How To Be The Best Ever

(If you’re short on time, skip to the bottom for numbered instructions.)

Whoa there!  Slow down a minute.  Have you really considered what you’re doing?

You know who you are.  You’re the one believing that you really do excel at one particular skill.  You’re so confident that you could be the best ever at it, that you are on the verge of totally restructuring your life in order to prove it to the world.

If there’s not one confusing thing about life, there’s another.  Take definitions for a moment.  They can be descriptive or prescriptive.  If you’re like me and strive to always exist in the present, you likely find yourself drawn to descriptive definitions.  If you’re not like me and you prefer to live in a fantasy world, you’re likely drawn to prescriptive definitions.  For example, dictionary.com defines “peace” as “the normal, nonwarring condition of a nation, group of nations, or the world.”  That is a prescriptive definition.  Howard Bloom, crazy thinker that he is, suggests a more descriptive definition.  Starting as a Tabula Rasa, he writes “peace” usually means, “‘Since I’m on top, let’s keep the status quo;’ or ‘Now that I’ve managed to climb on your back, would you please be kind enough to sit still'” (Bloom 265).*

Reading over dictionary.com’s definition is quite comical if it is supposed to be descriptive.  The ‘normal’ condition of the world.  Right.

Back to you, though.  Here you are.  The best ever.   But no one knows it.  We don’t need sources to know what being the best is.  It is simply being better at something than everyone else.  With 20/20 hindsight, let’s see what we can learn by looking at how a couple of people who are arguably the best ever did it.

I’m thinking specifically of Michael Jordan and Lance Armstrong.  If you haven’t watched MJ’s Hall of Fame speech, what you need to know is that it disappointed most people.  Not me.  I took notes.  Here was someone who was the best ever.  How did he do it?  I wanted to know.

Next we have Lance Armstrong.  Even more than MJ, Lance Armstrong solidified his place in history as the best ever.

But we’re talking about you.  So without further ado, here are the instructions.

Instructions for How To Be The Best Ever:

Step 1 –  Forsake everything, literally every other thing in your life if it doesn’t help you become the best ever.

Step 2 –  Believe, really believe that when you finally get the recognition you so desire, it will have been worth it.

*Bloom, Howard K. The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1995. Print.

A Reading’s Surprise

Staring at the small, basic kitchen table that doubled as his computer stand, he just sat.  It wasn’t ideas that he wanted, but help. Was this everything?  Could this really be how life was supposed to play out?

Only moments earlier he had such hope, such expectation.  Now, he only felt resignation and frustration.  “Curse you, World!”

Believe it or not, he was upset because he couldn’t believe what he had just read…about definitions.  That’s right, he had just read that there are apparently at least two different types of definitions from where the defense of an argument can be mounted.  The first being, stipulative definitions or what really should be called creative or inventive definitions.  The second, categorical definitions.

The book stated that categorical definitions differ from stipulative in that they focus on classifying ideas in categories (hence, “categorical”).  For clarity, here is a categorical definition of motorcycling:  one of the many types of transportation available to modern man.  On the other hand, this is a stipulative definition of motorcycling:  the greatest way to travel from one place to another.

No, this just won’t do.  By his thinking, there should just be one type of definition.  There should be only one clean, nice, simple way of making sense of the world.  That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?  That’s the point of defining a concept, right?  The point of a definition is to organize what an individual sees or believes to be into a set of data that can help fulfill life’s potentialities, right?

As if life wasn’t difficult enough, he now had to deal with this new information that even the very tool he had been using to define his reality couldn’t be simplified down to one type of meaning.  How was anyone supposed to get any work done in this madness?!  He must change this.  Life cannot require this level of complexity.

His first task, then, was to get everyone to agree on everything.

Are You Singing?

How can He hear us, if I can’t?

You should understand that I believe that in this world that God created, everything that happens is part of God’s plan.  Everything.  The good, the bad — everything.  How could it not be?  The catch is we, the humans, are always able to change what is happening, to improve it or maybe to take a step back and say, “Hmm, maybe this was a mistake.”  It is an enormous amount of responsibility.

