Real Evil - Inheritance

This is so wrong, massively wrong.

The pain and suffering of billions of unborn kids who will be losers of the birth lottery will be massive and immense in a scale that humanity has never seen. 

Without coming up with a way to control this stupidest idea of automatic inheritance, lot of problems in the world cannot be fixed.  In other words, this is one of the very few fundamental problems in the world. 

Just because A fucked B and C was born hence C gets everything A & B worked hard for in their entire life while C did zilch in life is wrong. This will be one of the the primary root causes that capitalism is failing and might cause democracy to decline in future, 

To state the obvious:

1. We need to segregate the process of defining and understanding a problem vs finding a solution. I am defining a problem here. I have no idea how to solve this problem. I think most of humanity will agree this is a problem. But disagreements come when you start confusing solutions with the process of defining the problem. 
2. Identifying this as a problem doesn't define me nor anyone as a communist or socialist. Fuck communism and socialism; its is proven over and over again as bad ideology not even close to a solution for any problem in the world. 
3. This is the time most people should start understanding this problem and agree that we have to find solutions to this issue. 
4. Solutions might not come for years or decades. 
5. Implementing the solution after #4 might take years or decades. 
6. So good luck sapiens. Max and I will not be alive to see what unveils. 

I have seen a few academic papers but not even is writing or talking about this a fundamental problem. I have been screaming about this for over two decades now. The birth-lottery a.k.a inheritance is the cancer which has potential to destroy democracy. Beware.

Gen X and Millennials Will Inherit Trillions in Real Estate Over the Next Decade - and this is just real estate (this doesn't include cash, 401K, investments et al.). 

Baby boomers and older Americans have spent decades amassing one of the largest concentrations of private wealth in history. Now, that wealth is starting to be passed down to the next generation—and it’s having a ripple effect across the high-end property market.

Over the next decade, roughly 1.2 million individuals with net worths of $5 million or more are projected to pass down more than $38 trillion globally, according to a new report from brokerage Coldwell Banker Global Luxury reviewed exclusively by The Wall Street Journal.

Real estate is poised to play a significant role in the great wealth transfer. Gen Xers and Millennials are set to inherit $4.6 trillion in global real estate over the next 10 years, according to the report, which incorporated data from research firms Altrata and Cerulli Associates. Nearly $2.4 trillion of that property is located in the U.S.

Real-estate brokers, attorneys and family offices say they are already seeing profound changes in who buys luxury homes and how purchases are structured. High-net-worth families are bringing children into conversations about inheritance earlier and making high-stakes real-estate decisions sooner.

[---]

In Manhattan, for instance, family money is accounting for an increasing share of major transactions.

“The price points have just gone wild,” said Ian Slater, a Compass agent who works with ultrawealthy families in New York. “I used to commonly see people buy $3 million to $5 million apartments for their 25- to 30-year-old kids. Now I see people buying $15 to $30 million apartments for their kids.”

[---]

Americans with a net worth of more than $5 million are expected to pass down about $17.3 trillion over the next decade. Centimillionaires—those worth more than $100 million—hold roughly 43% of that wealth, according to the Coldwell Banker report.

With so much at stake, many families are preparing their children by starting conversations early.

When Bobby Castro, 58, began planning how his money would one day pass to his children, he said he was driven primarily by fear that the fortune he and his wife built would be squandered.

“I read there’s over a 70% chance Gen Two—meaning my children—will wind up blowing all the hard work that the creators of Gen One, my wife and I, did,” he said. “And that is a scary stat.”

As a result, he and his wife, Sofia Castro, 54, who live in a sprawling waterfront home with a private dock in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., began building what they call their “100-year legacy plan.” Bobby made his money by founding and later selling a financial-technology company called Bankers Healthcare Group and using the proceeds to amass a real-estate portfolio along the way. The family is now worth about $500 million, he said.

[---]

In cases where multiple siblings inherit one property, things can get complicated, particularly if a plan isn’t put in place before a parent’s death, Cole said. 

“Kids have kids, spouses get involved and complexity becomes more of an issue,” he said. “One wants to keep it because there is sentimental value, one wants to sell it because they want the capital out. There’s a lot to untangle.”

