Parents have much in common in the care of children, including the need to teach their children healthful habits. Among those habits is brushing teeth regularly, a task that many children resist doing for reasons like the taste of toothpaste, the time involved, and the effort. When one of my children was young and had a cavalier attitude about the brushing ritual, I said, “Here’s an idea. Just brush the teeth you want to keep.”
 
Maybe that advice has corollaries. “Just exercise the body parts you want to stay healthy.” “Just change the oil in the car you want to keep.” Those pearlies in your mouth have no other place to go for care and no other place to serve as masticators. Your teeth will be your teeth and no one else’s teeth. So, here’s another corollary: “Just care for the people on your planet. You’ll lessen the chance that any of them go bad.”

Gotta love optimism. Enthusiasm for the future unbridled by naysaying. We don’t get much of it nowadays, what with all the complainers online. But in the midst of this ocean of darkness, occasionally someone shines one of those beacons of hopeful thinking that keeps us sailing beyond the doldrums of the present.
 
Actually, every age has its naysayers; every age has pessimists. They’re the ones that dampen the dreams of youth by concentrating on what they don’t have, what the world isn’t, or what hasn’t been done. Naysaying narrows that sea of potential to a strait with Scylla and Charybdis in wait. But again, every so often someone suggests in the darkness that a bright future awaits. Such is the message of George Elliott Clarke, Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate.
 
Looking into Canada’s makeup and potential future, Clarke sees the potential for “hybridized citizens” of his nation to become “triumphantly humanitarian.” He imagines a time when differences will not separate but will, instead, combine. Essentially, Canada’s “melting pot” demographic will become a force for the good of humanity. Using a synesthetic metaphor, he writes, “Canadian culture will be a polyphonous kaleidoscope. Beautiful.” *
 
Synesthesia aside, the idea of a visualized harmony or polyphony is an interesting thought. Can we in all our diversity somehow work together not only for a mutual and creative good but also for a respect for the individual?
 
We will always have naysayers and pessimists among us. That’s a given. And bringing together diverse populations has been difficult, especially since any unity is subject to breakup by the constantly changing whims of individuals and groups. History gives us more examples of cacophony than it does of polyphony.
 
Cooperative optimists endeavor to write a human fugue that few of their contemporaries can appreciate. Nevertheless and on occasion, diverse efforts do coalesce into a pleasing, if only a temporary, composition. Maybe educational systems should include mastery of the fugue as a lesson in culture: Everyone playing a different song on a different instrument yet all the sounds somehow making beautiful music. Yeah. Beautiful.
 
*U. of Toronto. The Canada Issue, Vol. 18. No. 1. Online at http://research.utoronto.ca/edge/spring2016/the-future-of-canadian-cultures/  Accessed on April 15, 2019. 

If you want to explore yourself, consider how you see the world. Like any explorer, you will either follow or make a map; it could be a physical map or a mental map. The latter is the focus of or the background for many of these essays. We are mental cartographers. Our map-making helps us make sense of our world, enabling us to see the relationships of its components both to one another and to us personally. We always identify ourselves in a place full of relationships—never in nowhere.
 
If you look at a wall map, you’ll notice that it is a distorted representation. That distortion is a product of turning a round world into a flat image. You have the same difficulty if you try to piece the peelings of an orange into a continuous unit with no gaps or try to cut a tennis ball into pieces that fit uninterruptedly into a two-dimensional object. To counter the necessary distortions that occur, cartographers use projections. You can think of a projection as an image cast by a central round light bulb or a cylindrical fluorescent light that lies in the middle of a glass globe. The light casts the outlines of continents onto a flat screen. Depending on the position of the screen, the projection distorts different parts of the continental outlines. Where the screen touches the globe’s surface—where it lies tangent to the curve—the flat map is very accurate, but greater separation of the screen’s edges from the globe mean greater distortion. That’s why in the common Mercator projection Greenland looks on a flat map to be almost the size of South America, and Antarctica looks like the largest continent. In short, projections distort, and mental projections distort similarly.
 
Distortion in mental maps largely occurs because attitude and emotion dominate much of who we are. As children in school, for example, we sit in class beneath standing teachers. We tend to couple their authority and their relative position (standing vs. sitting) into a projection that adds to the physical stature of teachers. Meeting those teachers later and after becoming adults, we can be startled by a smaller physical reality than our young minds imagined. The process of remapping reveals, also, that our early projections of places also differ from our current perspectives. We replace the old distortions with both corrections and new and different distortions.
 
