by worn scarps that appear as muted cliff-like breaks in the slope of a hillside. The same processes that formed the original scarp continue to smooth out rough edges and steep slopes. With time neighboring slides also form scarps, scalloping the hill.
 
The inevitability of landslides and the formation of scarps make the seemingly stable geology of the region a questionable place to build any structure. Land above the river is destined to slide into it to be washed to the sea. In the case of the Monongahela River Valley, the washing continues through the Ohio River and into the Mississippi River. Eventually, the land of western West Virginia, southwestern Pennsylvania, and Eastern Ohio is destined for the Mississippi Delta and the Gulf of Mexico. The journey is sporadic and long, but the movement of the riverbed is inexorable.
 
So, if you drive through the region and see a muted or fresh scarp, think of this. Yes, the hillside failed, but the people of New Orleans would have no ground on which to stand if those scarps did not exist. Thousands of years, more thousands of landslides, and thousands of miles of meandering transport in riverbeds all combined to provide people with land on which to put Bourbon Street, a street that could not have existed a mere 8,000 years ago before the Delta formed. Where would all those jazz musicians play if there hadn’t been landslides along the banks of the Mon?
 
Failure upstream in a life does not mean failure downstream. Each of us can take the material of a failure to build a new landscape at the edge of a boundless sea. Our past failures can make the landscape of our future successes. Downstream from destructive landslides lies a new place where you can play your music.
 

Addictions are insidious, making their onset difficult to detect. That makes overcoming them difficult in a species given to habitual behaviors ranging from a morning coffee, through watching a TV series, to detrimental drug and alcohol use. Habits are comforting. They make us recognizable to ourselves. “I’m in the habit of…,” you say. Unfortunately, by the time inimical habits become recognizable, many addicts have already suffered physical, emotional, and mental downturns from which recovery is very difficult.
 
Take a step back. Really far back, say, millions of years. If you have ever looked at the geologic time scale, you know that geologists, after centuries of examining rocks and fossils, have divided both physical and biological history into eons, eras, periods, epochs, and ages. Those divisions have not come easily. They required thousands digging and climbing rocks, drilling deeply, and developing and applying technologies over generations. Now we have a picture, and we can say, for example, that there was a “middle period” of life we designate as the Mesozoic Era, the Age of Dinosaurs (Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous Periods). In each of those periods, paleontologists have determined patterns of life: Some critters lived in the sea; some were herbivores; some carnivores.
 
But there are no more dinosaurs, are there? In fact, millions of species have arisen and gone extinct during the three eras of life, just as we have seen extinctions of the Vietnamese rhinoceros, the Pinta Island Tortoise, the Tasmanian Tiger, and the Grand Cayman thrush. That geologic time scale I mentioned earlier lists, if we don’t count our own time of species killing, five great extinctions. One of them, called the Great Dying, wiped out 95% of species at the end of the Permian Period and another knocked off the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous Period. In place of those that became extinct in the past, other species arose to take up residence. After the Great Dying, for example, the Age of Dinosaurs began.
 
The chief hypothesis about the extinction of the dinosaurs lies in a bolide impact that created the crater at Chicxulub in the Yucatan Peninsula some 65 million years ago. The common notion is that dinosaurs were happy critters until this monstrous object from space slammed into the planet. Dr. Manabu Sakamoto and others from the Universities of Reading and Bristol recently challenged this scenario. The scientists did a statistical study that seems to show dinosaurs in decline before the impact. Had dinosaurs possessed our conscious self-awareness, would they have recognized the subtle declines their various species were undergoing?
 
You might ask, “So, what’s all this have to do with addiction?”
 
Some initial event precipitated the change in life habits, such as an internal biological mutation or an external environmental change. For the creatures of various geologic ages, the oncoming of the event was unrecognizable because each was occupied by its habit of life. Poor dinos! Without recognizing the harmful nature of their life habits, they began a decline that was hastened by a dramatic external event, a collision with a 10 km-wide asteroid or comet. So, the dinosaurs kicked the bucket after an insidious decline they could not, once it began, stop.
 
