Instructions on use: Place the Miracle-Gro Tree and Shrub Fertilizer Spikes at the drip line. Think of a tree as an umbrella. The rain drips at its edges. 
 
Without such instructions from the company, many of us would probably put the fertilizer spikes near the trunk of a tree or shrub. But trees and shrubs are better served when we place fertilizer at the periphery of their roots, and that coincides with the farthest lateral extent of branches and leaves.
 
Like trees and shrubs, our ideas have a lateral extent, and our personal drip lines mark where we can explore. We need intellectual fertilizer that lies on the periphery of our current reach of ideas. An influx of nutrients works best at the drip line of the mind. Close in, the thick old tendrils of our neurons are less efficient at creative thought than those thin new offshoots exploring far from a well established trunk. New ideas lie at the boundaries of what we believe, that is, at the drip line.

Was there a time when the Rock Fairy dropped boulders randomly across the countryside? The rocks lie in both field and forest. A good example is Doane Rock* near Eastham, Cape Cod. It stands 18 feet tall and has a buried depth estimated at 12 feet. That’s a big rock. Who put it there?
 
Called “erratics,” boulders like Doane Rock randomly lie in once glaciated lands. Carried on moving ice that once covered Canada and northern United States, the rocks made their slow descent to the surface as the glaciers melted and retreated. Once part of rocks in some other region, the erratics seem to have wandered far from their home. They are like knights errant, “wanderers.”
 
The continental glaciers were so massive that nothing, not even solid rock, could resist their erosive power. They broke rock and carried the fragments, regardless of size, till the ice thinned by melting. With no force strong enough to move them once the ice was gone, the rocks have lain in their new homes for thousands of years. The clue to their travel lies in the compositional difference between them and the rocks in their new neighborhoods. Granites from far away can be found “out of place” in sedimentary rock complexes. There is, in fact, no single composition of erratics. Whatever rock glaciers randomly scoured provided the emigrants.  
 
Like glacial erratics, all of us can be carried along by forces too large to resist. Fragmentation and forced emigration is an almost periodic process that we can trace to those irresistible forces. In the physical movement of people, war, as we all know, is chief among those forces. Pandemics, famines, and economics are also such forces. The ambitions and policies of overwhelming numbers of invaders is still another. Look, for example, at the traces of Celtic people in Icelandic DNA, that chemical signature of heritage having been carried there by marauding Vikings.
 
For most of us, culture is the glacier in our lives, and it thins by time. It carries us with it and puts us down as we age. So many people are stuck “out of place” among unrelated “rocks.” Think of those whose lives have extended long after the general culture in which they spent most of their lives has melted away. Their friends and acquaintances having thinned, and their popular culture having faded into obscurity, they now stand as strange deposits on lands of foreign composition. They have little in common with their new surroundings. Ninety-year-olds are the Doane Rocks of every civilization.
 
But even if we don’t achieve great age by human standards, each of us is destined to become some kind of erratic eventually. Sounds a bit depressing, but don’t despair.
 
Doane Rock stands above the surrounding terrain, shaded by trees growing in soils that were, like the boulder, carried to Cape Cod long ago by a giant ice sheet that no longer exists. Young people climb on it. People take Selfies with it. The rock seems oddly out of place, but definitely fascinating enough to be the center of a small park dedicated to its existence. A big stone in the middle of some woods. It stands alone and immobile, but it hints at a life of travel, of experiences only it knows. And people go out of their way to preserve it and to see it. It is special by virtue of its size, isolation, and its relationship to both the distant rock from which it parted long ago and the process that forced its emigration.
 
Doane Rock was a passive traveler, one not responsible for leaving its point of origin and being carried along by an ice sheet that might have been thousands of feet thick and that covered all of New England and the shallow coastal zones. And like that erratic, early in our lives we were carried by irresistible cultural, philosophical, and social forces. But there is a major difference between glacial erratics and us. The only laws that apply to glacial erratics is the strength of the parent rocks and the force and spread of the eroding glacier. Inertia applies. Once dropped, the erratic is motionless.
 
We, by contrast, find ourselves still mobile, even when we have lain in one spot for a very long time. Wherever the forces of our past dropped us in the present, we are not stuck like Doane Rock. We can maintain our erratic, or wandering, nature. Moving physically might be difficult for a number of reasons, including economic ones, but breaking free from the containing ground of current culture and thought requires only the effort of the mind.
 
