Not Yet Nirvana

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...

How hard do you suppose it might be for someone to suddenly adopt an existential life style of living authentically? The idea of freely choosing one’s own purpose, deciding what is meaningful, living one’s life on one’s own terms with no thought of what others may think nor any thought given as to how this choice of living will affect them, must surely be a costly venture. Can it be done without tearing apart relationships? Should that really even be a consideration? To be what many would consider a non-conformist, to have autonomy over one’s own life, is to transcend socialization, to resist the allure and not be seduced by what is essentially the easy ways of a conformist. But at what cost? Should it give one pause to consider, before embarking on a life of free choices, to live by your own standards, to do what you will, when you will it, and how you will it to be done, what the consequences will be on those we love? Aren’t such people, who choose to live so freely, reviled r...

What makes you tick? Who are you and what do you stand for? What do you stand against? Most of us absorb our values from our parents, community, and culture. We grow up with much the same set of principals as our parents. If our parents are Christian then most likely we are Christian. The same can be said if our parents our Muslim or Jewish. It may even be that if our parents our liberal or conservative we will follow suit. Not all of us, however, fall into line. Some of us are rebellious. We question the premise these values we inherited were based upon. And if we don’t get the right answers, if the arguments for holding on to these values are weak, then we may discard them and adopt principles more reflective of our own morality. But we cannot do any of this unless we examine our lives. We need to discover what we are all about, what we will accept, and what we will abhor. We need to look inward to discover ourselves. For as Socrates said, the unexamined life is not wort...