As the tale is told, Siddhartha was an isolated, protected prince whose father wanted to keep him from seeing the downside of life. But it’s tough to keep the downside a secret. The harshness of the world isn’t an isolated phenomenon. Siddhartha’s father must have done a good job at hiding human suffering, however, because it wasn’t until Sidd turned 29 that he encountered age, disease, and death, supposedly seeing all three during outings along the kingdom’s roads. Of course, your question and mine is “How could anyone escape human suffering for 29 years?”
 
Certainly, Nepalese courtiers caught the flu and the common cold 2,500 years ago, and some servant had to drop a vase on or stub a toe. Possibly some courtesan suffered a rocky relationship in the palace. Nevertheless, let’s stick to the story that only after he left the palace, an almost 30-year-old guy suddenly discovered suffering and death.
 
Seeing the old man, the sick man, and the dead man was a turning point in Sidd’s life. One can envision his look of surprise as he peered from some curtained palanquin and suddenly understood his slow destiny in the wrinkles of an old man or his final destiny in the dead man. He had come to a turning point in his life; and upon seeing an ascetic, realized he needed to go “find himself.”
 
Twenty-nine seems to be about right for finding oneself if neuroscientists are correct about the brain’s not maturing fully until it passes the early twenties. Need some anecdotal proofs? Follow the Spring Break crowd to beach towns. Watch people of excess turn toward moderation as they acquire the responsibilities of adulthood. Read sobering regrets from those who turned from aimlessness to productivity or from crime to service.
 
Obviously, some have turning points sooner than others. Some are born into harshness from which they emerge through their own or others’ efforts or through chance. I suppose not all turning points are 180-degree turns, but many are. Think of optical illusions and art. You can stare for a while without seeing the effect, and then, for whatever reason the brain had for keeping the image from you, it suddenly frees the mystery. “Ah! Now I see it,” you say.
 
That turning point has various descriptors. Is it the “Aha!” moment? The “epiphany”? Regardless of his name, we have no way of knowing how the moment arrives. It is simply Zenlike in its appearance, and it comes in all forms of experience. Apparently, such turning points are often associated with new places and circumstances or even with boredom and fatigue in the same place or circumstance. Some people might even rely on drugs to induce a different perspective and insight—though one might argue that such perspectives and insights are usually hallucinatory and rarely of lasting or useful nature. The history of physics gives us many examples of moments of enlightenment derived from both a change of place and/or boredom. Freeman Dyson took a bus from Berkeley to the East Coast in 1948. After two days of the trip, as he wrote to his parents, he went into “a semi stupor,” and “a remarkable thing happened.” “I had solved the problem that had been in the back of my mind all this year, which was to prove the equivalence of…two theories.”* The theories are irrelevant. The point is that Dyson underwent one of those “Aha!” moments, and it just “came to him” during his Siddhartha moment along the road.
 
Siddhartha came to his moment, his turning point, and from that he became the Buddha. Do we all have such turning points? Have you had one or even more than one? A couple of thousand years after Sidd took his ride, such moments still come unexpectedly to us. Dhyana, or liberating insight, is usually a surprise. Until it comes to us unexpectedly, however, we are all hidden behind the walls of an imposed palace, happy in our ignorance of what is to come and what we can become.
 
*Feeman Dyson’s letter to his parents on September 18, 1948, in Schweber, Silvan S., QED and the Men Who Made It: Dyson, Feynman, Swinger, Tomonaga, Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 505.

If the Higgs boson gives mass to matter, does it have a mental or spiritual analog that gives substance to thought?
 
Every once in a while, you probably have a thought that you believe to be insightful, possibly even brilliant. You believe you have done some substantial thinking, that you have revealed a “truth.” If the thought becomes part of your permanent memory, it can manifest itself by influencing both your behavior and ensuing thoughts.
 