There’s no fault in having been carried along by overwhelming forces. It happens to all of us in some way, even if only by virtue of once being young and inexperienced. But staying in place till we become social and intellectual oddities, even revered ones, is a choice, albeit a difficult one. Intellectual inertia is an individual matter.
 
Move. It’s time to wander again, but do it by choice.  
 
* http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=doane+rock&qpvt=Doane+Rock&qpvt=Doane+Rock&qpvt=Doane+Rock&FORM=IGRE     

Have you ever watched a wet dog shiver? Shivering is a practical drying method for some animals. If humans could do it as effectively, they might present quite a spectacle of shaking bodies on the beach or at the pool. Alas! We are not the best of shiverers when it comes to drying off, but we sometimes do a little dance to shake off excess water from our heads or arms. For that action we ascribe no special meaning.  
 
Not so in the vicinity of Madras, India, where some ancient texts speak of quivering as an omen. Among Telugu Tottiyans, according to Edgar Thurston, onetime regional superintendent of the Madras Government Museum, during a marriage ceremony “a red ram without blemish is sacrificed. It is first sprinkled with water, and, if it shivers, this is considered a good omen.”* There are probably numerous Telugu Tottiyan marriages that get off to a good start because the little critters probably naturally shiver off the unexpected shower of water.
 
Our species has no want of behaviors designed to assure us that our futures are bright. As Thurston reports, “In many villages, during the festival to the village deity, water is poured over a sheep's back, and it is accepted as a good sign if it shivers.” Even some of the region’s criminals have been known to use shivering as a sign of their successful ventures in robbing others. Thurston also says that such thieves ordinarily steal sheep, but they will pay for the sheep over which they pour water to watch for shivering before they sacrifice the animals.
 
If you are not one of the Telugu Tottiyans or other groups in the Madras area who govern their actions by omens, you might be inclined to dismiss what they do as silly. Your dismissal of their omens and beliefs is understandable—to you. But in what behaviors do you or those with whom you associate engage that might seem strange to others?
 
Ever go to a basketball game or football game? Ever see the group known as cheerleaders? There’s a noticeable absence of such groups at athletic events in most other cultures. Do cheerleaders dance and shake pompoms for a reason? Is there not some slight hint to someone from another culture that their actions might be an appeal to the gods of victory? Have you seen fans (sports or political) waving pennants? Can you imagine one unfamiliar with the practice asking, “Are the pennants for penates?” Or what about sprinkling? Have you seen players and coaches shake and open bottles of champagne to spray over one another after a sports championship?
 
Because we cannot have grown up in every place and culture, we frequently fail to assess the personal meaning of “strange” behaviors in other cultures, even when we employ our best ethnological and anthropological intentions and skills. Before we laugh or demean, we ought to examine what people from another culture might consider to be our strange behaviors. Without such examination, are we any different from those steeped in unquestioning superstition?   
 
 
* Edgar Thurston, C.I.E., Omens and Superstitions of Southern India. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912
https://ia800504.us.archive.org/22/items/omensandsupersti35690gut/35690-8.txt

In 1919 Edmund Gosse published Some Diversions of a Man of Letters, essentially a set of essays or lectures on various topics. The topic of his “Preface” is "The Fluctuations of Taste.” Noting that Voltaire wrote a chapter on epic poetry called “Differences of Taste in Nations,” Gosse writes that for today the subject should be redefined as the “Differences of Taste in Generations.” I suppose Gosse had observed the changing of whatever was deemed fashionable in the nineteenth century into whatever was becoming fashionable in art, literature, culture, and literal fashion in the “Roaring Twenties.”
 
In what appears to be an age-old complaint, Gosse says that in early youth “we fight for the new forms of art, for the new aesthetic shibboleths, and in that happy ardour of battle we have no time or inclination to regret the demigods whom we dispossess.” He then notes that as we age, “Behold! One morning, we wake up to find our own predilections treated with contempt.”*
 
It happens to most if not all of us. What we find fashionable the next generation throws into its wastebasket. Of course, as we learn from experience or from study, we know that the pendulum swings, and sometimes what was fashionable, then abandoned, becomes fashionable again. Here’s where Gosse fingers the problem. He says “that no canons of taste exist; that what are called ‘laws’ of style are enacted only for those who make them, and for those whom the makers can bully into accepting their legislation, a new generation of lawbreakers being perfectly free to repeal the code.” Face it: Whatever you declare as fashionable is going to change because your declaration is meaningless outside the parish of likeminded thinkers.
 