It is important to remember that we mentally map in the contexts not only of attitude and emotion but also in the contexts of memory and knowledge both true and false. Mental mapping is a complex process, and that’s the reason that we have so much difficulty “knowing ourselves.” We aren’t always aware of the influences under which we map. Nevertheless, we continue to search for Self as a one very important relationship in a world of relationships: Objects to objects, people to objects, and people to people.    
In An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, D. T. Suzuki notes that catching life “as it flows” is the “idea” of Zen. In light of that definition, a daily altering of personal cognitive maps is a kind of Zen. For most people reared in Western Culture daily life entails, to speak tautologically, living daily, but probably few westerners would, like Bodhidharma, say they did not know who they were or argue that doing nothing is doing something. Westerners like defining themselves by doing things. But my guess is that regardless of one’s being from the Occident or the Orient, every person draws mental maps that always include memory, reasoning, emotion, and attitude. 
 
Suzuki explains that Zen is both “a discipline and an experience which is dependent on no explanation.” In the West, we like explanations. It’s the legacy of logic and formalism and of people like Rene Descartes and the rationalists like Denis Diderot. Westerners pride themselves on ostensible reasoning from cool mathematical analyses of character types to foolish rationalization. Diderot wrote an interesting comment: “To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster!”
 
You might wonder how that statement applies. Recall that on some maps of about a half millennium ago, the cartographers would write “Here there be dragons” for regions as yet un-surveyed. In their minds, unexplored regions held some dangerous mystery; they had no places, objects, or people to relate to one another. Maps are explanations of the components of the world; we can even map intangible components like beliefs and attitudes.
  
Mapping means putting things next to other things, seeing relationships. Humans can’t prevent themselves from doing this. Except in those suffering from damaged parahippocamal gyri, cognitive mapping is a natural and indispensible part of being a motile life-form. Regardless of what Suzuki and others might write or say, they themselves map relationships and use those relationships to explain the world. Even if a Zen monk sees a pebble fall from a cliff and believes that in the falling some mystic aspect of being has revealed itself to him, he also does what we do in the West: He sees spatial and temporal relationships, and he maps the occurrence in the framework of a personal geography.
 
We can’t get around our distortions. In fact, we sometimes use them for better understanding. Cartographers who work with demographics often show distorted shapes in cartograms to reveal some endemic component of place. For example, if we were to map countries by population, India and China would dominate all other continental areas. If we were to map states by age, the geographically tiny New England states would be disproportionately large because Maine, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire have populations with a high average age. Our mental maps are also cartograms. Those images of towering teachers we mapped in our youth are examples.  
 
It’s my contention that you can best know yourself and can best find inner peace by examining your mental maps and by understanding how your personal cartograms relate to the external world. In doing so you will have to acknowledge that cognitive maps are not products of disembodied reason, statistical computation, or mathematical quantification. You will not uncover the geography of your life through a set of logical proofs regardless of all the statistical patterns, quantified analyses, and enumerated fashionable life patterns proclaimed by experts. Mental maps are infused with attitudes derived from personal histories and culturally inculcated patterns. When you understand better the underlying motivations for and processes of mental mapping, you will see that your maps record who you are and how you understand and deal with people and places.  Cognitive maps reveal character: Knowing your personal maps and how you derived them means knowing yourself. 
 
If what you map reflects the world as it is, you’ll live effectively. The trick for you is not to impose patterns where none exist or to think that all projections are equally good at representing the world.

In his introduction to his collection of early English poems, Michael Alexander makes this statement: “There is no reason to suppose… that what Time has spared is necessarily the best.” (9) *
 
The context for his statement is the paucity of literature that survived the millennium since people spoke Old English. As Alexander notes, the surviving literature can be found in just four manuscripts. Some of that writing found in those books is familiar to almost everyone because Beowulf is part of English literature curricula, and the story has been movie-ized. (In an age of Marvel and DC heroes, Grendel’s slayer fits well in the mix of super-humans) Anyway, Beowulf is among the very few Anglo-Saxon works to survive the ravages of time. Given the physical state of surviving books, their scantiness is no mystery. One of those surviving four tomes, the Exeter Book, was abused: Its front cover was used as a cutting board and a mat for beer steins, and its back 14 pages were burned through by a brand.
 
