history

Nature’s Dominant Creature

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A cross to bear

Though the hysteria surrounding the H1N1 flu has left the entirety of the news-watching world with the encouraging habit of frequent handwashing, it is hard to call it anything but an overreaction.

Not to dismiss the crushing impact of even one person’s death to their loved ones, but when we venture into the realm of cold numbers, H1N1 just doesn’t warrant this level of acute, global paranoia. Thus far, the worldwide toll is just short of eleven thousand. That’s equivalent to about a summer’s worth of highway deaths in the US alone, or about 18 hours’ worth of tobacco-related deaths. But that’s not news.

I won’t delve into the media’s reprehensible M.O. of manufacturing widespread panic in this article, though. The point I want to make has more to do with our place in the world. From our presumed throne at the top of the food chain, we often take it somewhat for granted that we’re a more advanced creature than any other, certainly better than anything with no brain and no face. Read More

by David on December 14, 2009
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People and Fire

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Sweaty, muddy and bleeding a little, the three of us picked our way through the overgrown ‘trail’ that snakes between Blue Lake campground and the remote, mythical Goblin Lake. We were traversing the final leg of our return trip through a wondrous forest of moss, bogs and toadstools, but the hike had been taxing. We had survived eleven kilometers of difficult terrain, countless detours, and a few brief, horrific moments when we thought we’d lost the trail.

If you’ve never been, the Canadian Shield hosts some of the most spectacular natural scenes anywhere. I just got back from a weekend of camping in western Ontario. The Shield is the Canadian wilderness stereotype in a nutshell: towering pines, overgrown crags of rock, moose, deer, loons, and crystal clear lakes. It’s a vast ‘shield’ of granite covering over half of Canada, speckled with millions of lakes carved by ice age glaciers.

Despite the clichéd tourism slogan, It is surprisingly difficult for a city-dweller to truly “get away from it all.” From my home city, the land is cultivated for many miles in every direction, crisscrossed with farm roads and power lines. Hike a mile into the trees and you’ll still hear the drone of the highway in the distance, at the least. Campgrounds and lodges do get you closer to nature, but it’s still a far cry from experiencing a wilderness that is completely uncompromised by human activity.

Goblin Lake’s appeal, apart from its Tolkien-esque name, is that it is remote and difficult to get to. We met other hikers who had turned back because of ‘impassible’ terrain, which only made it that much sweeter when we did emerge from the forest to set our eyes on this magical, pristine lake. Read More

by David on August 25, 2009
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What Your Dinged Up Car Can Teach You About the Universe

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ding!

Just behind the little gas tank door on my Honda, there is a silver scratch in the paint, about the size of a dime. It looks almost like an upside-down Nike swoosh. The panel is a little bit dented.

I know exactly when it happened.

It was a Friday in June 2006, I was new at my job, and I had just screwed up bigtime. I had transposed a few digits in my field notes and something ended up being constructed improperly, to the tune of about $5,000.

My boss had received a phone call, informing him of my costly blunder, while the two of us rode along in his truck back to the office. Things had been blowing up all day, and that was the last thing either of us wanted to hear. Painful silence.

Then my cell (for which he pays the bill) rang. Sheepishly, I answered, knowing it was a personal call. My friend wanted to go camping right after work. Feeling a desperate urge right then to get the hell out of town, I said yes and then quickly got rid of him. The awkward, silent ride continued.

When I got home, I hurriedly unloaded the work-related equipment from my trunk to throw in my camping stuff. I really wanted to be gone.

I had a bundle of wooden stakes under one arm and an aluminum range pole under the other, when I heard Right Said Fred playing behind me. Suddenly curious, I spun around to look for what kind of bizarre character would be blasting I’m Too Sexy from his car in 2006, and whacked my own car with the metal tip of the pole. Read More

by David on August 14, 2009
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How I Found the Secret to Happiness While Totally Naked

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Hidden somewhere in a pile of my own bad prose and abandoned bucket lists, in a tattered grocery bag in my storage room, lies the secret to happiness and peace.

It’s scrawled on a fifty-cent note of Canadian Tire Money, in dark purple Jiffy marker. Just four potent words, but they triggered a flood of insights into my life, and started me on the long and winding road to happiness.

The night I wrote those words down, I was in trouble. I was marching down a career path that made me nauseous to think about, I had no friends nearby, no passions, no ambitions, no confidence. I had lost, by that time, any real belief in a bright future.

The optimism I’d carried so easily through grade school was a distant memory, by then as alien as photos from someone else’s life. Small obstacles completely derailed me, I expected to fail at everything, and human beings generally scared me. It was a particularly bad night in a bad year, and I was in mourning for myself.

I was also totally naked. Read More

by David on July 31, 2009
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100 Years Hence

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I’m fascinated with how our world changes over a relatively short time.  Technology, infrastructure, culture and fashion just can’t stay put for long.  Humans are so amazing because they have a habit of completely reinventing their habitat every generation or so.

Undoubtedly this is also a big reason why we are so troubled.  Every generation is faced with an environment for which their parents could not prepare them because it never existed before.  Old-fashioned values don’t always work so well when the world is continually being fashioned by the new.  “Always eat everything on your plate” may not be such great advice when today’s average portion size is triple what it was in 1950.