Anyone who knows me knows I love Metallica.  Their music demands to be performed on electric guitars and amplified drums.  I think most would agree that all heavy metal should be amplified.  It’s kind of the nature of the beast.

Anyone who knows me knows I also love classical music.  Classical music (classical meaning ‘the best’) is written for acoustic instruments, and rightly so.  Something magical happens when music is acoustic.  Something so magical, that over the years many have remarked that classical music is surely the voice of God.  I have always liked this metaphor if only because it highlights that music is a universal language.

I’d like to take the metaphor a bit further.  If mankind was created in God’s own image, and music can have the effect of sounding like the voice of God, what about when we sing?  Wouldn’t our “made in God’s image” voices actually sound closer to how God’s voice sounds?  (Assuming of course, that He has a voice.)

I point this out because, again, in my recent visits to a church, I have been perplexed by the changes.  There is an amplified band singing, words are displayed on the screen, no written music is anywhere to be found, and I can hardly hear anyone over the band, save the person standing next to me.  (Great voice, btw.)  It most certainly is not music to my ears.

Worship via music is one of the main reasons I see for going to church.  I have always liked singing in a large group.  I liked it as a kid at church, I liked it in the Air Force on those special occasions, and I like the idea of it now.  I think singing, especially large groups of men singing, is just great.  Doesn’t everyone?

I think I know what is going on.  I bet that over the years, like in all other areas of life, people’s enthusiasm has been waning.  Who wants other people to hear that they can’t sing a note?  It does take some energy to sing, too, and we’re inherently lazy.  So at first the music leader’s volume gets turned up, the thinking being that it might encourage more people to sing if they aren’t afraid of being heard.  Then a band is introduced instead of a piano or organ.  Now we can all pretend that we’re singing, and no one will ever know the difference.  At least that’s how I see it.

As for me, I want people to sing out loud.  I want to sing out loud.  I want to feel the power in the music.  I want to hear the voice of God.  I want guests to visit and feel the inescapable love that is expressed when a group of like-minded people worship with music.

The easy answer is to find another church.  Should this be about easy though?  I don’t know.  I just don’t know.

If I was a pastor, I’d want to hear the congregation sing.  I’d use it like a thermometer.  I think even the most accurate digital thermometer would tell a pastor of churches like I described above, “Meh.  Lukewarm.”

But that’s just me.  What do you think?

Who Killed the New Kids?

“Censorship is murder.”

Too strong?  I thought so at first.  Then again, this was an assignment for college and I wanted a good grade, so I decided to run with it.

The task that lay before me was developing this radical thesis.  So I thought and I thought and I thought.  I asked my housemate what he thought.  So he thought.  Then we both thought.  Here’s the result:  Censorship is murder because I believe that “to be a human, as opposed to all other known life forms, requires an unfettered ability to communicate one’s value (in the form of words, images, or music) to other humans.  And an external restriction of a person’s expression of value is the same as telling them they have no value.  In other words, it is a malicious attempt to end their life.”

It was beautiful.

After developing my thesis, the next assignment was to write about my first experience with censorship.  What I discovered was frightening.  Even now, I am afraid of the implications.

187.  68.  32.  Those are the amounts posters and/or pictures of The New Kids on the Block my cousin Jenny, my sister Kate, and I had on our bedroom walls, respectively, in the summer of 1990.  I feel like I should be embarrassed to admit this.  I would be if I led the bunch.  That I was a distant third clearly showed I was just trying to fit in.

For those of you who don’t recall, The New Kids on the Block were it back then.  Their top single, “Hangin’ Tough” spent 132 weeks, that’s nearly two and a half years, on the Billboard charts.

Despite the New Kids’ success, all was not well in households across America.  Mine was no different.  My memory gets fuzzier by the year, but this much I do remember.  My sister was taking piano lessons.  She was three years older than me.  She was 12, I was 9.  Mrs. Misty Bolton, the wife of our church’s pastor of music, was her piano teacher.  Even a cool lady like her couldn’t see the storm brewing on the horizon.

