“It’s very difficult, in geography as in morality, to understand the world without leaving your own house.”
– Voltaire
That’s me looking out over the Colorado River at Grand Canyon National Park by Glenn Canyon Dam: Walter Simon
Sunday Reader – A Think Piece –
By Glynn Wilson –
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Do you ever just take some time off to simply think? To dream?
Experts in psychology say this is critical not only to mental health, but to success in life. There are entire business courses in this now for entrepreneurs.
I find myself doing this all the time, every chance I get, and find it’s important to turn off all forms of media input to accomplish it. You can’t do it with the TV blaring, even in the background, or the radio. You can’t do it with Facebook notifications beeping on your phone either.
I find I can do it with my computer on hooked up to the internet, however, because in this age of the internet, I find it hard to think or write at all unless I’m plugged in and hooked up, at least with my iPhone. It’s almost like I can’t think at all without it there as a second brain.
The world is full of contradictions and contradictory advice. The trick is to decide where you come down and try to avoid the anxiety that comes with cognitive dissonance. It’s difficult to hold two contradictory thoughts in your head at the same time. Any input attacking either side will just make you angry and you may lash out at your friends or family members. Maybe this is why news stories always reporting “both sides” only seem to piss people off these days.
If the events of the past year or four years have not caused you to set aside this time for reflection, maybe you can find some time on this Easter Sunday after reading this to set out and do it. I find this is best done outside in nature, although that’s not always possible and not absolutely necessary. Nature exists right outside your window.
As I sit here at my computer called Mac, there are robins, mockingbirds, cardinals, finches, sparrows and other birds singing their spring mating songs outside the windows. But there is also the background hum of traffic noise from the cars and trucks racing through this city on the interstate that runs right through town. If you close all the windows and turn on the radio, you can drown it out.
But on this quiet spring Saturday while I think about my Sunday column, I’m listening to the birds and the traffic noise and letting the thoughts wash over me. I’ve already read The New York Times and Washington Post and listened to “Weekend Edition” on NPR. The rest is just talk. Radio talk. TV talk. Personally I’m not that interested in all this talk.
If I was a preacher man, I might call this a sermon. One of my friends in Birmingham calls me up every now and then, and always asks, “What’s happening reverend?”
I guess he’s been reading and listening to me for a long time and thinks my rants are sort of like sermons. Maybe I do a little preaching now and then, although my readers know very well that I’m not a religious man.
In fact, I can relate to a writer like Voltaire, who was denied a Christian burial in France for his life-long advocacy of freedom of speech and the separation of church and state, and for his criticism of the Catholic Church.
Sometimes this freewheeling thought process takes me in wild directions. This may be why some traditional news editors and publishers find some of my columns so objectionable. The legacy press perfected in the 20th century was filled with stories that fit into a box of space designed to be laid out around a set of ads that paid the bills to pay the writers and editors and provide profit for the publisher.
You’ve heard of “thinking outside the box,” right? This is it. You are looking at it.
Think about it…
* * *
If you happen to pick up a copy of The New Yorker in print, for example, you will see these pretty little stories that are so tightly edited that they fit perfectly in little boxes, and they have been screened to make sure they are not only factually correct. There are teams of editors who are paid very well to make sure they do not offend anyone who might be reading. That’s what I call the Newhouse way. The magazine was purchased by Si Newhouse in 1985 — the same publisher who gave us Donald Trump in the first place — and dumbed it down a bit, although it still appears to be for smart people.
I know people who still subscribe because they think it makes them “big time” — and maybe they hope one day before they die some editor at the magazine may actually return one of their letters and mention them in the pages. As a free-lance writer I found that magazines stopped sending out rejection letters about 15 years ago when email replaced snail mail. If you are not already a TeeVee celebrity, you may as well give it up. Start a blog and build an audience on Facebook.
That’s what I did, and I was mentioned in The New Yorker once – when I beat them on a story. They had to cite me for breaking the story that former judge Roy Moore was banned from the Gadsden Mall for chasing underage girls for sex back in 2017 when Doug Jones was running for the Senate from Alabama. That story will last in search engines for as long as the internet remains up, long after they stop felling trees to print it, and as long as The New Yorker can pay its web server hosting fee.
