Musings of a Middle Aged Man

There is a phrase, "seeking the miraculous in the everyday," that the New Ageists love to glom onto as their own. They leverage as a supposedly newly found and profound insight that their attitudes wear like a shiny cast over their rage clothing. Only, this concept, they believe, is for a new age, is actually old school, older than Uncle Walt's verbose rendering. A trip in the waybac...

Uncle Walt Whitman was on the vanguard of what is categorized as the Romantic era of American literature. The era is marked by an emphasis on individualism, imagination, the spiritual dimension of nature, and skepticism toward the pure rationalism that claimed reason is the primary source of genuine knowledge independent of sensory experience, empirical observation, or tradition. Me thinks this er...

The Kesh Temple Hymn, a Sumerian praise poem composed circa 2600 BCE, is often cited as the earliest religious text. The words were inscribed on clay tablets and were associated with worship in ancient Sumer. The poem pays homage to the goddess Ninhursag (Nintu), praising her temple in the city of Kesh, while also highlighting the roles of the supreme god Enlil, who authorized the temple's con...

Conundrum: Do I have a propensity for silence because I have powerful spiritual tendencies, or does my propensity to dwell in the spiritual drive my tendency to seek out and inhabit silent spaces? Of course, there is also the very real possibility that there is neither causation nor correlation between the two, and I am simply a malcontent unsuitable for human interaction. To be clear, in my mind,...

I stumbled upon literary works by Ojibwe Canadian author Richard Wagamese late in 2025. Of the 93 books I read and rated this year, I rated six with top marks. Five of those books were works of fiction penned by Wagamese. I don't rate many books this highly, let alone multiple books by the same author, unless said author is the deceased prophet, Edward Abbey, a scribe proffering extraordinary...

Other than war and romance movies, possibly the next most popular genre involves aliens visiting Earth. Almost all end with some type of epic battle from which the primitive earthlings emerge victorious over the advanced alien race. Primitive humans? Indubitably. Any beings who can master star travel have to be more advanced technologically than one whose most advanced exploration method is by rem...

Religion and spirituality are both concerned with humanity's role in the sacred. Religion tends to be institutionalized, communal, and governed by dogmatic doctrines. Spiritually (but not religious) is geared toward the individual and heavily experiential, rendering it more fluid than the static state characterizing religion. The notion of the sacred typically revolves around god, goddesses, u...

Despite there being not a smidge of evidence for the existence of an immutable, eternal soul, its existence is a deeply held belief, likely echoing from the dawn of modern man, perhaps even a conviction of our Neanderthal ancestors. This assumes the Neanderthal propensity for ritual burial is evidence of their belief in some sort of afterlife. There is a hidden presupposition in this question, nam...

Religion was primitive humans' first attempt at pseudoscience, their first attempt to make sense of the mysteries encountered by the primeval brains of a nascent species with minds able to soar from the physical to the abstract on wings powered by imagination. As with any first attempt, it was clumsy and riddled with holes invisible to fledgling brains, rightly focused on satisfying physiologi...

To level set: Superstition is a belief that attributes supernatural significance to specific objects, actions, or events despite lacking scientific evidence or logical connection. Faith is a profound trust and belief in someone or something, often transcending mere intellectual acknowledgement, to involve deep reliance and commitment. Both involve faith ( a form of not knowing ) in unseen, superna...

Silence is typically defined as the absence of sound. Incomprehensible is the inability to understand. The question rejiggered would be "What does it mean to be an absence of sound that can't be understood?" Silence can also refer to a book omitting pertinent data, effectively silencing knowledge, ensuring the topic can't be properly comprehended or is purposefully manipulated to...

There was a time when a child was meant to be seen, not heard. Told to stop crying or they would be given something to cry about. More often than not, they were instructed not to speak unless spoken to and, in even less enlightened times, were used to do menial and dangerous labor for a pittance, if any compensation, because they were viewed as more expendable than the more robust workers in the l...