I can hear the nice, neat, well-timed piano playing now.  Whatever my sister may have lacked in expression, she made up for in crisp playing–just like an older sister to show how its done.

At this point in the story, it’s important that you join me in the room.

You’re already at the front door of the house?  Good.  Open it.  Once you make your way through the front door, you see a hallway to a kitchen table straight ahead.  You discover that what you thought was the right wall of that hallway is actually the left side of the staircase which leads to the second floor and a little balcony.  Turning all the way to your right, you see the room where the piano is.  You know the piano is in the room, not because you see it, but because you can see a reflection of it in the wall sized mirror that hangs opposite it.

This room, unlike any other in the house had a name: the “blue room”.  It was named for its predominant color, beginning with the blue carpet, extending to the blue walls.  The blue carpet was a plush, thick, luscious carpet that incurred my mother’s wrath if it was needlessly tread upon.

“Key-an’t you go around?,” she’d exclaim.  She could be rather vain about carpet.

Do you see me yet?  Good.  Here it comes.

“Mom!  Comeeer.  Misty, I mean, Mrs. Bolton says she’ll teach me to play the New Kids on the Block songs if we buy the book!  Can we?  Pleeeeease?,” my sister begged.

Our mom was no push-over, but it seemed like such a simple request involving learning to play piano didn’t necessitate that kind of begging.  It turned out that no amount of begging could overcome the music snobbery we were about to witness.

“Nnnnoooo, I’m not going to hee-ave you playing that garbage!  It’s bee-ad enough I hee-ave to hear it and see it all dee-ay long as it is.  I will not buy thee-at book for you.  Nice try though.”

Crushed!  Devastated!  If my sister wasn’t crying on the outside, she was on the inside.  Try as they might, my boy arms lacked the strength to lift her out of her misery.

-Fast forward to the next lesson-

Guess who showed up with the sheet music book for the New Kids’ latest album “Step By Step”?  Mrs. Misty Bolton.  This was a bad idea.  She obviously had not spent much time in our house.  Suffice it to say, my mom was not happy.  And so after my mom let Mrs. Baldwin know she wasn’t happy, she made my sister pay for it out of her piddly allowance and then she took the book away and hid it.  No piano of hers was going to play the New Kids’ music, and no piano teacher was going to defy her wishes!!

Well, there you have it.  My first experience with censorship.

What’s that?  You thought I was supposed to be explaining how this experience led me to believe censorship was murder?

But don’t you see?  I just did.  My mother censored the “Step By Step” album.  You still don’t understand?  Okay.  Okay, quick reminder then.  How did the New Kids follow their “Step By Step” album?  Don’t remember?  That’s because the New Kids on the Block never released another original studio album.  By the time those five guys did release another original studio album, they weren’t the New Kids on the Block anymore.  They were NKOTB.  Still not with me?  Fully connecting the dots now– a simple writing assignment in which I was asked to defend my original thesis, that censorship is murder, led me to stumble upon the frightening revelation that the New Kids on the Block died after my mom censored their “Step By Step” album.  Therefore, my mom killed them in an act of what appears to be cold-blooded murder!  This is the same woman who raised me to do the right thing and all these years she’s been hiding this secret!  She, too, must pay for her crime.  And I have to turn her in.  But how do I turn in my own mom??!

I guess, I’ll just have to take it step… by… step.

Sermon Serious

I don’t mind admitting that I was one of the suckers who left the church after I cracked The DaVinci Code.  A decade has passed since then, along with a lot of livin’ and learnin’.  Since I was young, my mantra has been, “Life is funny, I’m serious.”  The older I get, the more I find it to be true.

While it was reading that caused my faith to falter, it has also been reading that has guided me back to faith.  I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to say that in the couple of times that I have been back in a church, I have felt the prodigal son’s father’s arms around me.  I am unable to dive back in devoid of all skepticism, but I’ve seen enough over the years to recognize the simple truth that good people are good people.  And good people are rare.