Life changes when habits change. During the past 540 million years new species arose by unconscious adaptations to fill niches left by their extinct predecessors. Only conscious life has a chance to recognize how habits, patterns, and addictions can lead to an extinction of some kind. Only conscious life has the ability to adapt by changing habits.
 
We are the only replacement species with the ability to alter behaviors by analysis and forethought; yet, many of us seem to disregard on both a personal and a species level the lessons of the deep past. True, we might not be able to reverse widespread habits that affect all our species members nor stop an incoming rock from space, but we certainly have the chance to alter our personal behaviors. Inevitable personal extinction is just around this life’s next corner, but there’s no inevitability to maintaining an injurious habit and suffering a self-imposed decline.
 
The dinosaurs, like other species, unconsciously declined until the moment of impact. Don’t be a dinosaur.  

​Some guys just say catchy lines. Publilius Syrus, the former slave and eventual catchy-line writer, was one of those who wrote some memorable lines. This contemporary of Julius Caesar wrote the title of this piece: “It is foolish to fear that which you cannot avoid.”
 
Ordinarily, I would use such a comment as a point of departure for my own thoughts, but this little sentence by Publilius has a direct connection to your life. Maybe you should do the writing on this one. 

We are what we are as a species because we want “more.” True, some of us seem to be satisfied with what we are and have, but the drive toward “more” probably underlies most lives. Not satisfied with using just teeth and hands, we invented tools, and, well, the rest is, as they say, high tech drones and robot store clerks.
 
Kirsten Munk was a Danish noblewoman who became the second wife of King Christian IV of Denmark in 1615. Together they had 12 children. Then—and even a sophisticated 21st-century person like you might raise an eyebrow at this—in 1627 she had an affair with a German count, Rhinegrave Otto Ludwig. Twelve children in twelve years and she still wanted more. Of course, the king didn’t take the liaison well, and he exiled her from his court.
 
More. That’s what she seemed to want. Your thoughts?
 
Tough to fathom that a queen with everything at her disposal and a husband with enough testosterone to keep her expecting for what must have seemed a continuous dozen years needed “more.” Ah! Wanting “more.” It might be in our genes; it certainly lay inside Kirsten’s chemises.
 
Now, there are arguments against such wanting, and they make sense. The Buddha told us that desire gets us into trouble. And he was right; it does. But we make no advances in any manner without wanting more. Mindful? Have enough mindfulness? Peaceful? Peaceful enough? It’s a constant balancing act, isn’t it, this life? The scales tip between ascetic abandonment and avarice.
 
Where are you on that scale? Standing on the side of Buddha or on the side of Queen Kirsten?   

Ludwig Feuerbach proposed that through religion (specifically, Christianity), people undergo a self-imposed alienation by ascribing characteristics of personal identity to an external power (God, for example). We might be a manifestation of such alienation in another form: Turning our personal identities into broadcast bytes and pieces through social media. We are, in a sense, nonlocalizing ourselves, removing our identities from within and placing them “out there” to be reinterpreted, re-invented, and generalized by anonymous sources that, in their turn, subject themselves to the same self-alienation.
 
In this current milieu each person in social media gets multiple other identities derived from comments and discussions, tweets and retweets, and vines. Someone shows up in the media, drives interest and speculation, acquires friends and enemies, and becomes an “averaged identity” on the basis of responses. Almost any personal representation, from photo to comment, becomes impersonal. It’s more than gossip. It’s manipulation by an all-encompassing cybergod that is a multiheaded hydra.
 
Social media can alienate people from themselves, changing the meaning of being in a single place with a single identity. Once in cyberplace, a personality belongs to the whims of a sometimes indifferent, a sometimes elevating, and a sometimes angry cybergod. Regardless of the whims, the person becomes self-alienated. 

Find a place where nothing is under attack, and you’ve found an alternate reality. Virtually nowhere on the planet is there life that is not under attack.
  