So, Time has not been kind to Anglo-Saxon literature. But, ultimately, Time isn’t kind to anything, is it? We don’t know what literature we don’t know because it was lost through either purpose or accident, and those Anglo-Saxon products of the intellect aren’t the only lost representations of the past. The scrolls in the Great Library of Alexandria, for example, were subject to “book burning.” We’ll never recover those ancient lost works.
 
We might like to believe that our “wisdom,” the defining characteristic of a species called sapiens, would have made us caretakers of the written word; but that belief runs into the historical reality that someone or some group used a brand to destroy those last pages of the Exeter Book, and someone else used the book as a coaster for a mug of beer. And, as we have recently seen by the destruction of Palmyra by ISIS, wanton vandalism of the past still pervades the behavioral tendencies of sapiens.
 
But maybe losing the pages of the past is the way of the world. Nature set the pattern of losing the past long before humans penned or even inscribed their thoughts and then turned to destroying what they wrote. The history of life is a series of losses. Mother Nature wrote her tale in fossiliferous sedimentary rocks, and her story is a biased record at best because of its lost pages, the layers of rocks long lost to an unrelenting, albeit unconscious, destructive power like erosion. Time has allowed by chance only remnants of both natural and human histories, though the latter had some human curators that exhibited a sense of preservation.
 
Possibly because of losses, we have a tradition of thinking that survival alone imparts wisdom or that in surviving, the survivor has somehow picked up by static electricity, osmosis, or adhesion some gem of thought or truth that is worthy of continuance. It is that tradition of thought that equates age with wisdom and that intimidates the young as they face their teachers or political authorities. But as Michael Alexander—probably no relation to the Alexander for whom Alexandria was named—notes, “what Time has spared” isn’t necessarily the best.

No one has to accept the wisdom filtered from the past, and no one has to accept the “wisdom” of those who simply survived longer than the contemporaries of their youth. As we learn by experience, grey hair could just as easily cover a head of foolishness as it could cover one of wisdom. It’s a lesson that every generation learns on its own, a lesson that somehow gets lost before the ensuing generation comes of age.   
 
Because so much is lost, there always remains so much to be found. Wisdom is independent of its potential to survive the ravages of time; it belongs to the truly wise in any generation. Think before you follow.
 
Alexander, Michael, Translator. The Earliest English Poems. London. Penguin Books, 1966. 

“We need a new NAFTA.”
 
“What,” you ask. Aren’t we getting one with the USMCA?”
 
“Oh! I wasn’t referring to the North American Free Trade Agreement and its successor—if it is implemented—the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. No, I was thinking the North American Free Thought Agreement.”
 
“Say, what?”
 
“We need some kind of agreement that allows us to speak freely,” I add.
 
“We already have that. You’ve heard of the First Amendment, haven’t you?”
 
“Sure. And I understand that it both frees and protects. We can say the word fire, but not in a theater. Maybe I should qualify my NAFTA. Most likely, I am really asking for a NATFfHA, a North American Thought Free from Hypocrisy Agreement. True, by its very nature such an agreement would be somewhat more personally restrictive than the First Amendment because it would require any freely thinking person to think aloud only after cleansing himself or herself of hypocrisy.
 
“The agreement would have several benefits: 1) It would eliminate the need for anyone to say, ‘Who does she think she is?’; 2) It would ensure the free flow of options for debate; 3) It would guarantee that any thought, no matter how absurd it is or seems, would get a public hearing free from any ties to an individual’s lifestyle or past; 4) It would free debates from their dependence on ad hoc and ad populum arguments, and 5) It would lead to insights and judgments based on experiment. If we eradicate hypocrisy, we eliminate most of the judgments opposing sides make on the basis of emotion.” 

The quantum world that underlies your macro-world operates on strangeness: Entanglement, wave function, duality, foam, etc. Among the strange entities of the subatomic world (I don’t know how else to define them) are the quarks, such as the up quarks and the down quarks, components of protons and neutrons. I say strange because even in the context of our experiencing quantum effects directly, as in electromagnetism, quarks have relationships that are more the aspects of what I call “true love.”
 
“Here we go,” you say, “this is going to be a one of those love homilies so common among the commoners. It’s going to be about an ‘ideal,’ and not about the ‘real.’ Everyone knows that no one can define true love for someone else. But, since I’m already here, go ahead, I’ll read on if only for my amusement. No one is really going to say something profound about love because it’s different for all.”
 