I can’t help but feel like something is amiss though.  In the time I was away, a shift has taken place.

As I write this, I feel like an old timer longing for a past that probably never existed.  We’re all more than familiar with the rather cliche critique of modern churches, “they are too feel good.”  Maybe, maybe not.  Either way, I’m not interested in joining that chorus.  Instead, what I am interested in musing about is the amount of comedy that has been interjected into sermons.

Comedy in sermons interests me because of the subject matter.  For all communication, save sermons, I believe the speaker’s first step is to recognize his or her audience.  Sermons dealing with ‘the Truth’ are different.  By definition, if one person is going to communicate that they really know the nature of human existence, the audience has the responsibility to adapt to the speaker. The Truth is fixed, it doesn’t bend or change.  It is universal.  On top of that, it simply becomes too difficult to discern why someone is listening and/or why the speaker is popular if the sermon is built around the audience.

Did Jesus of Nazareth ever purposefully try to keep his listener’s attention?  What do you think?  Can you picture Him ever caring about whether the audience felt entertained?  Would Jesus have ever removed some Truth from his message in order for it to meet expectations, or to gain a follower?

I know life was fundamentally different back then.  I get it.  But they killed Him via public execution.  Whoever “they” actually were is irrelevant to this point.  An organized ‘they’ killed Him.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this and I’ve concluded that it would be very difficult to give a sermon today that would incite some group of people to that amount of passion; enough to call for a capital punishment proceeding.

(This is where my respect for Him grows tremendously.)

Let’s say I did develop this sermon.  Could I give it?  Perhaps.

I guess I would have to believe it was the Truth.

How To Use A White Board

(If you’re short on time, skip to the bottom for numbered instructions.)

According to Malcolm X’s autobiography, he constantly scribbled little idea-notes on any and everything all the time.  While I found that part of his personality fascinating, it wasn’t enough to convince me that I should follow suit.  Later, I watched Some Kind of Monster where I saw Metallica using a white board to capture creative impulses before they escape.  It shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that a white board was hanging on my wall within days.

I immediately put it to good use.  Any idea accompanied by a, “This is brilliant!  I need to make sure I don’t forget it!” feeling was recorded on my white board.  I was rather vain about it.  Scratch that, I am rather vain about my white board.

Thinking about Malcolm X’s little notes and Metallica’s colorful white board is always inspiring to me.  Seeing my own white board covered in ideas makes me feel good about myself.  Over the last several years of recording my ideas, however, I’ve come to realize that I like something even more than looking at a white board teeming with my ideas.  Erasing those ideas.

Yes, erasing my ideas.  I would have never guessed this, but in retrospect it makes sense.  Reflect on this for a moment.  What is the point of capturing ideas in writing anyhow?  The point is not to simply write them down.  Nothing magical happens because a good idea is recorded.  Something magical happens, though, when a good idea is acted upon.  I’ll go further and also argue that the same magical something happens when what appeared to be a good idea is permanently discarded.

And whether you’ve acted on a good idea or decided it wasn’t that great, regarding the white board, the end result is the same.  It is erased.

Everything begins as an idea.  *Begins*  If you use a white board to record ideas for later use, when is the last time you erased it?  When is the last time you made decisions about the ideas?  If it’s been a while, you may be misunderstanding how to use a white board.  No worries, that’s why I’m here.  Simply follow the below instructions, and you’ll be in back on track in no time.

Instructions for How to Use a White Board:

Step 1 – Write possibly brilliant idea on it.

Step 2 – Act on idea or Discard idea.

Step 3 (Most Important) – Erase idea.

Blog. How Else Will You Learn What You Like?

Hi there!  My name is Pete Peterson.  I’m a 22 year old college dropout and have been blogging for a week now.  I’m so excited because I already have 15 followers, and none of them are my family or previous friends.  How cool is that?