Every one of us has to answer a very important question related to Edmund Gosse’s thoughts. Is there no standard? Or is there a standard of beauty (or of truth, or thought, or fashion) regardless of the absence of, as Gosse puts it, “a fixed rule of taste”? It’s a question of relative v. absolute.
 
You might say that there can be both. Some things are absolutes. Others are not.  But are your absolutes absolutes for everyone? Gosse argues that we really can’t produce a standard of beauty (or fashion) on which we can all agree, but “when we observe…that art (or beauty, or culture, or fashion) is no better at one age than at another, but only different; that it is subject to modification, but certainly not to development; may we not safely accept this stationary quality as a proof that there does exist, out of sight, unattained and unattainable, a positive norm of …beauty [truth, fashion, culture, philosophy, psychology] ? We cannot define it, but in each generation all excellence must be the result of a relation to it.”
 
Time for you to decide your relationship to absolutes and standards. Fashions of thought, art, literature, and culture are always subject to the vicissitudes of generations, nations, and ethnic groups. Think of political correctness as a fashion of language or culture. Is it a standard of the time? Is it here to stay? If we are to judge by history, no. It might be fashionable now, but…
 
Think of current standards of beauty, of philosophy, of psychology, and of various artistic media. If they are all relative—all subject to change—do you agree with Gosse that there is an unspoken, unidentifiable standard somehow underlying all fashions and patterns?
 
If you said, “Yes,” you might be a Platonist or Neoplatonist. You might argue that there is an “ideal tree” even if you can’t picture it because you always think “oak,” “pine,” “maple.” If you said, “No” with regard to standards of any kind, then you need to ask yourself if you belong to that group of philosophers who have questioned whether or not all is illusion, that nothing is “fixed.”
 
Bertrand Russell framed this by asking in The Problems of Philosophy what we could say about the shape of a table.* Let’s say you see a rectangular table. Is that its shape? Does it look rectangular from every angle as you walk around it, see it from below, from a corner? What if we look at the table through a microscope? Will it appear to have the same texture as it has without magnification? What about the color of the table? Is the same under different lighting conditions? With glare and without? How confident are you that your drawing of the table could capture the nature of the table? Can you capture all the “patterns,” or forms that the table seems to take from every angle, from close in or far away, from being bathed in light or shielded by partial shadow? Or is your “table” an “ideal table”? 
 
If we can’t be sure about a table, what makes us so sure about the fashions, the patterns, and the philosophies to which we so desperately cling? Does our clinging in itself indicate that we recognize without specifying some kind of underlying law of standards?
 
Just askin’.
 
* http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18649/18649-h/18649-h.htm#Page_31
Edmund Gosse, C.B., Some Diversons of a Man of Letters (London: William Heinemann, 1919, 1920)
** http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5827/5827-h/5827-h.htm
Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (1912)

Verbally consecrated by Lincoln’s famous speech, Gettysburg was physically and emotionally consecrated by the actions of those who fought its famous battle. In Lincoln’s brief Gettysburg Address, he says that those gathered in the town after the battle were meeting in a place of unfinished work that had been nobly advanced.
 
Every place has the potential to be consecrated by action. Every place can be a Gettysburg. What will you do today to consecrate where you are by work nobly advanced? You have the opportunity if not to complete unfinished noble work, then to advance it for others. And so on.  

There’s always something of concern. Now it’s petunias, the genetically modified ones. Beware the African Sunset Petunia. It’s the product of genetic modification, and even though it doesn’t appear to be any kind of threat to ecologies in North America, it’s been banned by the United States Department of Acriculture.* No one seems to have gotten a permit to push a posy of petunias prior to their placement.
 
But you can understand the ban because you’ve seen the product of introduced plant species, the so-called invasive species. There’s Pueraria lobata, for example, commonly called kudzu. It’s the vine that is covering much of the southern United States. And then there’s Kali tragus, or tumbleweed. Watch for it on windy days in the American West. The former is a green vine; the latter is a bird’s nest of tan fiber. Now imagine a country covered in reddish petunias. Gasp!
 
