Seems to be two fundamental kinds of human connectivity: Cohesive relationships that tie like to like, and adhesive ones that stick opposites together for a common good. Nothing wrong with cohesion much of the time, but if the cohesiveness centers on pure emotion, it eventually becomes exclusive. Adhesion is by its very nature inclusive.
 
Now, I could give examples from the political world and political thinking, but just by mentioning the word political, I believe I have started your mental engine. When people gather for an emotionally charged political cause, they have a tendency to exclude those whose motivations differ. Enough said about political cohesiveness, except to add that a bit of adhesion sticks unlike substances together.
 
The problem is finding the right tape, something that effectively binds different materials for a common good, much the way one uses adhesive bandages to heal a wound. That problem is exacerbated by any refusal to look for, find, and then acquire and apply such tape. It’s like saying, “The wound will heal itself.”
 
And wounds can self heal, but they take longer to heal when they lie unshielded from further damage. “I keep bumping this cut and reopening part of it. I know beneath the scab there will be some scar.” Adhesive bandaging, even though it comprises something unlike the wounded skin, helps. Amazing, isn’t it? Some totally foreign material helps to heal the wound.
 
Even if the use of an adhesive bandage is only temporary, it allows for healing. Protected by something quite different in makeup, the wounded area undergoes a renewal that prepares it for once again facing a world of opposites, a contusive environment.
 
Maybe we should all look for a little adhesive. We know we are all susceptible to cuts (even ideological ones), but sticking to that which differs seems to expedite healing.

They are all gone now, even the survivors. I suppose nary a person is unaware of the Titanic’s sinking. Some, especially college students who have to read “The Wreck of the Deutschland” by Gerard Manly Hopkins, are aware of the 1866 shipwreck. Few are probably aware of the sinking of the Sultana in the Mississippi River at the end of the Civil War.
 
Fourteen hundred ninety-six people died on the Titanic. As many as 1,800 died on the Sultana, a sidewheeler loaded with Union soldiers eager to return to their homes. The Sultana’s boilers exploded while the overcrowded riverboat made its way northward on a swift and flooding river. Most of the men who died had been prisoners of war and were too weak to fight the current or to escape the burning ship.
 
They are all gone now, gone in a brief moment on a fluid place. But aren’t all places “fluid”? Certainly, we recognize our lives are always on some current, always bouncing on some waves, and always near dangerous shoals or over great depths. Traveling on the seas and rivers of life is a risky venture at best. Shipwrecks are common.
 
Is that the reason that we are advised to “keep a sharp lookout”? Is there a crow’s nest on your personal vessel, one that gives you a vantage point to see a bit over the horizon? The horizon. When one lives on a round planet, there is that barrier to our seeing. We know that something lies beyond, but we are never sure exactly what. In our attempt to see our own destiny, we climb various masts to see farther. What are they? Philosophies, religious texts, social science analyses, statistics, paranormal predictions (Nostradamus?), and hallucinogenic drugs serve as masts for some. Others might climb different masts.
 
The reality is that you might be able to stretch your horizon a little, but you do only that: stretch it a little. You move it back a bit, but it is still there, and what lies beyond is still a mystery until it is reality. The reality you daily deal with requires that you understand your current position, the durability of your vessel, and, if not exactly what lies over the horizon, at least a sense of what is possible.
 
So, here you are, captain of a vessel. What mistakes to avoid? Aye, Captain. What mistakes indeed? The mistakes that sank the Titanic are well documented, and everyone knows them from books and movies. The SS Deutschland ran aground because the captain didn’t know where he was, and the seas were rough under blizzard conditions. The captain of the Sultana had boiler problems that forced him to make repairs twice. His boat, built to ferry 376 people, had almost 2,500 on board plus cargo; it was, in short, overloaded, and it was struggling against floodwater flow.
 
Now, Captain, look at your own vessel. As you sail toward the horizon, are you aware that you travel in a cold sea toward shifting islands you cannot see because you left the binoculars back in port, and from the crow’s nest you can’t pierce the distant darkness? Are you aware of your current position? After all, knowing that is important because you can’t get to “there” without knowing the location of “here.” Or in vanity that never recognizes limitations or cracked boilers, do you steam against a strong and relentless current on an overloaded vessel? 

Do you exist on a level that has no identifiers? Or are you, like some traveler’s suitcase, covered with appliques and stickers that indicate not only where you have been, but also how the places of your life identify you? Even the most stay-at-home people among us are travelers of sorts, doing that traveling through what we have read or observed or through what others have taught or told us.
 
The question is as old as philosophy and religion. How do we identify ourselves as individuals when we are enveloped by others and possibly an Other (some Universal Principle, Infinite Being, or Being Itself)? To what level of simplicity can we reduce ourselves, especially in light of all those places whose stickers mark us?
 
