Not Yet Nirvana

We lost many celebrities in 2016. Many of us lost loved ones. I lost my mother and my aunt. My wife lost a friend and we both have friends who lost their loved ones all during some part of 2016. Most of us agree 2016 was a bad year. Now, as the year closes out and we look to renewing hope that the next year will somehow be better,  we are struck by the politically realities of a new president. Most of us are having difficulty clinging to the hope a New Year promises. The horrors of Aleppo, the rampant greed that is fast destroying our environment and causing wars, religious fighting, these things still exist, they are happening. But so are good things. And often, the quiet good things do not get the equal attention with the sensational and bloody stories. There is strife and sadness in the world and perhaps there always will be, but gains are being made, good things done by good people do happen. The thing of it is, taken in context, 2016 was not that bad of a year. There w...

All this justification for guns and war, all of this justification for killing people, I wish it would stop. Why can't we spend more energy justifying peace? Violence begets violence. For the religious folk, isn't your premise that an eye for an eye was replaced for the love and peace and forgiveness in the New Testament? While I am not religious, I nevertheless, do not want people killed in my name. I wish the entire world could enjoy peace and love, for there is far too much killing and hatred. That might strike some as a naive position, reminiscent of the 60's hippies. And admittedly, I am a hippie. I am one of those far left, democratic socialists from way back when I lived in Canada and voted for the New Democratic Party, a party where Bernie Sanders would have been at home. But politics aside, and naive as my position may be, if we give up on even hoping for peace then surely we have already lost. And is it really a bad thing to want peace? Is it not a good id...

I just watched, for the second time, a documentary called Best of Enemies , the debates in 1968 between William F. Buckley Jr . on the right and Gore Vidal on the left. The debates were part of a new truncated coverage of the 1968 primaries by ABC which did not have the budget to compete with the gavel to gavel coverage the other two major stations, CBS and NBC, could manage. The familiar lines were drawn, the right was the party of the greedy and heartless, and the left represented the lazy and the decadent. But this was the first time the coverage drew upon drama created between two iconic advocates from the respective sides. Buckley was the darling of the conservative movement; in fact, he founded it and the magazine, the National Review . Later, in coming out for Reagan, he was regarded as a kingmaker. Vidal was the popular author of many historical fictions beginning in 1948 but is most famously remembered for the novel Myra Breckinridge . Vidal’s social commentary was wrap...

I don’t know about you, but my existential angst has reached near critical mass. Racism, bigotry, misogyny, and jingoism, while certainly not new to this country, have become legitimized. Truth has always been hard to find, but now verifiable information is a virtual Grail quest. Apparently, all established, credentialed news agencies are not to be trusted. I am now admonished to accept as fact, the posts of a masked person who speaks with an electronically altered voice on the Internet. The mask incidentally is symbolic of Guy Fawkes, a religious zealot who tried to assassinate the Protestant English King James, on the 5th of November 1605. And there are many other Internet sites claiming to speak truth to power that escape that meddlesome chore of fact checking. There are countless sites explaining how the government, that nameless nemesis always the culprit no matter which political party has the majority, is rendering the population compliant by spreading lithium via che...

Confirmation bias is what we do when we search for information that supports our position. We have all been guilty of this type of thinking from time to time. And what makes it even harder is the abundance of bad information, especially on the Internet which is where, let's face it, we do most of our arguing. In this venue, in today's charged political climate, it is a full time job fact checking other people’s claims. It has come to the point where we actually have to fact check the fact checkers. Scientists look for evidence that will prove their hypothesis wrong. This is one reason why science, with all its flaws, remains the best modality available for learning stuff. But I am not a scientist, I barely made it out of high school and I dropped out of college. I am a middle class, blue-collar worker, average in every respect. In my defense, I have read a lot. And not just crackpot books with weird political agendas. I’ve read books, by Shermer, Sagan, and Asimov, to n...

I am not lonely when I am alone. I only feel loneliness looking at the back of the smart phone sitting opposite and as the silence thickens, I realize how less lonely I’d feel if I were by myself. You ever stand in front of the mirror, looking at the strange old man with the perplexed look on his face, eyes casting about trying to make contact with you? There he is, looking at you with his wrinkled, blemished skin, saggy and mottled instead of taut and tan, with fat where muscle used to reside. Do you try to pretend he’s not you? Do you deny him? Scented shaving cream applied, razor in hand, and you suddenly wonder why bother? Why, instead of shaving grey whiskers from a slack, jowly jaw line, do you not just cut your throat? According to Algerian playwright and philosopher, Albert Camus, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest...