I guess I should have known that people would follow my blog.  I write well and my posts are funny, smart, clever, dramatic, creative, and most importantly they display–albeit sometimes unconsciously–my desire to make money blogging.

I guess this last trait is really the one that has captured most of my follower’s attention.  I never would have believed how many people know how to make money blogging.  The best part is that they are very helpful.  They’re willing to almost give away the secret.  I know better though, than to expect anyone to give away their golden goose.  It does make sense, then, that they would require a nominal fee to learn the really good stuff.  I’m happy to pay it because I really do want to make money blogging.

We’re all the same, my followers and I.  That’s how I learned that I love to travel.  All of my willing-to-teach-others-how-to-make-money-blogging followers love to travel.  Truthfully, I have never left the home town I grew up in, which is just outside Big City, USA.  Just the same, I figure if all my followers love to travel, I must love to travel.

I can imagine it now.  Endless beaches against a backdrop of snowcapped mountains.  Large trees all around with even larger leaves.  There’s probably fit young women at these locations as well.  With no crummy 9-5 job to worry about, I could finally start wearing my 80s style tank tops every day, or maybe I’d wear no shirt at all.  I’d probably choose to wear sunglasses most of the time, even if it didn’t make sense.  I think I’d also begin to post pictures of myself too.  I’d make sure to always have water in the background somewhere.  I think that would be classy.  Yep, I’m going to love traveling.

It’s exciting, I’ll tell you that.  It’s so exciting, in fact, that I’d like to invite you to follow my blog.  Do you love to travel?  Do you know how to make money blogging?  Then follow me!  The only way to get there is together.

Experience’s Danger

The reason pilots debrief a flight after landing is to see what lessons the experience can offer.  The end goal being to use the lessons learned to improve their performance during the next flight.  A continual striving, as it were.  But, at its core, experience is not an exclusively positive thing.  If left unquestioned, it can have negative consequences too.  Seasoned pilots know this all too well.

I’m talking about the danger in mistaking the current situation to be the same as a past experience.  For pilots, this occurs most when troubleshooting a malfunction.  Pilots have a tendency to enjoy being able to say, “Oh, that’s nothing to worry about, I’ve seen it before.”  However, choosing a course of quickly reaching a conclusion without proper evaluation of the situation can create larger problems down the road.  For pilots in the air, this course, if uninterrupted, leads to death.  While grounded people don’t face immediate death for mistaking “this” for “that”, the result is definitely unpleasant.

Who can’t relate to this lesson?  I’ve had many, many arguments with loved ones that only after they went to great pains to rephrase and re-rephrase their point did I realize, “Hey, while it seemed like they just wanted to re-hash some past grievance, it actually turns out they aren’t thinking about it at all.”  I then experience the wonderful feeling of dumbfounded shame.  All the energy I had been putting into the argument up to that point was misguided.  Instead of devaluing their position and jumping to the conclusion that this was the “same ol’, same ol'”, I should have given them the benefit of the the doubt and really listened.

Ask yourself, “Have I ever actually been hurt because I gave the benefit of the doubt to the other person until more information could be gathered?”  Unlike pilots, who have a strict and short time-table to work with, I have seen no reason to act under the guise that life has a time table.  We can take all the time in the world to hear each other out.  In fact, that might lead to a longer life in the end anyhow.

I can hear a few of you right now, “But that’s the thing… I really don’t have the time to deal with (Insert your favorite combatant).”  Hmm.  Sure.  Okay.  We’ll do it your way then.  Instead of being patient and seeking understanding, which has been proven time and again to result in strengthening relationships (regardless the outcome of that particular discussion), let’s rush to a bad decision.  Come to think of it, I now see why you want to rush to a bad decision.  If I rush to a bad decision, I will then have even more time for even more rushed, bad decisions based on misunderstandings.  Just think about how many bad decisions I’ll be able to make in one lifetime if I hurry!  Sorry, no.  I’ll take my cues from pilots.  If their unique and ongoing relationship with death teaches them to gather all the data before making a decision, rather than forcing the current problem to look like a past experience, then I, too, will  treat every situation as unique until proven otherwise.