Mystics might offer clues to simplification, but short of our own mystical experience we have no way of immersing ourselves in their mysticism. If we do achieve that immersion, doesn’t it just become another suitcase sticker? You and I do not exist in some definable vacuum. Like the universe filled with undetectable Dark Matter we are filled with much that is indefinable and often, if not always, undetectable. Can you and I see inside a closed suitcase?
 
If you and I have difficulty determining our “pure essence,” can we determine it for others? No, of course not. Yet, daily most of us believe we can see what is inside the suitcases of those around us. We simply look at the stickers on the baggage of their lives and use those indicators to tell us what’s inside.

We recognize more than we know. Yes, there is a difference. Take our sense of what it means to be courageous. What is courage?
 
Don’t worry if you can’t define the word beyond a Merriam-Webster version of its meaning. Here’s that version if you’re interested: “the ability to do something that you know is difficult or dangerous” or “mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty.” See, even the lexicographers have difficulty, so they give us two definitions. For the folks at Merriam-Webster courage is both ability and a type of strength. You want to take a stab at the definition? Go ahead. I’ll give you a few moments…
 
Nothing? Don’t care? Who cares? Actually, the definition of courage isn’t my focus. I would rather center on what your mind does when it encounters courage (assuming that there is such a phenomenon). You recognize it even in the absence of a clear definition. Again, don’t worry. You’re not the first to run into the wall between recognition and knowledge, and you could get around this whole matter by simply defining recognition as knowledge. The word does contain cognition, which our friendly lexicographers define as “conscious mental activities: the activities of thinking, understanding, learning, and remembering.” Re simply means “back.”
 
Plato broaches the subject of courage in Laches, a book in which Socrates reveals our lack of knowledge. Yes, OUR lack of knowledge. Socrates discusses courage with Laches and Nicias, and demonstrates the incompleteness of their definitions of courage. But maybe almost any intangible is incompletely known though fully recognized: Love, hate, folly, and even wisdom.
 
In our quest for knowledge we are often left with only our ability to recognize. Yes, you can recognize courage, but that holds as long as you don’t have to define it.

Has it always been this way? Give us some bread (panem) and some entertainment (circenses, circuses), and we’ll be happy?
 
Not everyone, of course, thinks a full belly and distraction are the only avenues to happiness. There are alternatives, and they differ for each of us. Nevertheless, the two words that Juvenal linked together as keys for a Roman emperor to keep his people happy appear to apply to our times. If you are a leader and you want your charges to be happy, at a minimum give them bread and entertainment.
 
That doesn’t speak much for the temperament of the majority of us—and maybe it doesn’t say anything about the majority of us. But on the surface, bread and entertainment are the extremes of human needs and desires, and many people do seem to be motivated by those two extremes. So, we get the constant advice of “moderation,” of balancing ourselves between need and want.
 
There is, in fact, a good reason for that balance (as hard as it might be to achieve). Moderation between need and want frees us from manipulation by those who can provide both. Moderation is the mark of an individual under self-control.
 
It isn’t, of course, a bread of wheat or a circus of dancing elephants that subdues us like the faithful and obedient subjects of an emperor or imperious oligarchy. We need to moderate, also, the “food for thought” that fills our “tables” daily and the manipulation of emotions that motivates us to act in unison.
 
Bread and entertainment can enslave our minds.

If one is alive, then there’s a possibility that one will suffer either an injury or death. That’s the reality of this planet, and it’s been the reality for over 3.8 billion years, that is, for as long as the planet has supported life. Individual death and species extinction are the way of the world. Why should I tell you this?
 
I recently read a statement online that is attributed to a disgruntled person concerned about his own demise after the recent presidential election: “I’m going to die from climate change. You and your friends let this happen, which is going to cut 40 years off my life expectancy.” Now, I’m not going to argue against the speaker’s feelings. They were, no doubt, genuine. The guy, speaking at a DNC post election meeting, is clearly concerned that climate change will kill him. But there are some realities he needs to consider.
 
According to David M. Raup,* the fossil record indicates that on average a species survives for about four million years. The history of life also suggests that on average about ten species become extinct yearly (108).  
 
Let’s take the average extinction rate and run with it for a moment. Ten species extinctions per year would mean that 38 billion species have kicked the bucket! That’s a bunch of dying out. Of course, new species emerge; that’s the reason we might currently share this planet with anywhere between four and 40 million other species. No one knows how many species have come and gone, just as no one knows the exact number of species alive today, but the number is, by any reasonable estimate, big. So, there are many species from which to pick ten losers, ten that find this year to be their last. “Goodbye, Unlucky Ten. You’ve had your run. Hello, Lucky New Species, hope you make it through the next four million years. But you newcomers should be aware that we’re talking averages here, not absolutes. Nevertheless, enjoy your stay because four million years go by like—well, just ask those ten whose tenure was revoked.”  
 