Any particular thought is irrelevant here, but there is a question you need to ask yourself about thinking. What makes you believe in the “substantiality” of your thought? Is there some force-emitting neuronal process that imparts substance? Does it generate substantiality equally? Do, for example, the thoughts “I am out of bread, milk, and eggs” and “E=mc^2” carry an equal substantiality? Yes? No?
 
“Silly?” you say. “All thoughts are ‘insubstantial.’”
 
Yet, some seem to be life-changing or to act as the foundation of belief or action.
 
You seem to have an ability “to weigh” them and to consider some “substantial enough to warrant changing behavior.” So, back to the original question. What gives “substance” to thought? What underlies certain ways of thinking or thoughts that makes them different from other ways of thinking or thoughts? Is it their relationship to action? Or, will you argue that there is “pure reason” that isn’t somehow bound to any action? But if you do, then how do you consider pure reason as substantial thinking? Reasoning is a process that even thoughts about it employ.
 
Search for the underlying force that, like the Higgs boson, gives substance to your thinking.

What is the role of a formal education? Is it ultimately just a matter of conducting oneself in a manner both understandable and acceptable to contemporaries? Is it a matter of freeing individuals to be individual? Does a formal education governed by state or local authority both foster and endanger individuality? More importantly for you: How much of your life and thinking has been molded by your teachers?
 
Ours isn’t the first age to think about education. Ancient civilizations had various types of schools and teaching methods. Because the foci of education shift with the times, however, what worked for Sparta will not necessarily work for kids in the Hamptons—although, one wonders, wouldn’t some Spartan discipline work for just about anyone? Anyway, education was on the mind of Charlemagne before he became Holy Roman Emperor in 800. Having become a king, he had subjects, and he desired to have educated ones, so he wrote to Abbot Baugulf to address an issue of importance. Apparently, as one can see from the following quotation, Charlemagne seemed to take both his religion and his kingship seriously.
 
     “Be it known, therefore, to you, devoted and acceptable to God, that we, together with our faithful, have deemed it expedient that the bishoprics and monasteries intrusted [sic.] by the favor of Christ to our control, in addition to the order of monastic life and the relationships of holy religions, should be zealous also in the cherishing of letters, and in teaching those who by the gift of God are able to learn, according as each has capacity. So that, just as the observance of the rule adds order and grace to the integrity of morals, so also zeal in teaching and learning may do the same for sentences, and to the end that those who wish to please God by living rightly should not fail to please Him also by speaking correctly. For it is written, ‘Either from thy words thou shall be justified or from thy words thou shalt be condemned’ [Matt., xii. 37]. Although right conduct may be better than knowledge, nevertheless knowledge goes before conduct.”*
 
Speaking correctly probably does not mean speaking with political correctness though one might guess that Charlemagne, with all the power at his fingertips, probably had little tolerance for those who wavered from the “norms” of his own eighth- and ninth-century times. But like anyone at the top of an organization, he probably also had little tolerance for gibberish; thus, his emphasis on the teaching of “letters.”
 
Centuries after Charlemagne wrote to the abbot we still face similar questions about the nature and purpose of education. Is it related to conduct? Should it be related to conduct? Does it affect conduct?
 
Have any questions about that last sentence of the letter? (“Although right conduct may be better than knowledge, nevertheless knowledge goes before conduct”) Your first question: “Who’s to judge what ‘right conduct’ means?” Your second question: “What is the relationship between knowledge and conduct?” That leads to your third question: “What is the purpose of education?”
 
Are you a Floydian (Pink Floyd), believing, as the lyrics of “Another Brick in the Wall” suggest, that “We don’t need no education”? Do you think education is simply a matter of inducing conformity (“another brick in the wall”) to the observance of rules that “adds order and grace to the integrity of morals?” In a secular society, many might believe that education should have nothing to do with adding order and grace to the integrity of morals; many, in fact, might think there is no moral system that applies to the public in general. In a time of situation ethics, few would be willing to accept the overriding rules of any emperor or group of education oligarchs. Nevertheless, almost everyone has probably experienced some pressure to conform and almost everyone recognizes behavior and thinking that seems not to fit an “acceptable pattern.”
 