You have experienced the attraction and repulsion of magnets: The closer two magnets to each other, the stronger the force between them. Proximity is a control on the strength of the pull that makes two bar magnets into one larger bar magnet. Well, quarks seem to act differently.
 
Protons are combinations of three quarks: Two Up Quarks and one Down Quark. Neutrons are made of two Down Quarks and one Up Quark. No quarks seem to exist outside these nucleons. Anyway, here’s one of those strange effects: Unlike magnets, quarks seem to act more independently as they get closer and less so when they are farther apart. Think now. That’s the opposite of what magnets do, and from science classes through which you slept, you remember vaguely that that’s also opposite of what bodies do because gravity weakens with the square of the distance. With respect to the electromagnetic (also electroweak) and gravitational forces, proximity makes the bonder fonder.
 
Quarks become more independent when they are close. And this is where I introduce one of my usually strange analogies (Is “usually strange” an oxymoron?). True love is, I believe, quark-like.
 
I’m not one to favor co-dependency in a relationship. I believe in the “magnetism” of love, but I don’t think love should be magnetic. I don’t think that two lovers brought into close proximity should lose their independence; rather, I think the relationship should strengthen that independence, each lover supporting and enhancing the other’s special character. I’m one who thinks that love doesn’t equate to need.
 
The adage “absence makes the heart grow fonder” applies. Like separated quarks, lovers experience an attraction born of distance. But in my model of love, lovers also act like quarks in close proximity. Love isn’t a matter of control. Love frees.
 
I know. You’re saying, “All that for an explanation of an old adage?”
 
Well, it occurred to me that love is very much like a nucleon. It is the framework within which lovers relate just as a nucleon is the framework for quarks. But all analogies limp, and this one also limps. Quarks come in groups of threes. And I’m not suggesting ménage à trois except in the case of a family, where the “third” quark is the offspring, for a child, too, can garner greater independence through a close relationship. A “household of three,” or one of any number, should foster independence through the force of love.
 
Oh! I know again what you’re thinking, “This guy forgets the other adage, ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ People whose jobs take them on the road probably have greater instances of infidelities. Nothing like a business conference to stimulate hormone production.”
 
Yeah. I thought of that, and you’re probably right in practice. Many spouses have found a new “quark” quite attractive in the nuclear confines of a conference far from home. But the adage and counter-adage combine to make a point about love as I see it: It’s one of the most contradictory of emotional experiences. It both ties and frees. I just happen to think that the tying and binding mimics quarks in the scenario of a “true love.”
 
So, look into the eyes of the one you love, and say, “I don’t need you; I love you.” Like quarks, the closer a lover is to the loved, the more each can go a separate way.  

Forgive me my periodic railing against bureaucracies. I’m partly a Jeffersonian with regard to government interference in the lives of peaceful individuals. I have noted elsewhere that the tendency of any bureaucracy is to expand its membership and its reach, or should I say, “overreach.” That penchant to grow, overreach, and intrude on the lives of individuals makes me ask: Is it possible to keep the bureaucratic nature of government and still lessen its dire effects on individuals in its population? Is it not a bit ironic that in an age of Selfies that indicate a self-centeredness that so many want a larger and even more intrusive government?  
 
There’s much to support that we are living in times of “The Extreme Me.” There might be nothing new in that focus except in its enhancement through technology and media. That individuals are important in the United States has always been an embedded principle that we can find in both the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution. So, a country that declares openly that every “Me” is significant ought to govern in a manner consistent with those Me-centered founding documents and principles. Both of those founding documents were written precisely with you—with each “Me”—in mind. Everyone is supposedly free to search for his or her Nirvana and enlightenment. That search is an American birthright, and that makes us all a bit Buddhist in our makeup. Even government bureaucrats, as Americans, are essentially also a bit Buddhist; their individuality in a vacuum is more essential to their lives than is their immersion in society as a whole. And I don’t have a problem with that except…
 
We don’t live in a vacuum. People in a vacuum can ignore others’ search for Nirvana or emerge to throw obstacles in their paths intentionally and unintentionally.
 
If the underlying premise of the American Constitution is freedom of the individual, then there’s a potential for conflict between large, regulating bureaucracies and the citizenry. Such conflict manifests itself in the many limiting restrictions put into de facto law by government agencies—often by agents partly unaware of the fundamental makeup of the Constitution while being acutely aware of their own agency’s history of regulations.
 