Olive trees are under attack. A bacterium (Xylella fastidiosa) appears to be the attacker, but the science of the bacterium and its relationship to olive trees is unsure. Nevertheless, there’s a war going on against the nemesis of the trees. In 2015 and 2016 authorities have burned some olive trees to save others in European countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea. Kill to protect.
 
In 2015 and 2016 authorities in Brazil and other tropical countries have sprayed insecticides to kill Aedes aegypti and A. albopictus, the bugs that carry Zika, dengue, and chikungunya viruses. Kill to protect.  
 
We sometimes have no apparent options when we are under attack, so we take drastic measures that are often “all or nothing” in scope. True, some “kill to protect” methods are standard procedure: We burn trees to stop forest fires at firebreaks.
 
And then there’s war, real war, war at its most tragic level, the killing of people to stop the killing. In 2015 and 2016 the Middle East became a place of counter-killing in an effort to stop the further slaughter of innocents.
 
Apparently, humans have always needed some kind of “firebreak” to stop attacks on their wellbeing. In the process of protecting, we often kill. Maybe that is in itself justification for my calling this website thisisnotyourpracticelife.com. We can’t save olive trees, Brazilian babies, or innocent victims by pretending, ignoring, or passively waiting. Sometimes the only option to guarantee life’s continuance is by killing to protect.
 
Is it not odd that in my previous blog I advocated you to practice “Ahimsa,” the principle of “do no harm”? Do I not see the hypocrisy in the current blog? Am I unaware of Gandhi’s admonition against violence, even his advice to let enemies “slaughter you”? No, I know what he’s saying. But in view of a one-time-go-round life, I know that when one olive tree is infected with X. fastidiosa, the only way to protect a neighboring tree is by burning the diseased tree. Gandhi might have been compelled by a belief in reincarnation on this planet for another go-round at life.
 
With no guarantee that such a reincarnation is a reality, with no demonstrable proof that self-identity returns as recognizable self-identity, I advise treating the current go-round as precious enough to defend against bacteria, viruses, and terrorists. This is not your practice life. That it is under constant attack requires some protective measures on your part. In most instances you can avoid attack by changing places, but you always trade one kind of attack for another. Burning your olive trees is a real tradeoff: You destroy your livelihood to protect the livelihood of your neighbor, but in the process of destroying, you save life from further attack by at least one agent. You have a choice, of course: Ahimsa or kill to protect. Whatever you choose remember to decide in the context that for you—and for your attacker--this life is not practice.   

From Sanskrit, Gandhi seemed to derive his concept of “doing no harm.” That idea, called Ahimsa, seems to run in John Stuart Mill’s work on free speech, On Liberty. Mill says we should be free to say anything, but we should not cause harm. It seems to make sense if we want a peaceful society that we all aim to do no harm. The problem is that we live in an age where perception is harm, perception derived in many instances “out of context.” Apparently, unintentional harm is unavoidable in an age of social media.
 
It was Ludwig Wittgenstein who stressed the importance of context. Now we seem to have people offended by just about anything. So, let’s draw an analogy. If I see a number of amusement park rides, I feel safe in assuming that I’m at some sort of festival, carnival, or amusement park. If I enter a festival, carnival, or amusement park, I feel save in assuming that I will see some sort of amusement rides. Yes, there might be exceptions, such as some individual’s property that might have an amusement ride for family and friends or a resort that might keep some version of rides for guests, but let’s keep the context in context here.
 
If I say, “I hate bloggers,” what do I mean? In the current era, the expression probably yields a thousand negative and condemnatory comments: “Doesn’t this idiot know he’s blogging and that his blogging makes him a blogger? Does he hate himself?” But what if I mean “I hate bloggers because they are smarter than I, have greater insights, and make a bunch of money at what they do while I make none?” What if the comment is a minor note on a personal feeling? What if it is made tongue-in-cheek and expresses some hidden sarcasm or self-deprecation? What if it actually means to me, “I love bloggers”?
 