From the perspective of the Pink Floyd song, education can be a stifling infusion of conformity in thought and word. Cemented like arranged bricks, some will always fit into an acceptable social pattern and conform to a rather rigid “morality” or code of conduct. Some will also communicate in “acceptable ways.” But even the most timid of us sometimes have the temerity to think on our own and break the wall of conformity. Add to our personal dilemma between conforming or not conforming the role that learning “letters” might play in either restricting or freeing our personal expressions. We live in an age when any statement of ours can be used either for or against us.
 
A millennium and a century after Charlemagne wrote to the abbot, Harvey Rice published Nature and Culture.** Harvey advocated for state and local departments that would oversee education:
 
     “In order to secure…the elevation and social equality [of students], every State in the Union should be required to maintain an efficient system of common schools, in which all instruction should be given in the English language, and the schools made accessible to all classes of youth, and be "good enough for the richest, and cheap enough for the poorest. In order to effect this, the system should recognize the theory as an equitable principle, that the property of the State is bound to educate the youth of the State” (p. 72).   
 
Harvey wrote this at the end of the nineteenth century, a time before the state and federal governments formalized agencies of education and at a time before the country moved from a mostly agrarian society to an urban one. He also advocated for “practical,” and not “fanciful,” knowledge. As we struggle today to balance individuality with conformity, so Harvey struggled. He wanted not only to encourage students in their talents, but also to consider them “children of the state.” Sounds a bit like education in the now defunct Soviet Union, doesn’t it? Confused? So was Harvey, and so are many who think about education.
 
Harvey would probably not consider Pink Floyd the Prophet of Education, but Harvey gave, in the context of his proposal for state education departments and long before “Another Brick in the Wall,” his own Floydian warning:
 
     “It is doubtless true that educators have already become a power in the land. Of this fact they seem to be aware, and the danger is that their influence may be subordinated to the uses of political aspirants. Every educator has a right, of course, to express his own individual opinions; but he certainly has not the right to employ educational instrumentalities to promote the interests of a selfish partisanship, either in State or Church. Whenever it is attempted to sow "tares" of this kind among the wheat, it is to be hoped that an indignant public sentiment will eradicate them with an unsparing hand” (p. 69).
 
Knowledge and conduct in the context of a formal education for the “masses” is as yet an unresolved problem. Should we teach in a manner that shapes thinking and behavior? How does that differ from propaganda? Are there kinds of knowledge that everyone in a particular society should know? Given your own background, you probably have an opinion derived from the dilemma between choosing individuality and conformity.
 
Pink Floyd OR Charlemagne? Pink Floyd OR Harvey Rice? Pink Floyd AND Harvey Rice?
 
 
*Letter from Charles (Charlemagne), King of the Franks and Lombards and Patrician of the Romans to Abbot Baugulf sent sometime between 780 and 800. Text in Monumenta Germaniæ Historica, Leges (Boretius ed.), Vol. I., No. 29, pp. 78-79. Adapted from translation by Dana C. Munro in Univ. of Pa. Translations and Reprints, Vol. VI., No. 5, pp. 12-14. Available online at Gutenberg.org.
 
** Rice, Harvey, Nature and Culture, Second Ed., Lee and Shepard Publishers, Boston, 1890. Available online at Gutenberg.org.

I had a college friend who drove to visit me during the summer. He called from a pay phone (a land line phone that required a deposit of coins to make a call—for those who only know cell phones) to ask for directions. I said, “Tell me where you are, so I can meet you.”
 
He, not thinking anything about the significance of his question to those around him, asked, “Hey, can anyone tell me where I am?”
 
He was in Tom’s Bar.
 