Well-Defined Problems vs. Poorly-Defined Problems

I hate compliments. This is not fake-humility but I really hate compliments and to make it worse, my red flags light up about the person who compliments me. In other words, I don't trust the humans who compliment me. 

A few times in my life I received a compliment, I liked it since I work hard for it. 

That word is - wisdom. A few times in my life, I heard someone utter the phrase - you are wise. 

And I gladly took that compliment as a commitment to work harder.

Word-hard for what? To be not bad at poorly defined problems a.k.a trying to be little less stupid tomorrow than I am today. 

This such an wonderful article on the same - Why aren't smart people happier?

I think all of our various tests of intelligence aren’t as different as they seem. They’re all full of problems that have a few important things in common:

• There are stable relationships between the variables.
• There’s no disagreement about whether the problems are problems, or whether they’ve been solved.
• There have clear boundaries; there is a finite amount of relevant information and possible actions.
• The problems are repeatable. Although the details may change, the process for solving the problems does not.

I think a good name for problems like these is well-defined. Well-defined problems can be very difficult, but they aren’t mystical. You can write down instructions for solving them. And you can put them on a test. In fact, standardized tests items must be well-defined problems, because they require indisputable answers. Matching a word to its synonym, finding the area of a trapezoid, putting pictures in the correct order—all common tasks on IQ tests—are well-defined problems.

Spearman was right that people differ in their ability to solve well-defined problems. But he was wrong that well-defined problems are the only kind of problems. “Why can’t I find someone to spend my life with?” “Should I be a dentist or a dancer?” and “How do I get my child to stop crying?” are all important but poorly defined problems. “How can we all get along?” is not a multiple-choice question. Neither is “What do I do when my parents get old?” And getting better at rotating shapes or remembering state capitals is not going to help you solve them.

We all share some blame with Spearman, of course, because everybody talks about smarts as if they’re one thing. Google “smartest people in the world” and most of the results will be physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and chess masters. These are all difficult problems, but they are well-defined, and that makes it easy to rank people. The best chess player in the world is the one who can beat everybody else. The best mathematician is the one who can solve the problems that nobody else could solve. That makes it seem like the best chess players and mathematicians are not just the smartest in their fields, but the smartest in the whole world.

THE POORLY DEFINED PROBLEM OF BEING ALIVE

There is, unfortunately no good word for “skill at solving poorly defined problems.” Insight, creativity, agency, self-knowledge—they’re all part of it, but not all of it. Wisdom comes the closest, but it suggests a certain fustiness and grandeur, and poorly defined problems aren’t just dramatic questions like “how do you live a good life”; they’re also everyday questions like “how do you host a good party” and “how do you figure out what to do today.”

One way to spot people who are good at solving poorly defined problems is to look for people who feel good about their lives; “how do I live a life I like” is a humdinger of a poorly defined problem. The rules aren’t stable: what makes you happy may make me miserable. The boundaries aren’t clear: literally anything I do could make me more happy or less happy. The problems are not repeatable: what made me happy when I was 21 may not make me happy when I’m 31. Nobody else can be completely sure whether I’m happy or not, and sometimes I’m not even sure. In fact, some people might claim that I’m not really happy, no matter what I say, unless I accept Jesus into my heart or reach nirvana or fall in love—if I think I’m happy before all that, I’m simply mistaken about what happiness is!

This is why the people who score well on intelligence tests and win lots of chess games are no happier than the people who flunk the tests and lose at chess: well-defined and poorly defined problems require completely different problem-solving skills. Life ain’t chess! Nobody agrees on the rules, the pieces do whatever they want, and the board covers the whole globe, as well as the inside of your head and possibly several metaphysical planes as well.

[---]

So if you’re really looking for a transformative change in your happiness, you might be better off reading something ancient. The great thinkers of the distant past seemed obsessed with figuring out how to live good lives: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, even up through Thoreau and Vivekananda. But at some point, this kind of stuff apparently fell out of fashion.