To mitigate the negative effects of bureaucratic overreach, we need a more stringent civil service test. My motive for this position stems from my reading anecdotes about and seeing numerous surveys of individuals who have little or no knowledge about the country they “serve” as bureaucrats or voters. I propose the more stringent examination in light of an old incident and a new survey. The old incident occurred during the Atlanta Olympics. The Los Angeles Times reported in 1996 that Wade Miller of Santa Fe called for volleyball tickets only to be told that he would have to go through his national committee. Miller couldn’t convince the agent or the agent’s manager that New Mexico was part of the USA and not some foreign country that the agents believed was related, it seems, to “Old Mexico.” So, he had the tickets sent to his old address in Arizona, a state that the agents recognized as part of the country. * Add to this anecdote the results of a recent survey commissioned by the Samuel Hubbard Shoe Company that found one in five Americans in a group of 2,000 was not familiar with the Bill of Rights—at all! ** It is possible that some bureaucrats fall into that 20%? Anecdotes like the one from the Atlanta Olympics and surveys like the shoe company’s reveal a paucity of knowledge about the country, a paucity also evidenced by one former President saying he thought he had visited all “57” states.
 
But this is not an American problem. Probably every country has its “20 per centers.” And the present times hold no special claim to ignorance about a national government. History tells us that even the Chinese of almost two millennia ago faced the challenge of an ignorant citizenry. That story begins when Buddhism entered China via India in the first century A.D. and became the dominant religion under the Wei emperors during the late 4th century. Eventually, Confucianism entered the public consciousness and became the underlying organizing principle in government bureaucracy. So, let’s set this up: Buddhism was a dominant religion, one that focused on the individual, but Confucianism was a principle that guided the administration of government. According to Kate Santon and Liz McKay, the editors of Atlas of World History, “The civil service that had been developed under Wu-ti was eventually bound to Confucian ideals, with the development of an examination system that required all prospective civil servants to show scholarly knowledge of the teaching of Confucius. This examination system remained in place for the next 2,000 years.” (65) ***
 
To protect the individual freedom that the Constitution guarantees and to ward off control by the uninformed, we need a demanding civil service exam and maybe even some continuing education classes for all government bureaucrats. And we need to have an examination that is politically neutral, favoring neither the Left nor the Right. To protect themselves from uninformed or misinformed bureaucrats, we also need an informed citizenry. Given a focus on the founding documents and principles of the country, government agents might be a little less inclined to favor their own agency’s collective “Meism” and more inclined to govern in a manner that allows many Mes, including the bureaucrats themselves, to seek Nirvana. In ancient China that merger of individual Buddhism and public Confucianism was probably unintentional and only partly effective. Can we now have a government that enhances the individual’s search for Nirvana?
 
A government with more than 2,000,000 employees is a big bureaucracy. **** The Founders could not have anticipated the growth of the country and the changes that have occurred in politics, mores, and attitudes over the last two centuries, but it seems they did have some sense that the two—government and individual—had to have a framework for both to function effectively. They did, after all, form a government. In that context, there are good reasons for some governmental restrictions, not the least of which is the presence of bad actors in every generation, including corrupt officials. In an unprecedented move, however, the Founders ensured the rights of individuals to seek personal Nirvanas within the context of mutually beneficial laws that take precedence in the absence of public jeopardy.
 
An uninformed citizenry guided by uninformed bureaucrats favors only those in power. If the Chinese could run an examination system for two millennia, couldn’t Americans do so for a few hundred years? Under our current dominance of ignorance and Meism, we probably don’t know what we don’t know. That 20% that didn’t know anything about the Bill of Rights is probably representative of the country. If, as a group, we are largely ignorant of the fundamental bases of this country’s founding, then we’re hardly in a position to demand a more challenging examination for civil servants. It seems that while we profess a desire for personal enlightenment when we wear our Buddhist robes (in contrast to Buddhism’s goal of eliminating desire), we don’t know what enlightenment to seek or even that we should seek enlightenment when we wear our civil robes.
 
  
*Florence, Mal. Atlanta Olympic Workers Need a Crash Course in Geography. The Lost Angeles Times. March 1, 1996. Online at  https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-03-01-sp-41795-story.html  Accessed April 7, 2019.
  