The country is divided. You are either right wing or left wing, you live in a blue state or a red state and if you disagree you are unpatriotic. Political candidates, well, at least the only two allowed to be recognized as such, spend their time bashing each other. The media dishes the dirt on each of them and not so evenly perhaps. From both sides, we hear how bad things are, how we are under threat, and how our way of life is being threatened. Frightened and cowed by the political rhetoric, frustrated and distracted by the media and desperately fact checking every statement, an endless job, we turn our anger toward each other. We draw lines in the sand about whether or not standing for the national anthem, itself a song about war and written while witnessing an attack, constitutes treason. We support police, law and order even when we see fellow citizens shot and killed over nothing or at least for no capital crime. We support protesting those actions and yet are hard pre...

I may be depressed. I have eight of the eleven symptoms listed for depression. That’s depressing! I’ve always been an existential brooder, not that I am generally pessimistic, I consider myself a realist. But I think that constitutes a subjective analysis. The articles I’ve read suggest there may be a trigger for this depressive episode. I lost my mother back in April. That may fill the bill. Her dying could be the root cause of what I am experiencing. I am inclined to believe that to be the case. On the other hand, it doesn’t feel like it. Age may have something to do with what I'm feeling. I am older, fatter, shorter and weaker than I used to be and what I used to be, what I identified as being for most of my adult life, was dependent upon two things; my career as a correctional officer and even more importantly, my martial arts training. You can see where the age thing would play havoc with my self-esteem. Because of injuries sustained over a long period of time and thr...

I worry. I worry, a lot. Especially now that I am firmly in my sixties, both my parents have passed away, my mother only recently so, and I am three years from retiring. My children are in their thirties and they live in another country. Okay, a bit melodramatic there. I live here in the States and my children live in Canada about twelve hours away. Seems like twelve light years, though. I have stepchildren. Yeah, I am re-married. The first marriage was not so good and ended acrimoniously. And yes, I do have regrets about that because it caused my children and I to be estranged. It scarred them. I have tried to make amends but I will always feel guilty. It was my fault. My second marriage was fraught with drama resulting from the situation surrounding my first marriage. I had baggage. A lot of baggage. But this marriage, thirteen years now, will last! We’ve been through the worst and we’ve come out stronger. My wife is my best friend, my lover, my confidant and we have a gre...

We, here in America, are told constantly that terrorists are running wild and that we are susceptible to an attack at any given moment. It's an election year here in the United States of America and the value of fear mongering cannot be ignored as a campaign tool. There was a horrific attack on America and no one can forget that for the symbolism was iconic. And there have been several attempts made in the ensuing years to repeat the effect of that horrific act, if not in the same magnitude, at least in the doubting of our own security. But intelligence agencies thwarted those attacks and saved lives. Europe has experienced brutal attacks that have claimed hundreds of lives with thousands injured. Terrorism works because brutal violence committed against civilians in the midst of the mundane, day-to-day grind with people gathered to celebrate a joyous occasion, shocks an open pluralistic, democratic society to its core. That such horror is employed against unsuspecting civil...

Everyone is afraid of something. What is it that you are afraid of? Not spiders, or heights or water. I don’t mean things like that [although I do fear heights and water]. Think more deeply. What is it that truly and fundamentally terrifies you? For me, I fear being a coward. To be faced with a challenge in life and not measure up, that’s what terrifies me. I fear that I might fail to protect my wife, though even at my age and state of decrepitness, my thirty-eight years of martial arts training might stand me in good stead, for a short time, at least. I figure about ninety seconds. But my cowardice could manifest as me being immobilized by self-pity over some crisis or other when I should wish to remain strong for my family, a rock of strength for them. Simple, daily life can be more arduous than we care to credit. The mundane can drive a man around the bend or even to his end. A man must deal with the frustration of earning a living, not getting that promotion, not making e...

I read the news of the attack that took place at Turkey’s largest airport on Tuesday, June 28, 2016. Scores of people were killed and hundreds were wounded. I was at work complaining about still working at my age, complaining I wouldn’t be able to afford the vacation I wanted, moaning about having to cut back on going out to dinner and fearing whether or not I would be able to continue my lifestyle when I do retire in four years. It’s absurd. People’s lives were shattered on the day I was working and thinking about my daily life, my wife, my friends, my family, and what to do on the weekend. It’s not that I didn’t care. I did care, I was outraged, I was saddened, and I closed the newspaper. How do we live in a world where tragedy occurs all the time? Worse, yet, much of the horror that happens does so in our name. The carnage is caused directly or indirectly by the very leaders, we elect. And it’s not all man-made tragedy. There's the capriciousness of nature to conte...

I look at my favorite musicians whom I’ve followed since the seventies and I notice something. They look old. Most of them are around sixty-eight years of age. And they’re gamely out there and still touring, (albeit much smaller venues for the most part, although David Gilmour sixty-eight and Paul McCartney seventy-three, still pack stadiums). The photos that pop up in my Facebook feed from time to time show my rock idols as they were in the sixties and seventies with long flowing hair, clear skin, mesmerizing eyes and you can feel the energy emanate from the photo. I remember with fondness, the summers of warm breezes bearing the musky scent of hashish and pot, the taste of sweet wine, the ambience of love, as my beloved music crashed over us in a tonal tsunami. But when the pop-up photos in my feed show side by side pictures of my favorite stars from then with current photos of them now, my dreams come crashing back to earth. They are old! What is worse is the realization tha...