A background extinction rate for species means nothing to the individual members of that species, of course. Individuals come and go in a blink, even for the long-lived bristle cone pines, the redwoods, sharks, and turtles. The background rate also means nothing in the context of the big extinction events. There have been five of those at least—possibly six if we think we are in the midst of another. The one at the end of the Permian Period was so significant that it has been called the Great Dying. The famous one at the end of the Cretaceous Period knocked off all the dinosaur species—all of them, no exceptions unless you count the birds as their progeny.
 
And now the guy worried about being killed by climate change: Just how will that work? Regardless of whether or not humans are contributing to a warming trend, we should all realize that climates have always undergone changes for a variety of causes. Think, for example, about the “Ice Age”—really a sequence of cooling and warming trends over about the last two million years. The ice came and went. Earth cooled and warmed. People weren’t involved in the cycles of cooling and warming until about 200,000 years ago, and the use of carbon-dioxide-releasing fire probably goes back no more than to our relative Neandertal species who lived 500,000 years ago. Lots of individuals kicked the bucket in the interim, and many species went extinct because of natural phenomena that had nothing to do with people.
 
Again, back to the guy’s concerns. He probably won’t live to see warming to the degree that occurred 55 million years ago. Earth was hot back then, really hot. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was toasty. And species who loved the cold probably—no, make that “without question”—went extinct. So, what in climate change is going to kill the guy? What is worth his anxiety? Does he think the rise of the oceans, a rise that has been in progress since the last continental ice sheets melted eight to twelve thousand years ago, will inundate him? Will he suffocate in carbon dioxide while plants thrive?
 
Dying from climate change is possible, but picture the scenario or the newspaper story: “Ocean rises three mm this year. Man trying to run up the beach is caught by the water and drowned.”
 
Okay, you want to pose stronger hurricanes or tornadoes or longer droughts as lethal consequences of climate change. “Look at the American Southwest’s current long drought,” you say. You know those events are local or regional, don’t you? Remember “We Are the World” sung to raise money for people in droughty Ethiopia? Before you stockpile a millennium’s worth of food and water, realize that even when it is short term, climate change is a long, complex, and fluctuating process. The American Southwest has seen centuries-long droughts before; just ask the Pueblo.
 
So, let’s think about extinction a little. We don’t even know the relationships among the physical players in the game of extinction that wiped out 38 billion species. Carbon dioxide? Methane? Comet impact? Volcanism? Orogeny? Sea level? Viruses and bacteria? Genetic penchant? Mitochondrial collapse? Whatever. Extinction is inevitable, just as death is inevitable for individuals. But those now lucky enough to inhabit the planet after so many predecessors have died should cut back on anxiety about the inevitable. No species beats the odds of extinction.
 
Again, I empathize with the guy worried about his demise at the hand of climate change. He’s been told that “the” climate is changing, whereas, in fact, climates have always changed and changed back to what they were before they changed. For individuals and species alike such change can be devastating. Someone should explain to him that even if humans had never burned a lump of coal or gallon of oil, some natural phenomenon or phenomena would alter climates.
 
So, Earth’s surface temperatures appear to be warming. What if the human contribution to warmer temperatures actually meant a postponement of another natural cycle of cooling (and freezing)? Regardless of what we do or don’t do, someone’s going to die cold or hot, and if this year is average, we’ll all say goodbye to some ten other Earthling species—that is, if we don’t succumb first.
 
 
*Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck (1991), W.W. Norton & Company.

Okay, this is admittedly an ad. On November 11, football great Ray Lewis and emotional management specialist Dr. Christian Conte launch their podcast called Tackling Life. The two will interview athletes and coaches who have encountered and overcome obstacles. Here's a link: http://www.tacklinglifepodcast.com/     It should be inspirational and thought-provoking. It will not be an ordinary talk show. Lewis is a renowned motivational speaker, and Dr. Conte is an internationally recognized author, speaker, and psychologist. Lewis and Conte first linked up in their TV show Coaching Bad. Dr. Conte also puts out daily one-minute podcasts on his website http://www.drchristianconte.com , and he posts some of my blogs alongside his own teaching stories. The one-minute podcasts are broadcast over hundreds of AM radio stations, also. 

A child inclined to throw temper tantrums throws them often. Being around such a child is like standing in a rainforest waiting for the rain. You know that just about every afternoon the rain will fall, probably between two and four o’clock and maybe, on occasion, in the early evening or even at night. Point is, the rainfall is inevitable and periodic in certain seasons or until the climate changes and so are the tantrums until the child outgrows them.
 