We’ve evolved to know the importance of a “where” and how, when our brains are healthy, to keep track of our physical relationship to it. In our shared humanity, we can even tell others where they are. But with proliferating GPS technologies, we have become spoiled by navigation systems and computers and isolated from one another. Even our smart phones make us geographically lazy and isolated. Lose something? There’s an app somewhere that helps you find it. Lost in a city? Another app. Want to keep track of your car’s movements? After your first visit to concert venue, you can use your car’s navigation system to retrace your path to the hotel. It’s almost as though we don’t need our brains for anything other than obeying the navigation system’s instructions. But deep within our grey matter lie the secrets of place.
 
In 1971 John O’Keefe discovered place cells, and then in 2005 Edvard and May-Britt Moser discovered grid cells, all three sharing the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Now researchers Dun Mao, Steffen Kandler, Vincent Bonin, and Bruce McNaughton have added another piece to an as yet not complete puzzle of how we know where we are.* They have found that neurons in the resplenial cortex also play a role in spatial understanding. I suspect we’re not done yet. Surely, information from all the senses passes through some sort of neuronal detection and orientation system that involves different, if not all, parts of the brain.
 
Take smell, for example. Close your eyes and have someone drive you around town. The smell of bread? Probably passing the bakery. You don’t need to see it to know where you are. Or touch. Walk on sands. Most likely you’re on a beach—though there are, of course, other deposits of sands, such as kames, drumlins, and point bar deposits. Hearing? You don’t have to have open eyes to know when you are standing by a passing train or at the pool where kids are frolicking and splashing.
 
Seems that the whole brain is somehow wired to know place. So, for some this might be hard to believe, but your navigation system can fail, yet you don’t have to be lost. You have a brain designed to tell you where you are. And even if that seems to fail you, you can always do what people used to do before being isolated by technology. You can walk into a bar in a strange town and say, "Hey, where am I?”

Soon there might not be anyone--not even people on cell phones as they drink in a bar--that see either irony or humor in the question. 
 
* https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-08-spatial-memorynew-brain-region-involved.html

Two senior citizens, now both deceased, went to see the displays at Cape Kennedy some thirty or so years after Neil Armstrong stepped into moon dust. As they entered the Saturn V building to see the rocket, now separated into its component stages and set horizontally on supporting legs, their jaws dropped and eyes opened wide. One said, “I didn’t know it was this big. It looked like a pencil on TV.”
 
An understandable reaction: Most TVs at the time were black-and-white, rather small; and, because “rabbit-ear” and chimney antennae, sometimes enhanced with aluminum foil in artful designs in an age before cable and satellite dishes, provided grainy reception, many viewers didn’t quite understand what was required to launch three men toward the moon. A Saturn V on a 16-inch black-and-white screen would certainly have appeared no larger than a pencil. Standing beneath the giant rocket and looking up, the senior citizens were awestruck by its size.
 
Appearances are governed by perspectives. We see as our position allows us to see.
 
We are amazed by big things when we encounter them firsthand. Take Patagotitan mayoram, a dinosaur discovered in Patagonia: Seventy feet long and a mass equivalent to ten large African elephants. Some 100 million years ago this creature probably had few enemies once it reached its adult stage. Standing beside it, we feel small. If Jim Croce were around to compose a song at the time, he would have included Patagotitan mayoram as one “you don’t mess around with.” Stepping a the titanosaur’s tail would be equivalent to stepping on Superman’s cape.
 
The Sun is a big object, nearly 900,000 miles in diameter. With a diameter of only 8,000 miles, Earth is tiny by comparison. One could, the astronomers tell us, put over 300,000 Earths inside the Sun. Yet, there are other suns out there that dwarf ours, some into which one could put more than 300,000 suns like ours.
 
Why? Why do you think big rockets, dinosaurs, and suns capture our amazement? Are they reminders of our limitations, not just physical limitations, but rather also of our knowledge and mental capacities. It’s tough enough, for example, to imagine going around an object as big as our Sun. What could one’s brain do with Antares, a sun about 700 times our sun’s diameter?
 
