FootprintsintheWind.com

Can I allow disturbances in life to take me off my plotted course and into creativity and novelty? How many times have I noticed that mistakes gave me better ways to do and be!

:- Doug.

Tugged we each are between doing the usual thing—say earning a living—and doing your best thing. More sharply: doing your calling which means relying on others (family, tribe, nation?) to pick up your slack when you fail and being the one to pick up others when they fail. This is the prodigal father again, yes? The stay at the grindstone brother angry that he has to support the one who set out in the world and fell flat on his face: faced by the progenitor who loved them both with his all.

:- Doug.

Perturbation → disorder and order → emergence → life stretches for novelty → Do I allow the waters of my life to be troubled?

:- Doug.

There is that voice which says you have something special to bring to the world. But even in our individualist times there sounds the overpowering hum beneath all sound. Do not be odd, do not pull away, this is the way we go, if you go some other you will be in the wilderness, alone, alone: you will die! So we don’t quit our job. Then that voice. The anguish.

The anguish of the human. Here is life, in the wrestling of these two.

Unacknowledged. But were we to hear and hold the battling too! Might we, scathed, be?

:- Doug.

Conversation is emergence made audible: an example of the whole exceeding the sum of the parts. Something arises no one carried into the conversation. Together is new possibility. We trigger thoughts in one another—or maybe the thoughts use the meeting as their vehicle.

:- Doug.

At once it is larger and smaller than we thought, this epidemic of violence.

People who immediately talk of gun control are right to do so. So are people who talk of gun rights. These are part but not the central issue.

One piece of violence is access to the means. Another is how we choose to open and restrict access to gatherings of people who might be targets. Another is motive—what drives people to these acts? We must think together about these questions and all the things naturally entangled in it.

Intertwined are larger and smaller issues. Public policy and how we each think in our daily lives. One smaller aspect is how we relate with other humans. Do we connect or do we cocoon? Are others people or things? For instance what are video games teaching us, child and adult? There are some which show that if someone or something gets in your way, you blast it out of existence. This is not to disparage video games but to point out our attitudes. Attitudes are in the air as well as individual. We would not legislate violence out of the video game industry, perhaps, but we could require the companies to fund public education about the dangers of video game violence. We can teach conflict resolution in our schools. Does the drug culture encourage violence in our culture generally?

Is it all intertwined? This will take efforts by government, schools, business, and you, efforts great and small.

Vigilance and speaking out are small things that take great effort of will.

:- Doug.

These stories are how people die in our times. We have more choice than we realize. Let’s talk about how to get our choice.

:- Doug.

Old is a definite developmental stage some folks are privileged to go through.

:- Doug.

Life is the work they are doing, the converse of which they are part.

:- Doug.

In old age we finally have enough material to make something of ourselves!

:- Doug.

What is the work people—even people with dementia—are doing in old age?

:- Doug.

Which came first, the living organisms or the atmosphere they breathe?

:- Doug.

People will go deeper if I let them, if for instance I do not step on their lines.

:- Doug.

Is the conversation a living res? Beyond that, is it the life within living things?

:- Doug.

How old do you want to be when you die? Young-old? Old-old?

:- Doug.

We walk a path in the woods, a path curving in three dimensions. We can see only 20 to 30 yards ahead at any point. A few curves and we turn back. Before we reach discovery. The problem with straight line thinking is we turn back too soon. We do not recognize all we do is approximation. We stop. Too soon.

:- Doug.

The mathematics of business, medicine, and politics has experienced arrested development. It is stunted. It has so far missed the advances of fractal geometry, chaos theory, complexity, nonlinear dynamics, patterns, feedback, and emergence. We lack the languages to speak of reality.

:- Doug.

Our holes, are they defects, access points, turning pivots, things to be filled by others, the gathering place, invitations, our sparkling parts, the inessential ping, the emptiness that allows the bell to ring?

:- Doug.

Torus as
Conversing as
Transforming as
Hole ever
With us

:- Doug.

As much as the other way around, the conversation speaks us.

:- Doug.

Living Wills, Durable Health Care Powers of Attorney, and the like are for before I get a diagnosis. POST is for after.

:- Doug.

I am a person known to the world as Douglas Germann.

:- Doug.

I cannot be whom I am becoming. I can only discover and create.

:- Doug.