I guess what is most interesting to me is that the human being — the animal itself — stays more or less the same, but its tools and toys and general way of life change so completely.  I wasn’t around before 1980, but even in that short time, technology has completely revolutionized our lifestyles, with some interesting complications.  For example, who in 1991 could have predicted that by age 28 I would be spending twelve hours a week and writing on a “blog”? Read More

by David on July 13, 2009
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The Highest of Arts

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Human art

It seems to me that person by person, humanity is just beginning to wake up to something great.  Every day I see evidence of more and more people taking a step back from the well-worn grooves of tradition, and finding a way to live that makes sense for themselves.

More people are quitting the corporate race to work for on their own.  Fewer parents are deciding what their children’s careers will be.  More people are living unconventional lifestyles, choosing jobs, diets, parenting styles, clothes, music and creative pursuits that speak to them more deeply than the traditional prescriptions.  The old-fashioned vice of conformity appears to be losing out to the human spirit.

What this means is that fewer people are being funneled into lifestyles that don’t fulfill them, religions that don’t make sense to them, and careers they dread.  This leaves many more individuals who are free to listen to a deeper voice within them, the inner advisor that tells them what’s right for them if they remain still enough to hear it. Read More

by David on July 9, 2009
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4 Brilliant Remarks From History’s Wisest American

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Emerson

If I have a hero, it’s Ralph Waldo Emerson.  He represents to me humanity’s potential: wise, self-reliant, honest, unencumbered by conformity, and able to enjoy every little detail of life as if they were all miracles.

He possessed the hallmark of a human being ahead of his time: he was hailed as a genius and simultaneously reviled as a subvert.  His views were radical for his era, but his wisdom could not be denied, even by his detractors.  Even Herman Melville, author and professed Emerson-hater, later described him as “a great man.”

I am convinced that all of the secrets to personal peace and freedom reside within the ideas recorded in Emerson’s essays and lectures.  His eloquence is well-known from his famous quotations, yet most people today would find a full essay of his to be too verbose to digest in one sitting, if at all.

Perhaps this is why he is so widely quoted and so scarcely read.  His works are full of difficult metaphors and archaic phrases that would require everyday people like you and me to really slow our eyes down from their normal scanning pace, and give ourselves plenty of moments to pause and think.  Perhaps this is a good habit to develop anyway.

It’s worth the effort.  I think the man is one of humanity’s greatest offerings to the world.  Read More

by David on June 18, 2009
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You Are the Greatest Story Ever Told

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A good scene

I have great news.

You are the star of the most poignant film ever conceived. An unprecedented epic saga, it is filmed in one continuous shot, from the first-person perspective. The sets are rich with detail, the lighting always underlines the mood perfectly, the cinematography always magnificent yet unpretentious.

The supporting cast is top notch, too. There are no histrionics, no miscast actors, no flubbed lines. They all deliver the dialogue impeccably, each line timed and inflected perfectly for its respective scene. The protagonists’ friends and lovers will make you laugh out loud, swoon with desire, and feel a sense of belonging and respect. The villains make you feel afraid, furious, depressed, and alienated.

Often the people in the story will look right at the camera, and reveal the stunning depth and density of their character to you.  Why are they even in this story, and why in this particular chapter? What role are they here to play: the advisor, the fool, the expert, the disciple, the love interest, the diplomat, the instigator, the enemy, the martyr? Read More

by David on May 11, 2009
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7 Profound Insights From the Beatles

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Fab four

I used to roll my eyes when people talked about the Beatles.  Maybe you rolled your eyes when you saw this article’s headline.  Thank you for bearing with me anyway.  I’ll make it worth your while.

I had always pictured the Beatles as a tired novelty from my parents’ past.  All I knew was that they played lot of teenagey love songs in their early years, and some weird drug songs in their later years, and that they seemed to have written virtually every famous song that I didn’t want to listen to.

Gradually I came around, and began to recognize that they really were something special.  I harbored an understated respect for them for many years, but two summers ago I spent a few incredible weeks devouring all twelve proper Beatles albums, in chronological order.  It was magical.  I was struck by how beautifully and organically their sound evolved, growing more sophisticated and mature every album.

By the final phrases of of Abbey Road, I had grown too.  And not insignificantly.  I can’t quite put my finger on exactly what moved me, but it definitely had something to do with the beautiful metamorphosis I witnessed.  Read More

by David on April 24, 2009
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There is No Good and Evil, Just Smart and Dumb (Part 2 of 2)

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This is part 2 of a 2-part post.  The first half is here.

If there’s no good and evil, why do people steal and hurt others?

Because they’re dumb.  They just don’t know any smarter and more rewarding ways to live.

Ok, ‘dumb’ is a little misleading.  There are intelligent people who commit crimes and atrocities too.  A person can have a genius IQ, yet still misbehave himself into addiction, ruined relationships, or prison.  ‘Foolish’ might be a better adjective.

What they lack is wisdom.  Insight.  They just don’t know how to cultivate peace in their lives.  So they grasp at things that provide fleeting scraps of fulfillment: money, power, gratification.  They don’t know where else to look.  But of course it’s never enough, and so desperation mounts.  They begin to feel an even stronger draw towards gratification and security, mistaking them for some kind of salvation, and soon they are stepping over others (or worse) to acquire these things.  They just don’t get it.

A common argument is that without morals, we wouldn’t know how to behave.  We’d become greedy, cruel and petty, slaves of every selfish impulse we have.  Well, I don’t think so.  I don’t know about you, but I’m smart enough to see the benefits in being good to others, and the drawbacks of being mean.  There are natural incentives built into both love-based and fear-based courses of action.  It is clear to me that this is exactly what religions were trying to teach: that there are smart ways to live, and dumb ways to live.

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by David on April 19, 2009
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