We’re always dealing with two characteristics of hybridization and invasion in our personal lives. We ourselves undergo hybridization through experience and learning, and we encounter a changing social environment either in the form of new people in the neighborhood or at work or in the form of invasive social media or governmental restriction.
 
In the face of changes to our personal ecology, we often act like the USDA, placing caution above acceptance. “Better to be safe than sorry,” the expression goes. But we are relatively resilient and resourceful. There might already be tens of thousands of introduced species in North America, but we survived their invasion, and we can even profit from it. Kudzu, for example, is edible. So are dandelions, another invasive species.
 
We hybridize ourselves as we adapt to the changing nature of place. We develop emotional and intellectual mechanisms to deal with previously un-encountered problems foisted upon us by social media. We have survived by adapting. You will survive by adapting. Encountering a changing personal ecology? Adapt. Find some way to use the invasive species to your advantage. That’s not just food for thought. It might be real food.
 
Don’t worry. We’ll get through this petunia crisis.
 
* Posted in: Science, AAAS at
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/us-flower-sellers-rush-destroy-illegal-ge-petunias
DOI: 10.1126/science.aal1200

Confess it. You’ve been to some sort of fast food restaurant. You probably felt obliged sometime to express your guilt. “I know I shouldn’t eat this stuff.” But from MacDonald’s to Minute Rice, twenty-first century people, like their immediate predecessors, are obsessed with speed, often at the expense of quality and health. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that the obsessions of our times go back more than a century.
 
In 1878 Scientific American reported that Mrs. Lawton of Carrolton, MO, made her guests biscuits from wheat that had been growing in her fields. No big deal? The wheat was reaped and delivered by swift horse to the mill in 2 minutes, 17 seconds and then delivered to Mrs. Lawton’s who immediately made griddle cakes, taking only another one minute and 38 seconds to bake. “In 4 minutes 37 seconds from the starting of he reaper, a pan of biscuits was delivered to the assembled guests.”* That, my friend, is really fast food—and done without a microwave.
 
In the same year that Mrs. Lawton made her fast food, James Goodheart of Matawan, N.J., improved a machine for “Distributing Poison upon potato plants to destroy the potato bug.” The machine could “also be used for sowing seeds.” Looks like the perfect combinations: Fast food, poison, and sowing with a machine also used for distributing poison. What more could a modern person ask for?
 
How about “crooked journalism”? In 1878, also, we see one of the roots of our times: Slanted writing. Seems that a writer for Engineering spun a story about one of Edison’s inventions in which largely by omission, he tilted credit to Mr. Hughes and away from Edison. The Scientific American editors, taking Engineering’s reporter to task, say, “Altogether the article is the most dishonest piece of writing we have ever seen in a scientific periodical.” (*Ibid.). So, 1878 was also a significant forerunner of today’s spread of news influenced by bias.
 
And then there’s sport. In the same year two velocipedists (a bicycle of the times) did a Tour de France, including parts of Italy and southern Switzerland, traveling more than 3,000 miles between March 16 and April 24, for one segment from Turin to Milan traveling 90 miles in 9 hours 30 minutes. And it was also the year that someone turned an unassisted triple play in baseball.
 
And now robots and Artificial Intelligence: Aren’t we concerned about machines taking the place of humans, practically eliminating the sentient beings from the workplace and replacing them with efficient, never-tiring mechanical workers? Here’s another statement from Scientific American in 1878: “Already we notice several instances in which the workmen, renouncing their prejudices have willingly consented to the substitution of machine for hand work, and we doubt not that the success of these innovations, conjoined with the pressure of the times, will ere long create a complete revolution in the ideas of the British workmen, so that instead of longer opposing radical change is not necessarily far in the future, for the logic of it has long been working in the brains of both masters and men and may reasonably bear fruit at any time.” It was also a year when the magazine included an article about uneven wages.
 
Are we reliving 1878? Got your smart phone nearby? This is what Scientific American reported: “The characteristic avidity with which the American people seize upon a novelty has been wonderfully exemplified by the manner in which the telephone mania has spread.” You don’t have that mania, do you?
 