**Study Finds. Stunning Survey Shows Half of Americans Don’t Know All First Amendment Freedoms. Studyfinds at https://www.studyfinds.org/survey-half-americans-dont-know-what-first-amendment-protections/   Accessed April 7, 2019.
 
***Santon, Kate and Liz McKay, EDs. Atlas of World History. Bath, UK, Paragon Publishing, 2005.
 
****Congressional Research Service. Federal Workforce Statistics Sources: OPM and OMB, updated march 25, 2019. https://crsreports.congress.gov   Rf43590.  Accessed April 7, 2019.

Your relationship with the past, the significant maker of your present, is worth examining. And I don’t mean just your personal past. As the inheritor of what preceded you, you are even more than you might think. You are a ball of philosophical threads, the center of which lies so deeply buried that you could spend a lifetime unraveling to get to the core, only to find that as you unraveled, you raveled. More threads accumulate, threads such as the current little essay.
 
The ball of threads began to grow in diameter before you reached the age of reason—an age different for each of us. By the time you consciously chose a strand or set of strands, your intellectual twine was already intertwined, and the colors of the individual threads were often hues so close that they were indistinguishable in the light of your retrospection.
 
Intertwining thoughts have always made many of us ask about the originality of our own thinking. Surely, somewhere along that long string of humanity, someone thought what you now think; someone foreshadowed your insights and maybe, through connections you’ll never discover, indirectly led to your synthesis of ideas. The threads of thought parallel the threads of time. We are connected to ancient thinking even when we are unaware of the influence.
 
One of the most controversial figures of the Renaissance, Giordano Bruno, posed the question about our link to past thinking. He recognized a connection to the thought of ancient Greeks and the religions practiced in ancient Egypt in his search for understanding. He was so controversial that the Inquisition burned him at the stake as a heretic for holding views antithetical to the Ptolemaic, geocentric, universe and the belief in a young Earth. Bruno, like Galileo, thought Copernicus was largely correct, and he also thought the universe was infinitely old, making Giordano the first in a thread of thinkers that includes the late Stephen Hawking. It was Bruno who in going beyond the Sun-centered cosmos of Copernicus, speculated that the universe had no center and was older than the people of his times believed.
 
Giordano Bruno would tell us that our ties to the past are worth examining if we want to be original thinkers. He would by the lesson of his life’s end, probably warn that original thinking can be dangerous. There are only a few acceptable threads of thought in the surface of any ball of string. Whatever the thread du jour is, that’s what dictates whether or not one finds acceptance. Adding a new thread, possibly even one made of never used materials, can be hazardous to one’s acceptance in societies of supposed "intellects."
 
It might behoove us all to ask a question that Bruno in the sixteenth century posed about our relationship to past thought. He wrote, “Do we…who begin to renew the ancient philosophy, stand in the morning to put an end to the night, or in the evening to put an end to the day? *
 
Yes, I’m aware that in using Bruno’s words, I’m mixing metaphors in this little piece, but the point is worth pursuing in light of his life and works and your life and works. Your tie to the past like Bruno’s tie is undeniable. If you are to seek original insights, do you sever the strings of ineffective philosophies that run like night to the morning you create, or do you cut those threads of enlightenment in favor of frayed thoughts that like the end of daylight lead into darkness?
 
Whether or not you choose to see your connections to the past as interwoven and accumulated threads or as moments during which you chose to continue or discontinue a philosophy, you might be wise to examine the history of influences that made you what you currently are. With some persistence, you’ll be able to determine if you are currently putting an end to night or an end to day, severing some useless string or spinning a new thread.
 
*Rowland, Ingrid D., Giordano Bruno: Philosopher and Heretic. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008., p. 161.

Mark Twain captured the essence of anxiety in a single thought: “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened.” That’s insightful thinking on Twain’s part, right?
 
I wish every anxious person would read that sentence. But, alas, Twain’s thought is a rational assessment of why he sometimes must have suffered from anxiety. Reason, he must have reasoned, can explain why he was anxious. But reasoning works differently during anxious times. To the anxious, there appear to be “reasons” for the troubled mental state. However sound those reasons seem to the anxious, they are to outsiders mere rationalizations based on a belief in the inevitability of “what ifs.” Those who are anxious and those who are not derive their sense of reason differently. The anxious derive it from hasty conclusions. Those not anxious derive it from logic. It seems that looking at the world “reasonably” is like looking through windows with varying transparency, maybe even like looking through stained glass windows.
 