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Those of us who take this First Amendment news business seriously, however, know that you can’t be doing this job right unless you are sometimes offending someone.
“Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose,” the author George Orwell once wrote.
People in the news business like to quote him. But how many actually live up to it?
“If you can’t tolerate critics,” Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com once said, “don’t do anything new or interesting.”
This thinking is all prelude to another recurring thought I often seem to run into, almost like a recurring dream.
Going Around in Circles
Life is not only full of contradictions. I don’t know about yours, but in my life and times I sometimes find that I seem to be going around in circles.
The New York Times these days is carrying a recurring feature with writers helping readers remember places they have been. How to pretend you’re in Cartagena, Dakar, Hawaii, Paris, Quebec City, Singapore, Riviera Maya or Toyko, for example. This week’s feature focused on New Orleans.
As I posted on Facebook when sharing the link this morning: “Now this is interesting, amazing photographs. I do sometimes imagine I’m back in New Orleans, where I once lived for four years, even working for The New York Times there, although I doubt I will ever make it back. I listen to WWOZ online sometimes, and we had a small Mardi Gras party and dinner in Knoxville this year.”
“I did some of my best writing there, but realized it will be under water one day in the not too distant future, and had to get out. This is The Southerner version of the last story I wrote for The Dallas Morning News that ran on Jan. 2, 2004, before Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005.”
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While doing all this thinking, and some research, I considered adding a religious message to this Easter column. It turns out that even some sermons about the old stories concerning the prophet called Jesus include lessons about The Journey Of Life.
I decided not to dwell on it, but I do want to repeat something else I posted on Facebook recently, for the permanent record here.
Altruism vs. Selfishness
“I’ve been thinking a lot about the best ways to go about helping others, practicing altruism. And let’s face it, we all need help now, a break from the selfish gene of you know who and his so-called conservative cohorts. But I find it hard sometimes to help some people, and occasionally think back to what Norman Maclean wrote in the conclusion to his memoir, A River Runs Through It.”
“Help is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly,” Maclean wrote. “So it is that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don’t know what part to give or maybe we don’t like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed….”
His conclusion? At least, he wrote, “You can love completely without complete understanding.” That’s the hard part. Stop and think about that for a minute.
* * *
Looking for Meaning
Then, while I was thinking about this idea of traveling in circles, searching for meaning, I ran across this Elton John song from the Disney movie “Lion King,” a movie I’ve never watched.
From the day we arrive on the planet
And, blinking, step into the sun
There’s more to see than can ever be seen
More to do than can ever be done
There’s far too much to take in here
More to find than can ever be found
But the sun rolling high
Through the sapphire sky
Keeps great and small on the endless round
It’s the circle of life
And it moves us all
Through despair and hope
Through faith and love
‘Til we find our place
On the path unwinding
In the circle
The circle of life
But as I think about this, it just seems like such a damn cliché. Leave it to Disney, right? Or the Hallmark Channel?
Sorry. I’m being a critic again. Maybe you liked the movie.
Then I found another song about circles that might very well be a more accurate reflection of what life is actually like. This brought back an interesting childhood memory. I bet some of my Baby Boomer friends on Facebook remember this.
In 1973, the year my father died when I was only 15, NBC started running a live music show on Friday nights called The Midnight Special. Of course I was too young to be allowed to stay up until midnight to watch it. But I used to stay awake on purpose and sneak out of bed and watch it with the volume down low. I actually remember watching Billy Preston do this song live back then. I went out later and bought the record.
I’ve got a song, I ain’t got no melody
I’m a gonna sing it to my friends
I’ve got a song, I ain’t got no melody
I’m a gonna sing it to my friends
Will it go ’round in circles?
Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky?
Will it go ’round in circles?
Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky?
I’ve got a story, ain’t got no moral
Let the bad guy win every once in a while
I’ve got a story, ain’t got no moral
Let the bad guy win every once in a while
Will it go ’round in circles?
Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky?
Will it go ’round in circles?
Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky?
I’ve got a dance, I ain’t got no steps, no
I’m gonna let the music move me around
I’ve got a dance, I ain’t got no steps
I’m a gonna let the music move me around
Will it go ’round in circles?
Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky?
Will it go ’round in circles?
Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky?
Maybe life is like a song with no melody, a story with no moral, a dance with no steps.
Will this life fly high like a bird up in the sky?
Maybe life doesn’t mean anything at all accept what we make it mean.
I was talking just the other night to an artist friend of mine, who was talking about something that seemed to happen serendipitously, like there was some reason this thing happened. You often hear people say it, even in books and movies.
“Everything happens for a reason.”
But as I told my friend, I spent a good of bit of time reasoning this out many years ago, and to avoid cognitive dissonance and all the anxiety that goes with trying to hold all these contradictory thoughts in your head and arguing about them, it’s probably best just to come down on this side of the argument.
There is no master divine plan. Life was created out of chemical chaos and hurtles toward an unknown conclusion as the universe constantly speeds up and expands, and technological, political and social change is coming about too fast now for the human brain to keep up with it and deal with it all.
It will take sociological committees and yes big government to deal with this stuff, as frustrating as that can be. No individual can figure out how to save us going forward, certainly no one president of the United States, not even Joe Biden. Trump sold half the country on the idea that only he could fix it.
We see how that shit turned out.
If you are sitting around waiting for a god to tell you what to do, or a president, you will be waiting until the end of time and you may never do anything in your life. The only thing that matters are the laws of physics, what the founders of American democracy called “nature’s laws,” and human will.
For the individual, the questions to ask are: Where do I want to be? What do I want to be doing with my life? What do I have to do to get there?
That voice in your head is not a god. It is you. That should be a liberating thought. I realize many people disagree. That’s their right. But they are wrong, and more and more people seem to be coming to this realization.
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Only you can decide what to do. Maybe if you keep this in mind and spend some time thinking about it, perhaps in nature, you can decide what will make you happy.
That is the quintessential American question, is it not? We are charged with living in “pursuit of happiness.” This is our natural right. You can believe it is “God given” if you want. But that could very well be what’s holding you back.
Happiness is a short term state of mind. No feeling lasts forever. If you can capture a moment of it and put it in a bottle or a picture on Facebook, consider yourself lucky.
I do believe in chance, in luck, and timing. And I do believe in preparation through hard work. These are the things that seem to matter.
Even the young Isaac Newton got a little lucky when he watched the apple fall from the tree and he discovered the law of gravity, only to become famous for it.
Everything else is “commentary,” as E.O. Wilson once said, or as I say, everything else is just noise and sensational clickbait.
Take the Time to Dream
A summer sunset view from the Appalachian Trail by the Loft Mountain Campground in Shenandoah National Park, Sunday, July 12, 2020: Glynn Wilson
I also do believe in taking the time to dream. Whether it’s dreaming about what you would do with a winning multi-million dollar lottery ticket, or planning a spring or summer trip once you get your COVID vaccine shots and government stimulus payment.
You can dream big. Or you can dream small. But you’ve got to dream.
Want to know what I’m dreaming about right now?
I’m thinking about a certain campsite in Shenandoah National Park by the Appalachian Trail with a west-facing sunset view. I’m thinking about a three mile hike down and back along the trail from there on one of the most scenic hikes on the entire AT.
There will some good food, drink and smoke involved in that view and experience. It may only make me happy for a few minutes, hours or days. But I will take as much of that time as I can get for the rest of this life.
If there are members of my family, friends on Facebook or critics in the news business who don’t like it, I also kind of like what Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight once said, although I didn’t much like the man.
“When my time on earth is gone, and my activities here are passed, I want they bury me upside down, and my critics can kiss my ass!”
If that doesn’t make you smile and laugh a little, there is something wrong with you, not me. If it makes you angry, you clearly suffer from cognitive dissonance disease — the only cure for which is to decide on which side you come down.
