“You first!” “No, After You!” From optimism to resolve…

By demanding optimism, the universal sweetener, before we will engage, and then faltering as soon as we detect the hard reality welling up from below, we ensure that we remain firmly in the realm of futility, and the process feeds on itself.

Captain Smith & Amelia Earhart, pathological optimism

Hope is not confidence. Confidence is propped up by optimism. Hope is sustained by courage.

From 9/11 to 11/9…

Fifteen years between these two dates. Seventy eight years since Kristallnacht…. Landmarks on the path to disillusionment. A road we’ve not seen the end of…. A road from complacency and an unearned certainty to humility. A humility we may feel we don’t deserve. A humility that brings us no where we wanted to go.

Division, a not-so-timely second look…

This post has sat in draft form for many months. It’s neither been published nor can I definitively side-line it. As time has passed, it seems unseemly to return focus to the event of Paul Kingsnorth‘s Apotheosis in The New York Times, but there are things here that still matter, that have grown in importance

Uncertainty and Cause & Effect

There’s something tickling out there at the confluence of our refusal to accept uncertainty and our belief in cause & effect. Even here, as I ponder these two concepts, I’m falling into the expectation that relation equals cause. I was about to say that we refuse uncertainty – vehemently, violently, with suicidal insistence – because

Rational

We believe we are rational. We use logic to confirm it. We ignore the circularity of our arguments. How do we drop defensiveness? We live in a tumult of fear and anxiety. There is a gap between our beliefs and what we know we are hiding from behind those defenses. We are at least in

After Comfort

We have resigned ourselves to accept that life’s purpose is to chase after comfort. This leaves us in a very uncomfortable position. We begin to prod and peer to see what might come after comfort…. Money, power, agreement, advantage; these all promise comfort. The key here is in promise. In our appetite for comfort we

What Realism…?

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. Frederick Douglas Looking at a history of Europe and its entry into Modernity in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries one factor stands out. The legacy that lead to Modernism was filled with internalized violence and the passing down of abusive behavior and the

Communication, driven by assumptions

We cannot connect or communicate intentionally without some assurance of common assumptions to buoy us through the effort. I find that through subtle hints – the sort of unintended communication that takes place whenever there is one organism perceiving another and “making sense” of what they see. Through these hints, if I feel the gap

Space at the end of the year

The close of this year has me once again in a curious form of free-fall, as if the inertia of past impetus is losing to the sheer force of gravity. I tend to welcome these periods. Without the chance to notice the tug of futility it’s easy to get caught-up in enthusiasms that might entertain,

On Being Outside, a meditation on precarity

Vinay Gupta wrote a piece recently, The Subtle Art of Precarity. It’s a nice article, and an interesting neologism, precarity. It relates to a familiarity and even comfort with being on the edge. His thesis, one I’ve long ascribed to, that as we get deeper into collapse the crises of leadership and expertise drive, and

We Think of the Spectacle as External…

The title to this post came to me as my head hit the pillow last night. I got up and wrote it down. That beats spending the next half hour trying to instal it in memory, and calling forth the rest of the insight just to have it evaporate before morning. Trusting the organism means