What about you?  How will you use this experience?

How To Live Uncensored

(If you’re short on time, skip to the bottom for numbered instructions.)

A professor of mine recently led a classroom discussion on censorship.  I am embarrassed, therefore compelled, to admit that this is a hot-button issue for me.  I cannot stand censorship.  Why should one human being have power over what another human being is exposed to?

Just the same, I can surely see the other side of the story.  Wait, no I can’t.  What is the problem again?  Has there ever been any data to support that uncensored living is problematic?  Sure, there seems to be well established correlations between those who watch violence and those who perpetrate it, and the like.  But causal?

There has to be an identifiable problem before we can start solving it!  What is the problem?!

So this got me thinking.  What, even, is censorship?

Censorship definitions refer us back to the word ‘censor’, which is a noun.  By noun, we mean a person, place or thing.  In this case, a censor is clearly a person.  This is extremely important to the following philosophizing or interpretation of life.  (Why is it important to spell out that a censor is a person?  Because as free and alive men and women, we should want to live uncensored.  Since we don’t right now, we need to know what that would even look like.)  So a censor is another person.  This makes sense because fundamentally censorship really can’t be imposed on oneself.  By definition, a censor is someone who views/hears/reads something, deems it objectionable and then suppresses it.  If I view/hear/read something, I can’t reverse that.  I can’t censor myself.  So we’ve learned something:  The minimum number of humans required to bring forth the concept of censorship is two.

Why is this important?  Because now we’re getting to the heart of the concept.  There must be two people in order for one person to act as a censor.

Furthermore, it seems to me that censorship deals exclusively in the realm of surprise.  As in, people clamor for censorship when they’ve been surprised.  Or the well-intended censor believes if he doesn’t act, the audience will be unpleasantly surprised.  Are you with me?  Taking a page out of history, picture this: a well-tailored family sits down to watch the Ed Sullivan show.  Everything is as it should be.  Then, surprise!  A man humps the air!  This isn’t what they were expecting at all.  Oh, boy.  What are they ever to do?

Well, what did happen?  What did they do?  Maybe some turned off the TV.  Maybe others wrote letters.  Maybe others discussed it.  Maybe others ignored it.

Could the surprise have been avoided?  YES!  Most definitely.  When in history did adult men and women give other adult men and women control over their life in the way that those parents did with TV?  As if there was something inherently congenial about what was broadcast on TV?  “There was up until that point…”, you say?  Well then, lesson learned.

What lesson?  Don’t believe there is another living person worthy of control over your life.

The good news is, the information age is here.  Not a single human being alive should be surprised by what they see or hear.  If you value the freedom you have, and want even more of it, you’ll recognize this as a good thing.  If censorship is inherently about limiting surprise, and surprise is coming to an end, the end of censorship is therefore near.  Without the ability to be surprised, individuals have regained some of the control they gave up with the advent of TV and other forms of mass communication.  And anytime we as individuals gain back control, it is a victory for freedom.

Censorship is about controlling life in the present to promote a desired future.  Am I being clear?  The thing being censored must really exist in order to be censored.  Something not yet real cannot be censored.   For example, whether fiction or non-fiction, censored violence is still violence.  It still was brought forth into reality.  How foolish are we to expect that life, inherently full of unknowns, should have a moment where we can for sure know the future?  How did people ever make it to this, “Alright children…  For the next short while, we are all going to stare at this optical illusion.  Unlike the rest of the day, we should be totally safe from surprises.  You see, there are men and women behind the scenes making sure that nothing we don’t expect will happen.”  Are you kidding me?

