Pushing Past Futility

I’ve always had a poor tolerance for futility. Faced with a task I sense is futile, I’m like a cat with a sock on its back. I just collapse under the weight of absurdity. This has rarely made me popular. The war of attrition waged by this on friendships forged under the sunny skies of

You Can’t Hide from Futility

One of the defenses of denial is that if we were to begin to accept what is in store we would fall into despair. Better to be busy than desperate. This ignores the power of Futility. It continues to amaze me the way the most self-declared pragmatists; political, military, and business leaders; remain by all

Futility, the chasm between efficiency and effectiveness

In the tension between our immersion in the fabric of being and the atomized self’s struggle to achieve a stasis, a utopia, not of richness, but an illusory concretion of wealth, in which we wish to stop without falling; we define the human condition. The workings of consciousness are so easily misunderstood as signs of separateness from the rest as epitomized in Cogito Ergo Sum. Yet consciousness, our phenomenological embededness in experience is the only window we have through which to glimpse an awareness of our integration into greater systems and structures.

Too Much, too little

I keep running into a single question whenever I consider what might be done. I must admit the question is holographic, its form mirrors its content. It is at once achingly simple and bewilderingly complex. Evidence of its necessity surrounds us and at the same time this question never seems to arise. It’s a question

Musing on Medusa, Reflections on the Gorgon’s Head

Those of us who fear chaos, through our efforts to control chaos, bring about more chaos, a more virulent chaos, a more violent chaos.

Whiteness, a Community of Narcissists

This post was drafted in August of 2015. At the time I was concerned whether it was complete enough. Whether it said enough. On looking it over today I am struck by how this theme has continued to strike us day after day. And how little, outside of the works of James Baldwin and his

Realms. How we position.

“How we position.” Seems to call for an object, “What?” before we can get into wondering about “how;” or even, who “we” are; we want to know what.

“Let’s be realistic!”

We feel the weight of this admonition upon us everywhere we turn. It stands like a wall between us and it echoes in our minds. We take it as a warning. In fact it is our prison.

“Relax! Take it easy.”

We hear this often enough. These days it probably sounds like good advice. Yet behind it is a troubling assumption. One that touches on how we keep running in circles, returning to the same traps again and again. We confuse ease with relaxation. What does it mean to be relaxed?

Out of the Depth of Our Numbness

Once we begin to recognize what it feels like to be alive it can still be a shock to acknowledge how much of our lives is spent in circumstances that are dead and threaten to engulf us once again in the numbness we’ve just begun to leave behind. But, if we fail to let this

By the time…

By the time we add in the complications and machinations of media it is damn impossible to know what is going on. Some call it Marketing 3.0….

Security & Well-being

It’s a common expression. We consider the two must go together, “How can we feel good if we’re not secure?” Here’s John‘s recent comment on An Exploration, Navigating Without a Map: Tony, I have read and re-read your original posting, and I think I have a better grip on where you are going with it.