When we stand beside a Saturn V or beside the reassembled bones of Patagotitan majoram, we have a perspective we can use to form a relationship between our size and something big. We get the same kind of perspective from a mountaintop as we look down, and from the mountain base as we look up. No doubt, first time visitors to cities with skyscrapers cast those wide-eyed glances upward in the same amazement.
 
And then there are those nagging little problems we face every day. Big to us individually, but small to outsiders: Titanosuars from the distant past looking down on creatures not much larger than their droppings, astronauts looking down from atop a rocket more than a football field tall, and, who knows, aliens looking at us from a planet circling distant gigantic Antares. Maybe we are in awe of big things because they give us a perspective on ostensibly big things. Maybe our big problems are only ostensible. Appearances are governed by perspectives. Perspectives derive from position. Put your eyes in the head of a long-necked dinosaur, inside an Apollo capsule orbiting the moon, or on a distant planet. Are the nagging problems really big?
 
I know. I should realize, you say, that just having a different perspective doesn’t make the nagging problems go away. You’re right. But a different perspective probably won’t make matters worse, and viewed from something larger or beside something larger, everything seems smaller.

I had a friend who made canoes. Once he offered an outing in a canoe to two gentlemen who were visiting from countries on the continent where canoes were invented thousands of years ago. They entered the canoe and sat facing each other to my friend’s amusement.
 
Put two people face to face in a canoe. Give them oars. They might be in the same boat, but where do they go? Lots of paddling to go nowhere in a rotating canoe.
 
Put two pundits, one from the Left and the other from the Right in a TV studio. They are like people facing each other in a canoe. Lots of talking to get nowhere.
 
In some studios, people do face the same direction, but they are usually people from the Left paddling only on the left side of the canoe or people from the Right paddling only on the right side of the canoe. Such a canoe simply moves in a circle and ends where it started. How rare is it to see people facing the same direction with some paddling on the left side while others paddle on the right side of the canoe? Goodness! That would move the boat in a straight line to a different place.
 
The next time you argue with someone, ask yourself whether or not you are both facing each other in a canoe of disagreement. 

Little Miss Muffett
Sat on a tuffet
Eating her curds and whey.
Along came a nanoscale machine with biomedical applications
That sat down beside her
And chased a tumor she was growing away.
 
Yes, it might be possible within a decade or so to place a machine the size of a cell in the human body, specifically, for attacking a tumor or for enhancing healing. That’s both good news and scary news. First, the good news: Dr. Jinyao Tang says, “This technology is hugely important and is going to have a very big impact. It will be used to treat disease and to monitor health. It has been speculated about in science fiction for a long time and soon it will be a reality.”* What Tang and others have been working on might be called “synthetic light-seeking nanorobots.” Tang’s nanorobots can turn either toward or away from light, and they are made from silicon and titanium oxide shaped into nanowire and then further shaped into a “nanotree” of tiny bristles. Each of these is a light sensor.
 
Second, the bad news: It’s virtually impossible to keep the technology out of the hands of bad guys. So, there you are, sitting on your tuffet, eating your curds and whey protein powder, and along comes a nanorobot with bad intentions, a critter too small to detect set upon you by a bad guy.
 
In the modern world, no macroplace is safe from bad guys. Soon, no microplace will be safe. Our only hope is to convert bad guys with bad intentions into good guys with good intentions.
 
* Hong Kong University Publications: Belletin, March 2017, Vol. 18, No. 2.

Here’s a list. Read through it without any expectations. Then, as they say, “We’ll talk.”