For me, the burden of proof is on the censor.   What is he trying to protect?  I hope to have shown his answer is irrelevant.  It isn’t about protecting.  It is about control.  Why does he want control?  Because ‘he’-the censor and ‘he’-the individual calling for censorship don’t know how to live in the present.  They are captivated by the notion of the future.  They only know how to live in such a way that demonstrates their denial of the present.  They simply put up with the present, in hopes for a better future.  If they’re children, we need to teach them.  If they are adults, they should be embarrassed.

Ask yourself, “Do I want a better future?” or “Do I want to live life?”  They are not the same thing.

Instructions for How To Live Uncensored:

Step 1– Stop believing you can influence the future.

Step 2- Understand that there is only one step.

 

Why Philosophy? The Answer is Mathematical.

The sound of the car door closing should have woken them.  In any case, he was too excited to care.  Up the stairs he went.  Listening first for what he hoped to never hear, he finally knocked on their door.

“What?” his mother asked.

“I’m home.”  he replied opening the door.

“Good…” she acknowledged.

“‘THE MATRIX’ IS THE BEST MOVIE EVER!!!” he burst.

“That’s great.  Tell me about it in the morning.”

“No, you don’t understand, I have to go see it again.  You have to see it.  Dad, what are you doing tomorrow night?  I mean, I could feel my jeans shaking from the bass it was so loud.”

That was me.  April 1999.

In the fall of 1999 I learned that the ancient Greek’s had mused that we could all really just be brains in jars being stimulated to believe life as we know it is happening.  Wow.  I cannot tell you how powerful that one fact was.  That begged the question, “What else did people thousands of years ago think about that is being presented as new today?”

Around the same time, this knowledge became slightly depressing.  If “The Matrix” was actually thousands of years old, what hope did we have for ever thinking something new?

A decade later, I stumbled upon Heidegger.  Intense.  Taken together, Heidegger and a plagiarized Matrix have revealed how wrong the famous “to remain ignorant of history is to remain forever a child” saying is.

Love history, study history, worship history; just don’t believe that you’re somehow better for it.  More and more it is becoming clear to me that “life” is perfectly synonymous with “now.”  Simply acknowledging this gives me all the hope I need.  Anxiety disappears.

For the doubtful reader, the best argument I can muster is the following personal story.

I attended college from 1999-2003.  I am back in college for kicks right now.  If you’ll allow my other writings to qualify me to make an observation, it seems US universities are really only interested in one thing: “How to Prevent the Holocaust.”  The Stanford Prison Experiment.  The Milgram Experiment.  Professors and students alike stand in awe of their revelations.  Somehow they miss the elephant in the room.  They miss that humans are totally capable of taking part in another holocaust.  This direct attempt to prevent the holocaust will not work.  To accomplish the goal, universities would be better served if they backed up a step and challenged students to accept responsibility for the present.  As I’ve written before, this idea of building a [fill in the blank] future is fundamentally flawed.

The only way I see to prevent another holocaust is to live for right now.  I’m not talking about “immediate gratification.”  I’m talking about an idea I first heard from Peter Drucker.  In his book “Management,” he discusses that the Hippocratic Oath doesn’t apply only to the medical field.  In his book, he makes the case that managers in any business have to live by it as well.  I’d go a step further and say everyone should use it as a guide.  Drucker paraphrases the oath down to, “Do no knowing harm.”  Implied is you can’t “do” the future.  You can only “do” the present.

By way of example, while deployed I hung on my wall some of the Samurai’s Bushido-type sayings.  One was, “Courage is living when it is right to live, and dying when it is right to die.”  I can tell you I have put a lot of though into it, and if the situation presents the “my life or me taking another’s life” dichotomy, I’m choosing the bullet.  The German people chose poorly.  They seem to have thought, “Even though this is wrong, if I do it now, at least I’ll make it to the future.”  Wrong.  No way am I making the same choice.  Only someone avoiding “the now” could murder on command.  Personal story turned rant over.

To recap, (“The Matrix” + Ancient Greek Philosophy + Martin Heidegger – Cicero + (Two x College) + Peter Drucker + Bushido) x Me^Infinity = Philosophy or interpreting existence is fascinating to me.   What’s your story?