There was a time in my arrogant younger days when I would have responded with an unequivocal yes. I thoroughly bought into the anthropocentric doctrine proclaiming that the only valid moral choice would be to choose human survival over the survival of any and all non-human beings. The arrogance arises from the pompous belief that humanity was somehow more special than our evolved brethren of the n...

My thirty-plus years as a soccer referee make me uniquely qualified to address this question. It was a role requiring me to be not only the judge and jury, but also the executioner when severe breaches of the Laws of the Game (LOTG) occurred. The brilliance contained in the LOTG is the unwritten law, known as Law 18, that says referees must use common sense when applying the LOTG. This allows the...

Inner peace, aka peace of mind, is generally defined as a state of psychological or spiritual calm that is maintained despite the presence of external stressors. External stressors are events or situations that originate from your environment rather than from your own internal thoughts or beliefs. Let's face it. Bad shit beyond our control happens to us. We cannot control external stressors, b...

The earliest identified purposeful burial site dates back 300,000 years ago in South Africa by our hominid ancestors, Homo Naledi, an extinct relative of Homo Sapiens, our species. The Naledi were cave dwellers with a timeline overlapping early Homo Sapiens. The Neanderthals, contemporaries of the Naledi, were buried with grave goods, including flowers. They included behaviors of covering bodies o...

There are no known organisms that live on nothing. All must engage in some sort of food consumption to sustain their lives. Predators either hunt and kill or scavenge off the deceased. Grazers mow green plants until they are nubs, then move on to greener pastures. Photosynthetic organisms, such as plants, consume light, water, and carbon dioxide to synthesize the sugars necessary for their surviva...

I grew up in the racially charged South Side of Chicago, an area with definitive lines separating white from black. Many of the families in my suburb fled the city neighborhoods in which they grew up because they feared living in an integrated neighborhood, believing they would be under siege from those "colored" people. The exodus was called white flight. It was exacerbated by unscrupul...

The belief that humans have free will is the basis for the modern laws governing crime and punishment is foundational to most, if not all, modern societies. Those that don't tend to be firmly embedded in Determinism, the belief that all events, including human actions, are determined by prior causes. Modern laws include caveats to lessen or eliminate punishment if a person is deemed either too...

The implicit implication when saying something needs to be fixed is that the thing is broken. A stick can be snapped, as can a human bone, when pressure is exerted with sufficient force. Machines can stop running because a crucial part becomes defective, taking down an entire system. Earth is a highly complex system with checks and balances, but I don't envision Earth being broken, considering...

The USA in which I grew up is but a faint mirage of the USA in which I am now living, despite my living in the same city area for nearly all of my soon-to-be 65 years on earth. Some, increased empathy, individual awareness of their rights, a growing appreciation of diversity, and less outright segregation have been for the betterment of society and individuals. Others, the resurgence of blatant di...

That someone would need to seek out the significance of silence tells me they are likely an incessant babbler compelled to fill the silence they fear with nonsensical words, the way a baby craves a favorite blankey or self soothes by sucking their thumbs. So powerful is the silence vacuum, the police frequently use silence as an interrogation technique because they know silence is a black hole voi...

There are five question renderings beginning with the letter 'W': What, when, where, why, and who. Coupled with two tiny words, 'am' and 'I', they span queries from empirical to existential. What I am, when I am, and where I am can pretty much be answered unequivocally by observation. In my case, I am a human living in 2025 Chicago. 'Why am I?' requires delving deep...

indness, a false equivalency. In this instance, presented as a false dichotomy, attempting to imply that morality and kindness exist in a causal relationship when they are, at best, tangentially related. This question presupposes morality is inherently about kindness, whereas reality is nothing more than the code of conduct a person chooses to adopt and cultivate from within themselves. Kindness i...

There was a time in my arrogant youth that I viewed art, narrowly defined as drawing and painting, as a colossal waste of time and artists as people unable to survive the rigors of a classical education focusing on maths and the hard sciences. It was an attitude probably fostered by my complete lack of ability to draw anything other than lopsided stick figures and a desire to be more like my hero,...