1. Fixsen, D.J., et al., The cosmic microwave background spectrum from the full COBE FIRAS data set, The Astrophysical Journal, 1996.
2. Zhou, Bo O., et al., Bone marrow adipocytes promote the regeneration of stem cells and haematopoiesis by secreting SCF, Nature Cell Biology, 2017.
3. Darr, Jawwad A., et al., Continuous hydrothermal synthesis of inorganic nanoparticles: Applications and future directions, Chemical Review, 2017.

 
Not one of these studies will change the world by itself. You will still need to buy bread, milk, and eggs. You will still have to go to work, rear kids, pay the bills. But in the background of human civilization, there are those who see some significance in these detailed studies. They believe they can reveal something that will eventually lead to a better world, maybe not immediately, but sometime, possibly long after they are gone. Sure, publishing is a required practice among academics, but researchers choose research topics because they believe they are onto something important, if only important in their fields of study.

And then there are the terrorists, the dictators, and the anarchists. Like you, they might not be interested in the specifics of the topics in the list. But there is probably a major difference in the disinterests. You are willing to let the process of research continue in all directions because there is a chance that one of these studies will lead to a breakthrough in either understanding or useful practices. Maybe, for example, the study of bone marrow adipocytes will lead eventually to an elimination of bone cancer; maybe the study by Darr and others will lead to the discovery of how life formed in an abiotic early Earth or on some distant world, and maybe the examination of data from the COBE satellite will lead to an understanding of creation. We don’t know at this time, but possibly down the road of further research we or our children will know.

The crime against humanity that the World Court should prosecute is that by anyone who threatens curiosity. A threat, for example, by an oligarchy or dictator against a civilized nation whose denizens include those doing research into matters that might lead to understanding or improvement of the human condition, is an attack on hope and purpose. Without either, we humans are somewhat desperate creatures.

That one country’s leaders threaten another country’s citizens isn’t in an interconnected world a limited threat. It’s a threat against the future. Those who work to find cures, those who work to develop useful technologies, those who work to pave the way for greater understanding are all threatened by fanatics with the power to destroy. 

In self-obsession, those who threaten condemn their own offspring to a life with discoveries never made, cures never found, and technologies never developed. But, of course, self-obsession, hatred, and short-sightedness prevent long-term vision. That there are cell researchers in the Middle East, physicists in China and India, chemists in America, and epidemiologists in western African countries seems to mean little to those who threaten the facilities and lives of people going about the business of furthering that which might diminish the harshness of life. Throughout the civilized world there are people whose efforts might just lead to an overall improvement in the human condition. No one knows which of those researchers will discover that which will enhance life.
Destruction that derives from self-obsession is a chief threat not only to individuals, but also to the species.

What will future Iranians gain from their country's constant call for the destruction of Israel? What will future N. Koreans gain from their dictator's call for the destruction of the USA? What will anyone gain from wanton destruction of the West by terrorists? You, of course, understand the nature of the threat, that a threat in the present is a threat to the future. Those who threaten can't see the full consequences of their threats and actions.   

The story of Thales’ prediction of a solar eclipse in 585 BCE might be apocryphal. I don’t know. Thales’ reputation as one of the first scientists might suggest a bit of truth in the tale.
 
The sixth century before Christ is a long time and many eclipses ago. We know that since Thales walked around Miletus a number of eclipses have been associated with human belief and behavior, mostly of the kind associated with religious fervor and apocalyptic fear. An eclipse of 1133 appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle this way:
           
          “Men were greatly wonder-stricken and were affrighted and said that a great thing should come thereafter.”
 
The “great thing”? King Henry II kicked the bucket that year. Coincidence? In the minds of the uninformed, “I think not.”
 
One might think that after Thales and others predicted eclipses on the basis of computations that the phenomenon of the moon’s temporarily blocking the sun’s light would be a HO-HUM experience for twenty-first century denizens. But, alas, no. There are still those who panic at the thought and those who believe such occurrences portend dire consequences or great personal affirmations.
 