And hey, maybe that’s because there’s just no more progress to make on the poorly defined problem of “how do we live.” But most well-defined problems were once defined poorly. For example, “how do we land on the moon” was a hopelessly poorly defined problem for most of human history. It only makes sense if you know that the moon is a big rock you can land on and not, say, a god floating in the sky. We slowly put some definitions around that problem, and then one day we sent an actual dude to the moon and he walked around and was like “I’m on the moon now.” If we can do that, maybe we can also figure out how to live good lives. It certainly seems worth it to keep trying.

 

What Octopuses Can Teach Us About Honesty In Communication.

Humans have built their entire social world around language, yet misunderstandings remain constant. Words can be misread, spoken in haste, or stripped of the nuance we intend.

Observing octopuses shows that clear communication can take forms that are immediate and unmistakable, relying on presence rather than vocabulary.

Their bodies speak for them — shifting color, posture, and movement in ways that leave little room for confusion about alarm, curiosity, or readiness to engage.

Of course, humans cannot change skin color or ripple patterns across our bodies. But the principle remains. Communication that is grounded in presence — how we move, how we hold ourselves, how openly we let emotions show — can carry meaning as clearly as words.

- More Here

Origin Of The Word 'Dog' Remains A Mystery

 Centuries ago, dogs were more commonly called "hounds" — a term derived from the Old English word "hund." Today, "hound" typically refers to a specific breed of dog, but back then, it referred to all domestic canines, according to Gorrie.

Early forms of the word "dog" did appear in land charters and place names over a millennia ago. But most notably, during the Middle English period from roughly 1100 to 1450, "dog" was often used as an insult directed at people.

" The use of terms for dog to insult people are pretty common historically and across cultures and we see it all over the place," Gorrie said. "So not just in the history of English but in related languages of Europe and Asia."

Over time, the positive emotions people felt toward the four-legged creature eclipsed some of the word's negative, derogatory charge, he said. Around the 1500s, "dog" replaced "hound" as the standard term we use for the pet today.

"It's very possible that the same word that you use as an insult, you can repurpose as a term of affection," Gorrie said. " Almost as if they're reclaiming that word or using it ironically to show just how strong the affection is."

Since "dog" became ubiquitous, it has continued to broaden in meaning. According to Gorrie, the term was used to describe an ugly woman in the 1930s, while in the 1950s, it came to mean a sexually aggressive man. Today, it is used widely as slang for a close friend.

Theories behind the origin of "dog"

While the evolution of "dog" is fairly clear, the mystery lies in its origins.

One theory among linguists is that "dog" comes from the Old English word "dox," which was a term used to describe color, according to Gorrie. "It's not entirely clear what it meant, but it probably meant something like dark or golden or yellow," he said.

Another possibility is that it's related to the Old English word "dugan," which meant to be good, of use or strong, Gorrie added.

Part of the difficulty in tracing the origin of the word "dog," he said, is that dogs have been part of human life for a very long time. That's also true for common words such as "boy" and "she," as well as animal-related ones like "pig" and "hog."

"  There are theories about some of them," Gorrie said. "But dog is the one that's the real mystery."

- More Here

What Pigeons Teach Us About Love

Love is as love does. “There’s no reason to think it would be much different for humans than nonhumans,” says Marc Bekoff, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals. “I’ve known mourning doves”—a species closely related to pigeons—“who were more in love than a lot of the people I’ve known.” To Bekoff, love’s ultimate measure is the presence of its converse, grief.

Apparent grieving exists in the avian world, most notably among greylag geese, in whom individuals who’ve lost a partner display the classical symptoms of human depression: listlessness, a loss of appetite, lethargy lasting for weeks or even months. The same applies to pigeons. On Pigeon Talk, a website of pigeon-breeding hobbyists, anecdotes abound of birds sinking into a funk after losing their mates, and sometimes refusing to take another mate for up to a year afterward—no small time for a species that typically lives for less than a decade.

One of the most moving stories involves mourning doves. After a dove was eaten by a hawk in the backyard of a forum member called TheSnipes, the mate stood beside the body for weeks. “I finally couldn’t stand to watch it any more and picked up every feather and trace of remains that was left there and got rid of it,” wrote TheSnipes. “The mate continued to keep a vigil at that spot though, for many months, all through the spring and summer.”