Hydrologists label floods according to their probable frequency or periodicity. Great floods occur less frequently than small floods, and that leads to classifications, such as “five-year flood,” “ten-year flood,” “100-year flood,” and on through periods of longer duration. The frequency is tied to the probability and is based on historic or records where they are available or on geologic detective work.
 
A five-hundred-year flood can devastate farms and buildings and cause injury and death. Unfortunately for victims, getting one 500-year flood doesn’t eliminate the possibility of a recurrence for 500 years. Two such floods could occur in consecutive years, but another one might not occur for a 1,000 years or more.
 
Between floods of similar dimension, people living on a floodplain wait, not knowing when the next flood will occur, but having an approximation of when it will.
 
Our lives are often marked by waiting times. We know there’s inevitability to certain occurrences, but we have only approximations to guide us. Of course, that engenders a bit of anxiety in some people. A temper tantrum or a flood is coming. You probably can’t stop either, and you can’t precisely predict the moment of arrival. You simply go on waiting, even if not consciously.
 
Waiting times vary with types of events, of course, and not all events have an anticipated intensity. All waiting times for natural phenomena like floods, earthquakes, major storms, and volcanic eruptions are averages. Hurricane Floyd caused a 500-year flood in 1999. In 2016 Hurricane Matthew appears to have matched Floyd’s intensity. Two 500-year floods within two decades: People along the Tar River in North Carolina had recovered from Floyd only to be inundated by Matthew. What are the chances? 
 
The intensity of the events as marked in probable frequency is irrelevant here. What is relevant is that like all of us, you have waiting times for events both pleasant an unpleasant, events both mild and intense, events both innocuous and catastrophic. 
 
What are the events you expect, if not in daily consciousness, then in some background of anticipation or anxiety? How have you ranked them according to their intensity? Are we talking about tantrums, floods, or hurricanes? What periodic event do you await? And how long is the waiting time?

Somehow, we have a tendency to see those we stereotype as 2D figures. They are, as far as we are concerned, flat figures, something on the order of what cave artists drew 20,000 years ago. No depth in the painting. No sense of 3D.
 
We are all familiar with perspective in art. Think of drawing straight railroad tracks running off into the imagined distance. The 3D effect occurs on a 2D surface, but the mind sees “distance” and a third dimension because of the artist’s use of a vanishing point, orthogonals (parallel lines), and a horizon line.
 
Maybe we should all become Filippo Brunelleschi, the fifteenth-century architect who drew the Baptistery of Florence and then checked his drawing for its ability to capture for the viewer the three dimensions of that building. In a little experiment, he drew the building, put a hole in his canvas, put a hole in a mirror, and looked through the back of the canvas and through the hole in the mirror to compare the mirror’s reflection of his drawing with the actual building he saw through the holes in the canvas and mirror.*
 
As we look at someone we have previously seen only in a flat 2D manner, let’s put the person on an imaginary vanishing point, something like the point that centers Christ at the table in Leonardo DaVinci’s Last Supper fresco. You know that you probably want others to see you in your complex three-dimensional perspective, noting all the nuances of your complex personality. Why shouldn’t you attempt to see others in the same way?
 
Time to start drawing people as 3D entities. Your view of them will become more realistic. After all, you don’t want to be stereotyped as one whose vision of others and the world around you is no more complex than that of an ancient cave artist, do you?  
 
*
​http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=brunelleschi%27s+experiment&view=detailv2&qpvt=brunelleschi%27s+experiment&id=0B90426ECDAE82290A9C635D5165C49228B658F2&selectedIndex=5&ccid=5knWufqQ&simid=607998900232324786&thid=OIP.Me649d6b9fa90268c63af58e79f49237bH0&ajaxhist=0 

Thanks, Shakespeare, for the many insightful lines, such as the one about Henry IV (Part II, Scene iii) in which he is referred to as the glass in which young men dress themselves. The question the line poses for all of us is this: What is the glass in which we dress ourselves?”
 
Who is the model we follow? What is the style of life we emulate? How is our behavior imitative?
 
What’s original in our lives? What’s original in your life?
 
Find yourself looking into a mirror that is, in fact, someone else? Trying to be a reflection of a reflection? Thinking as another thinks?
 
Of course, originality is a problem for all of us, what with there being about 100 billion predecessors. Nevertheless, short of being original, all of us can think about that mirror we use “to dress ourselves.”
 
Try this. Dress that mind and behavior without any cultural mirror for a day. True, you won’t be fashionable in any sense but your own, but you will be “your own mirror.”
 
And then there’s the potential all of us have for being a glass by which others dress themselves. Nice thought, isn’t it? Others, at least some others, might find in you the model to emulate.