What are we doing in schools that we have so many bereft of knowledge about our world, that there are still people who think—even after seeing a neighboring spherical moon and sun—that Earth is flat. How many twist their logic however they wish to demonstrate its flatness? How many still believe stars are “heavenly” bodies of astrological influence?
 
Remember Marshall Applewhite’s cult called Heaven’s Gate? The members of that cult were convinced in 1997 that Comet Hale-Bopp was coming to take them to who-knows-where. They committed group suicide.  Such is the nature of humans. It doesn’t seem to matter what we learn about the physical world, that comets, for example, are mostly just dirty balls of ice and gases, that their “tails” are gases excited and blown off by the solar wind always extended on the side of the comet opposite to that facing the sun. Ignorance isn’t just bliss; for Heaven’s Gate it was suicidal.
 
Understanding natural phenomena and processes will always be a challenge. No one can “know it all,” and the natural world still holds some mysteries. But the physical world, thanks to the Higgs Boson, is our home. And just as you can navigate to the sink for a drink in the darkness because you mentally mapped your apartment or home, you need to be able to map and navigate your world. Moving from carpet to hardwood floor without tripping or moving through doorways instead of bumping into walls is what we do because we understand our “ personal home world.” A lack of knowledge about the physical world and ordinary natural phenomena will surely lead to tripping or bumping.
 
Numerous people will look to the skies for some sign of whatever, things that affirm their beliefs or things that serve as mute prophets. Such people frame their lives by events that usually turn out to be “uneventful.” The moon’s shadow appears to have been such an uneventful event for our ancestors, and it appears to be an uneventful event for our contemporaries. And ignorance of eclipses extends to ignorance of the electromagnetic spectrum, to ignorance of short wave energy that can burn the retinas of direct onlookers. Eclipses come and go. Eclipses of the mind seem to be here to stay. Uneventful events will become “events” over and over and over…  
 
This place, this Earth, this universe: This is your home. It will never be completely illuminated, but if you know it well enough, you’ll get by all right even in its temporary shadows.

If you read the homepage of this site, you know that I emphasize the importance of place, saying that it is primary. It is the context of our behavior and most likely the context for many of our thoughts. And, of course, there’s that uncuttable Gordian Knot: You’ve never been outside place. We don’t exist without “place.” We are also constituents of place: Wherever we are, we become part of its temporary makeup and many times part of its long-term makeup. It’s difficult to separate person from place, for example, Napoleon from Waterloo, Kennedy from Dallas, Custer from the Little Big Horn, and Christ from Calvary.
 
We recognize “anomalous” behavior in the context of place: Moshing in a monastery, screaming in a spa, handfeeding haute cuisine in a five-star restaurant, and examples you recognize from experience. When we walk into a place, we either understand appropriate behavior or we don’t. It’s the ultimate social Either/Or because those who “understand” such behavior rarely or never accept alternatives. Wearing old jeans to the country club is definitely taboo; wearing a taffeta tuxedo to a minor league baseball game is clownish.
 
Observe how you conform to places: Office buildings, houses of worship, public parks, five-star hotels, and highways. You’ve spent your life learning behavior appropriate to place. Generally, you understand place’s control over behavior. Maybe, on occasion, you’ve tested the water of anomalous behavior, but finding it at times too hot or too cold to continue wading deeper, you’ve decided to “be appropriate,” that is, “to act appropriately.” Or maybe, like those whose names are associated “forever” with the changing of a place, you have left your indelible mark, and place will thereafter be associated with “that crazy person,” "that insightful person," or, hopefully not, "that tragic person."
 
We seemed to be obsessed also with two views about place: We want to preserve it or change it. Tour guides extoll the past of place; developers extoll the future of place. I’ll wager you have both views, not of the same place, of course, but of different places. Both views, however, require concerted efforts for practical fulfillment.
 
Consider, then, how much energy you put into acting appropriately or inappropriately and in maintaining or in replacing. Go ahead; consider your behaviors, views, and plans. Find some place to ponder place.