This blog is based on excerpts from my book: The Spiritual Energy Way . This was a book I wrote about martial arts, specifically, Seishindo , a curriculum I developed over thirty-eight years of studying martial arts and nineteen years working as a correctional officer. In the last segment of the book, I related martial arts tenets and philosophy to everyday non-martial art life. This excerpt talks about self-esteem and confidence. It is acceptable in martial arts to adopt any particular " kamae " or posture, as an expression of one’s self in an emotionally artistic or stylistic manner provided it is either a sound stratagem in and of itself or the individual is so adept at the posture that she can make it work. Couldn’t the same be said of how we present ourselves in daily life in a non-martial context? When I was teaching women’s self-protection, I taught participants how to not present themselves as an opportunity for targeting. Statistically, women are more likely...

When I was sixteen or so and growing up during the sixties and seventies in Toronto, Canada, I thought I knew just how the world worked and more than that, I knew how the world ought to work. I was all for sex, drugs and rock and roll, peace and love. I was against the war in Vietnam. I was for non-violence and I wanted people in Africa and India to have enough to eat. I did not agree with authoritarianism, conformism, or theism. Now that I am to be sixty-two in August, I am shocked to realize just how confused I am by the world and stunned to see it isn’t working how it should. I have decided that my philosophical outlook could be the cause of my confusion. But first, I have to identify what my philosophical outlook is. Political, religious, and economic issues aside, I still have trouble explaining to myself what the personal philosophy of my life is all about. It’s difficult to categorize. If it’s true that the unexamined life is not worth living then I had best get busy to codi...

My mother has died. That somber fact has me processing thoughts of guilt, love, and my own mortality. I am officially an orphan. My mother was one of the “Railway Children,” those Liverpool kids sent to the countryside to escape the bombing during World War II. She and her sister were sent to Wales and were bounced from household to household, relative to relative, and finally to an orphanage. Dad moved to Canada in 1960 to forge a better a life for us. Before my mum took my sister and I to join him, the family held an “American wake,” a mournful goodbye, as if a loved one had died. Mum left everything and everybody she ever knew to join her husband in the new world. My mother and father worked hard to give us a good life. There were tough times, money was scarce, and there was tension between my parents. Hell, let me be honest, my father hit my mother, I saw it. My mum was sixty when she left my dad. She just walked out with the clothes on her back. That was my mum. Tough. W...

There was a particular moment, a span of about ten seconds, in my life when I chose a course of action that changed everything and with very dramatic effect. It is hard for me to talk about this without telling you the details but I am going to try. It started in 1982, I had worked hard to earn a position within my job. During my course of duty, a situation developed and I had the obligation to choose, literally, to stay where I was or go. I know, " should I stay or should I go now." I could have stayed . I should have stayed . But I didn't, I went . Ten seconds of my life, that's what it took to change my life's path in every way. I am not talking about military service and fighting a war, where one looks back thinking had I gone right and not left, I wouldn't have been shot. No, nothing that noble. I wasn't shot, blown up, or physically injured in any way. But the situation turned sour and the result from that decision of mine played out in the cou...

Is it me or does anyone else think they are not being heard? Doesn't it seem that these days folks don't  listen to what you are saying and instead they prepare a response even while you are still speaking?  I don't know about you but I find this frustrating. This behaviour is sometimes accompanied by the person you are talking with editorializing every few sentences you make which causes you to lose your train of thought. And of course, with the ubiquitous mobile phone, it is hard to tell if the person you are talking with is even listening, they are too busy checking something on FaceBook. But that is not so much an issue of a difference in linguistic styles as it is more about plain bad manners. My linguistic style can be passionate and animated especially if I am talking about something important to me. I don't know if it's my age or if I am not as mentally strong as I should be, but constant editorializing greatly distracts me. I also think that when I am i...

I saw a tee shirt glorifying those of us born in nineteen fifty-four as now being the "new forty" at age sixty-two. Fine sentiment indeed, but I feel more like eighty-two. It's not a mental thing. Mentally I have the mind of a twenty-four year old. I know this because I took one of those quizzes on FaceBook. Not scientifically valid, agreed, but I liked the conclusion. Nevertheless, it is my body that has betrayed me and not my mind, not yet at least. I trained in martial arts for thirty-eight years with the zeal of someone with something to prove. Now I am paying the price for my folly without ever realizing the satisfaction of having proved whatever it was I was trying to prove. But you know, it's not all bad. I mean, I (and all those others born the same year as me) have lived through some spectacular times in human history. The "Space Race", the lunar landings, the rise of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the break up of the Soviet Union...