The parallels are getting a bit overwhelming. Wearing polarized shades outside? The same year saw developments in polarized lenses. Following the climate debate about the influence of the sun and sunspot activity? You guessed it. In 1878 people began using cameras to study the sun and its “spots.” Worried about how global warming might be affecting the oceans, causing, for example, the bleaching of corals? In 1878 guys named Negretti and Zambra invented a thermometer that enabled the English navy to measure ocean temperatures at different depths. Concerned about fresh water use? New Yorkers realized they were in the midst of a multi-year drought.
 
Have an anti-rollover system in your car? In 1878 Jonas Bowman patented an improved vehicle spring that reduced the tilting and pitching motion that occurs during a turn. Been to the dentist? Thank Dr. G. R. Thomas of Detroit for experimenting with operations to “replant teeth.” Think organ transplants are special? Dr. Thomas transplanted the tooth of a woman into the mouth of a man.
 
Going to watch the August solar eclipse? Yep. There was one in 1878. Going to change the oil in your car? Again, the use of petroleum lubricating oils was a big topic among those using the machines of the times. And oil derricks reached new drilling depths the same year. Think modern schools don’t give kids practical education? What do you think the discussion was about schools in 1878? The question of the day: Are kids going to school to learn “compulsory ignorance”? Apparently, the concern of the day was that kids were not learning practical skills and knowledge useful in an age of rapidly improving technologies.
 
Finally, disease and war. Someone tried to cure cancer by applying pressure to the blood vessels feeding tumors. You might guess that the technique was not very successful, and today, just as in 1878, we’re still running experiments on cancer cures. Same year: Greece and Turkey went to war; the Brits sent 40,000 troops into Afghanistan.
 
Why did I make you read all this? Think of our beliefs that we are “modern” and that we are technologically advanced and highly sophisticated. What you read above and other parallels with life in 1878 that I didn’t mention point to the continuity of human problems, solutions, and frustrations. We really aren’t much different from our 1878 predecessors. We might have tweaked a few machines, but the overall nature of our concerns isn’t radically different. Seems that only little over a century ago people had concerns similar to our own.

What do you think human concerns will be a little over a century from now?
 
* http://www.gutenberg.org/files/43282/43282-h/43282-h.htm#The_Treatment_of_Cancer_by_Pressure

Are there three drivers of human behavior?
 
Some behavior is situational, some enigmatic, and some ideational. The first of the three is reactive. Given a stimulus, we respond sometimes consciously and at other times unconsciously. But we recognize the stimulus and the situation. The second is mysterious because we can’t fathom all that is operating: Combinations of biochemical processes, past experiences, desires, unidentified stimuli, habits (or addictions), and current emotional states might drive us to act, again both consciously and unconsciously. The third driver derives from personal philosophy and cultural conformity (or nonconformity).
 
Have I missed some categories? Would you enhance your life by knowing why you behave the way you do? If you answer "yes," then here's an assignment: Make your list of mutually exclusive categories of human behaviors and their causes.  

One of the big evolutionary jumps toward mammals was separating a head from a butt. You aren’t built like a coral: One way in; one way out. No, you’re more wormlike. One way in and another way out. Head and butt. Brain and that other end.
 
Apparently, that evolutionary jump occurred more than a half billion years ago, and one of the organisms whose fossils demonstrates the head-butt structure is Hallucigenia.* It’s a creature whose front and back ends were long mixed in the minds of paleontologists until recently. What was thought to be a head was the back end. How could we make such a mistake?
 
Hallucigenia was also the subject to a topsy-turvy interpretation of its top and bottom. A tiny creature, it had long spikes on one side and tube-like projections on the other. Again, paleontologists long held that the spikes were legs and the tubes were something else, maybe feeders. Seems that we made a mistake there, also. The tubes were legs. How could we make such a mistake?
 
Having an identifiable head on a body oriented topside up is an advantage. Heads hold brains. Heads lead.
 
In a world of social media and the Internet, identifiable heads are difficult to pinpoint. We’re almost in a constant hallucination, remnants of thoughts everywhere and coming from every direction. Sometimes, leadership comes from behind. Sometimes, the bottom directs the top. And the same goes for news and history.
 
Possibly, humans have always struggled to find clear leadership. That might be the reason for turmoil as one dynasty after another has fallen. One generation of idea-diggers, paleontologists of human systems, can’t make out the heads and tails of previous generations. The previous generation doesn’t quite make sense. The new generation asks, “How could we make such a mistake?”
 