McMahon noted something I hadn’t considered: There are good and bad pigeon couples. Some are attentive and physically affectionate, constantly stroking one another’s feathers. Others appear distant and peckish. As human love varies, so might theirs. Not every pigeon’s tale need be so romantic as Fly High, Fly Low, Don Freeman’s delightful children’s book about the search of Sid for his mate Midge, lost to him—though only for a while—when workers take down the sign in which they’ve made their nest. Others might better resemble Maud and Claud of Patricia Highsmith’s “Two Disagreeable Pigeons,” regarding each other with pique and scorn, kept together by inertia and habit.

It’s also worth considering whether pigeons might experience aspects of love that we don’t. Could a bird whose basic physiology adapts to changing seasons, who can perceive atmospheric infrasound, and see Earth’s magnetic field, have emotional capacities beyond our own? Including, perhaps, forms of love that are not merely analogues of our cherished feelings, but something unique to them?

- More Here

Bubba Becomes First Fish To Survive Chemotherapy

38 years ago, an anonymous donor dragged a large, sloshing bucket to the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, USA, dropped it at the reception desk, and disappeared. When staff pried open the lid, they discovered Bubba – a giant grouper fish, presumably caught and determined too big to take care of. A note attached to the lid asked for the fish to get to a good home.

Upon deeper examination, doctors learned more about the Epinephelus lanceolatus. At the time, she was only 10 in long, and was a Queensland grouper – a species fast disappearing in nature. The "super grouper" needed treatment, so they nursed Bubba back to health and found her a new home in a tank in the coral fish exhibit, where the predator happily swelled to 4.5 ft (1.37 m) and a whopping 69.3 kilos (150 lbs).

While there, she became a popular attraction, as visitors marvelled at her mysterious origin story and compassionate change in circumstances. And when she was briefly removed from exhibition in 1998, fans were distraught.

"That's when we found out how popular [s]he was," said Shedd spokesman Roger Germann, to the Washington Post, "because we started getting letters from people saying they couldn't find Bubba on their last visit and wanted to know what had happened."

Midway though the 1990s, Bubba underwent her second big life change as she transitioned to male, as groupers often do. This is a common reproductive strategy in fish species, whereby the larger female fish in a tank change sex to male, while the smaller fish remain female – and since Bubba was so big, scientists weren’t exactly surprised!

But scientists were shocked to find in 2001 that Bubba, their beloved grouper, had cancer. 

While this usually is a sure sign of a fish’s demise, because of Bubba’s size, scientists decided to take the unprecedented step of treating him with chemotherapy. This was never attempted before on a fish, but groupers can live 30 to 50 years, so if successful, they would be making advances in cancer treatments, while giving Bubba years of his life back.

Luckily, Bubba responded well to the treatment, and he became the first fish to survive chemotherapy – and cancer! 

After his treatments, he spent many happy years entertaining visitors and serving as an inspiration for human cancer survivors. The Shedd Aquarium reported receiving many calls from people affected by the disease, especially children, asking how Bubba was and gaining strength and courage from the knowledge that he had survived his own ordeal and that chemotherapy had extended his life. And beyond that, he was a personal favourite for many at the aquarium.

"Bubba overcame some incredible odds over the years, and that's what made him so special to us," said George Parsons, director of the Shedd's Fish department, to the Underwater Times. "Every once in a while for the last three years we have been getting phone calls from kids with cancer or from their parents, wondering how he is doing." 

After regaining his health, Bubba was moved to a new home in the 400,000-gallon main pool of the Shedd's new $43 million Wild Reef gallery, so his fans could properly appreciate his beauty. He even got a new 5-inch friend – a golden trevally fish, which swims around him and eats his scraps.

"He is such a character," said Rachel Wilborn, one of his keepers, to the Washington Post. "He is so curious, always coming around to see what you are doing. If you give him a food item that he doesn't like, he spits it right back at you, then looks you right in the eye, waiting to see what else you can come up with."