I don’t have much hair. It started to fall out when I was seventeen, and there was nothing I could do about it. So, out it fell. And fell. And fell. That’s who I am, a person with typical pattern baldness, hair on the sides and nothing on top. As I walked along the street in Las Vegas, I passed three men who seemed to be idle, maybe just talking, maybe just standing around by a railing along a sidewalk because they had nothing else to do, no work, no play, no family responsibilities, no religious mission, no whatever. They were there, and I was walking past them. One, noticing my approach, stepped out into the sidewalk a little, though not in a threatening manner and not directly in my path, and said, “Hey, do you have an extra comb I could borrow?” I looked at him, chose not to respond, and walked on. That was the extent of the incident. Nothing really happened. He said what some might take as an insult, speaking to a perfect stranger on a sidewalk. And, of course, he knew nothing of the context of my life. 

​Was he attempting humor? Was he trying to get a belligerent response? Was he just saying the first thing that came into his head? I have no idea. I don’t really know the context beyond what I might surmise. Walking on seemed to be the best course since I had no sense of the context of his remark. Maybe he really meant no harm.
 
Ahimsa. Don’t make up contexts when you don’t know. Don’t assume harm is intended when you don’t know the context. Wittgenstein is right. If we want to discern meaning in its fullest, we need to know the context. Mill was also right. It doesn’t really matter how offensive speech is as long as it doesn’t result in harm. We are at liberty to speak as we will; and others are at the same liberty. Maybe the lesson of Mill, Wittgenstein, and Gandhi is Ahimsa. Just do no intentional harm.
 
But the corollary is also worth mentioning. Don’t assume intentional harm. If you are wrong, you spend your energy on combatting nothing, making unnecessary enemies, and creating a context. Think Ahimsa. The next time you think something offends you but you suffer no actual harm, say “Ahimsa” to yourself, and then walk on.

Pardon his grammar, but Ringo Starr makes a valid point about trust: “It don’t come easy.” Not for everyone, of course. We trust until we learn not to trust. Suspicion, I surmise, is learned.
 
We were power-walking along the Las Vegas Strip a few years ago when a woman pushing an empty wheelchair zipped by us in a rapid jog. I turned to my wife and remarked, “Maybe she’s a caregiver late to transport some handicapped person.”
Then we veered off the boulevard in another direction for a bit before returning to the main sidewalk of the Strip. Shortly, we again encountered the woman who had passed us, but she was not pushing some person in need of assistance.
 
Instead, she was sitting in the wheelchair where Las Vegas beggars sit on a pedestrian bridge with handmade cardboard signs revealing their desperate plights to passing tourists. Over her lap she had draped a blanket in the sweltering heat. And, though she had a full head of hair when she passed us on her way to her station, she now wore a headscarf in the manner of some women subjected to hair loss through chemotherapy or radiation treatments for their cancers. In short, she was running a scam to empty the pockets of passersby. Trust: “It don’t come easy.”
 
Las Vegas has no shortage of scam artists that will use any secular or religious symbol or mechanism for profit, but encountering such an artist in such a place leads one to doubt in other places. “How am I supposed to look upon the next wheelchair-bound beggar?” We carry trust and distrust from place to place.
 
Of course, in our adult lives we learn nuances that help us to distinguish between honest and dishonest, trustworthy and untrustworthy, but the subtleties of deception always lurk behind a headscarf hiding a full head of hair.
 
Animals. Yes animals. Some are untrustworthy. Cowbirds fool other birds into raising their young. Many parasitic animals fool members of other species. And there are some that fool members of their own species, such as the tufted capuchin monkeys of Iguazú National Park in Argentina. To trick dominant members of the species away from a cache of bananas, the younger capuchins give off fictional warnings that a predator is nearby (http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141125-four-animals-that-lie-using-sound ).
 
Members of our species trick not only other species, but also other humans, and they do it on a scale that can have international implications. Thus, treaties are made and broken. Think Hitler and Stalin in World War II. Think Tamerlane and Husayn in the fourteenth century. Think centuries of broken treaties.
 
Trust, as Ringo sings, “don’t come easy.” What would history look like if it were to come easily? What would relationships look like? Are you trustworthy?