Note that I am not pointing to any analog of a Cambrian fossil some 540 million years old. The system itself is irrelevant. The fossilized remains of a previous generation of suspected leaders and followers will always be difficult to interpret. Every age sees the world slightly differently. Historians have a tough job because they see the previous milieu through their own culture and evolutionary jumps. They make assumptions about leaders and followers and the roles that apparent topsides and undersides play.
 
Hallucigenia has a lesson for us. Sometimes our interpretations are mere hallucinations. Sometimes we can’t see which end drove the events because the fossilized remains of the past are often squished and scattered. What we believe might be a force of one might be a product of an entire culture. The bottom might be the significant top, the top might be the legs, and front might be the back, and the back might be the front.
 
Newer research demonstrates that the structure long thought to be the “head” of Hallucigenia was not, in fact, a head, but rather just some stuff squished out of the flattened organism. Hallucigenia’s “other end” was its head, one that had eyes. It also had a bit of smile—the smile a product of our penchant to interpret all things in our own image. If the creature did smile, was it because it knew that any historical interpretation errs on the side of the interpreters’ brains? Is the truth of any history a joke on the present? Will ensuing generations interpret your life and culture upside down and back end first? If so, you might as well die smiling.
 
* http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=hallucigenia&FORM=IARRTH&ufn=hallucigenia&stid=54c59443-06cc-188d-3ad9-67a8a9fae252&cbn=EntityAnswer&cbi=0&FORM=IARRTH   

Spring rain formed a puddle in the infield where the shortstop usually stands. In the absence of human activity, birds alighted and walked around, leaving a number of three-toed impressions in the fine silt at the bottom of the puddle. When the puddle dried, the prints were traces of the birds’ presence, random footprints that sometimes crossed one over another. Some prints unaffected by subsequent walking showed the direction of a single bird. Before the next game starts, someone will rake or drag the infield and eradicate the vestiges of those bird tracks. As dips in the surface they can cause a bad bounce, making the shortstop’s task of fielding a grounder more difficult in the upcoming game.
 
You can see something similar but much older beneath a dome at Dinosaur State Park in Rocky Hill, Connecticut. Dinosaurs walked over fine-grained wet sediments during the Jurassic Period. Subsequently, water washed sediments over the prints, filling them in with slightly different size grains and both layers turned to rock. Separating the top layer from the one beneath it, workers uncovered the tracks, similar, though larger, than the tracks at shortstop on a baseball infield.
 
Footprints are trace fossils: Evidence that life was present without any detrital hard parts to uncover and display. Thus, the Rocky Hill Dinosaur Footprint Museum displays no dinosaur bones found at the site of the impressions, but rather a Dilophosaurus that was common in Connecticut during the Jurassic. Unlike those who smooth the surface of an infield for the upcoming game, those responsible for the museum and the tracks’ preservation want the impressions left as they appeared during the Jurassic. The tracks tell a personal history of the region.
 
In a sense, all of us are like the infield and the rock at Rocky Hill. We have the tracks of thoughts left by those who walked over our minds through what they have done, said, written, and projected. We are analogs to the processes that preserved those footprints because with us there’s always a way to wash in new sediments to cover over the impressions of previous indentions in our lives. Filling in is what we do when we eventually lithify our personalities. Underneath lie the impressions, and they, like the tracks at Rocky Hill, can be uncovered if we strip off the top layer. For most of our lives, those early impressions lie hidden between layers of our own making.
 
For some, those early tracks are deep wounds, and no subsequent sedimentation can fill them to their own personal extinction. They remain as dips in the surface, still visible—even if only slightly—and still easy to excavate. The overlying sediments of experiences, repressions, and conscious efforts are all clasts that differ in size and composition from the underlying matrix of the infield or shoreline. Think of making an impression in sand or mud and filling that impression with pebbles. Maybe the tracks of others in our lives should never be covered over or filled. They are there, and they represent real influences.
 
But no one wants to play shortstop on an uneven infield. Fielding the next ground ball is easier when the surface is smooth, when a ball bounces more predictably across an even surface.
 
And every future is easier to handle when life’s surface is smooth. Is that why we consciously and unconsciously fill in those tracks?