Experience, as Twain implies, is meaningless for those that suffer from anxiety. That “nothing happened” as they predicted in most previous episodes of worry means little. If there’s an analog to be had, it lies in the anxious living in a many-worlds universe. The reality they know doesn’t preclude the existence of other realities that can interrupt their lives. In a many-worlds interpretation of reality, one never knows when dimensions will cross and alternate realities will encompass the present, nay, become the present.
 
Of course, we might all say anxiety is natural. There are some scary events and entities awaiting all of us, not the least of which is death. From tigers, lions, and monsters under beds and in closets to concerns that envelop adults, almost everyone, if not everyone, is given to moments of irrational jitters. In life the things of life happen, not the least of which is change: The circumstances of Now, however pleasant and happy, will change. Living an eternal High can be interrupted by a pulled hamstring, a dental cavity, or a lost set of keys.
 
As biochemical organisms, we’re all prone to some molecular influences, so anxiety can occur with a rush of chemicals through our brains. No doubt, there are people whose anxiety is a manifestation of a physical process that merges with the psychological in a perfect feed back loop. For such people, chemicals provide a mitigating therapy. As conscious biochemical organisms living highly complex lives in an even more complex world, mere chemistry isn’t always a complete therapy, and sometimes isn’t necessary at all.
 
When anxiety is driven by the mind and not the brain, there might be another kind of therapy to reduce anxiety: Reading that sentence by Mark Twain repeatedly until its message becomes a way of life, of an anxiety-free life—well, except for that death thing.

Sure, we do things impulsively, but all of us also make rational decisions based on some evidence—past experience or study. So, when we see a TV advertisement for a new medicine that offers some hope to the afflicted but that also comes with warnings of side effects, we have choices: Jump in with both feet, test a little, or refrain from use. This last choice would mostly likely result from our hearing that one of the side effects is death.
 
I especially like the advertisement for a medicine that advises, “If you are allergic to this product, don’t take it” (not in those exact words). I wonder. How will I know if I’m allergic unless I take it? And considering that advertisement makes me think about impulsive and rational decisions.
 
Recently, two scientific journals have questioned the use of the term statistical significance. The term is part of our common language even if we never took a statistic course. We assume that something that is statistically significant has a value that can serve as a predicate for action. For the most part, we’re okay with that. We think, “Chances are I’m not going to be the one to…get salmonella from bagged salad…be in the airplane that crashes…catch the bubonic plague…get bitten by a West Nile Virus mosquito… or any of a myriad of other possible negatives.” For scientists, the statistical significance lies in the range of a 5% probability. With regard to those advertised cures, less than five percent keeps you from the side effects—we think.
 
But all of us are individuals, and all of us live very complex lives in very complex bodies under very complex circumstances. Is five percent a good guide, a good limitation, on whether or not something is significant or insignificant statistically? Wouldn’t we all be happier when we know that the bad things are even less likely to occur, say on the order of just part of one percent?
 
Those complex lives we live give us little time to consider rationally all that we do. Often, we just take our chances, even when they might include a greater than five percent probability of some personally detrimental consequence. We hear some say, “When your time’s up, it’s up.” But that is a que sera, sera attitude that suggests a helplessness, and ignores that we don’t have to stand under a tree on a golf course during a lightning storm. Que sera, sera is the justification of those easing themselves into one addiction or another. The chances, for example, of one’s getting “vomiting syndrome” or becoming psychotic with continued use of cannabis is “within the acceptable risk.” We hear, “Statistically, that’s probably not going to happen to me.”
 
Because we live on a planet of risks, we could become obsessed with the statistical favorability of any of our actions, but we’re human, so we don’t act on reason alone. We know that about 50% of marriages fail, but people still marry. You will eat certain foods, take a supplement, swallow a prescription pill, chance an operation, or make a purchase on some basis you believe to be relatively certain. Thus, in most matters we teeter on a fence between doing and not doing, often jumping to one side merely on impulse because we can’t know with absolute certainty. A complex life has us walk many fences simultaneously and serially.
 
You will make many decisions today all based on your sense of their probable outcomes. Some, as experience has shown you, will be so-so; some will be great; maybe one or two will be regrettable. On what basis will you decide?