After many happy years in his new home, the magnificent fish passed away in August 2006 from age-related issues. A Shedd official said his autopsy shows only “evidence of multiple organ system failure consistent with [Bubba’s] age.”

"It's going to be tough now, if I have to tell people he's no longer with us," said Parsons.

But nevertheless, even though Bubba has passed, his story lives on as a testament to the compassion of his healthcare providers and all who loved him. His body was even donated to Chicago’s Field Museum across the street, where they will keep Bubba’s skeleton as a part of its enormous fish collection and cryogenically freeze his tissue samples, preserving them for study by future generations of scientists.

"If you want to know why we went to all this effort for a fish," Wilborn said, "all you have to do is look into his adorable face. We did it for Bubs because he is such a cool fish."

- More Here

Finding Awe!

I am blessed. 

I lived for over 13 years in a state of Max's Awe and I still do.  has become our awe paradise. 

Thank you my love. "I" became irrelevant living and one day soon dying with you. 

Awe Is Good for Your Brain:

Some attribute the beginning of the study of awe to the Apollo 8 mission. In December 1968, three astronauts entered a small capsule—the vehicle for mankind’s first trip to the moon. (They orbited ten times but didn’t land.) Major William Anders glanced out the window in time to see his blue home planet rising above the stark lunar horizon. “Oh, my God,” he said. Then he took a photo.

Later called Earthrise, the image became one of the most famous photographs ever taken. Fifty years after Anders captured it, he said that the view of Earth changed his life, shaking his religious faith and underscoring his concern for the planet. “We set out to explore the moon,” he wrote about the experience, “and instead discovered the Earth.”

Dubbed the overview effect, the profound experiences shared by Anders and many astronauts helped usher in a wave of academic interest in transcendent events and their attendant emotion—notably, awe. Experimental psychologists tried to induce the emotion in laboratories, showing people pictures of earth taken from space, as well as videos of a flash mob performing the “Ode to Joy” movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or Susan Boyle wowing the world when she sang on Britain’s Got Talent. (If you haven’t seen Boyle doing her thing, look it up; I dare you not to feel some tingles.)

For research purposes, subjects let scientists measure their goose bumps, supplied cortisol samples before and after whitewater rafting, performed tedious cognitive tasks, and were fitted with suction probes to measure something that’s called “awe face.”

Researchers pondered many aspects of awe, including why experiencing it caused some people to feel greater belonging or generosity. They speculated that awe may be the primary pathway through which therapeutic psychedelics help so many patients suffering from trauma, depression, anxiety, and addiction. They even asserted that experiencing awe may be the defining feature of our species.

For an emotion with so much riding on it, what seems surprising is that it took the academic world so long to take awe seriously.

“Science got into the awe game really late,” says Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and the author of the new book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.

Keltner grew up in 1960s California, raised by progressive parents. All around him people were exploring Buddhism, experimenting with mind-altering drugs, and communing with nature. It was also the golden age of spaceflight. “I was raised in a historical period that was in some sense devoted to awe,” he says. “But it was a neuroscientific and cognitive mystery.”

In 2003, Keltner and the psychologist Jonathan Haidt published one of the first academic papers on the experience. In “Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion,” the two scientists tried to pinpoint what exactly awe is. They combed through historical accounts by philosophers and mystics; what they arrived at was both eloquent and expansive.

“We said that awe is really an emotion you feel when you encounter something vast and mysterious that transcends your understanding of the world,” he says. The vastness part, he explains, doesn’t have to be literally vast, like a view from a mountaintop. It can be conceptually vast, like the anatomy of a bee or string theory or a late-night stoner realization that every mammal on earth must have a belly button.

In the two decades of research that followed, an even more remarkable conclusion emerged: that this state of mind could potentially alter us by unleashing feelings like humility, generosity, and a desire to reassess our lives. And sometimes even existential terror. Whether it’s cataclysmic or gentle, an awe experience could be an effective antidote to burnout, post-traumatic stress, heartbreak, and loneliness.

[---]

I had to admit, I hadn’t really been thinking of this spectacle from the plant’s perspective. It suddenly seemed a totally reasonable thing to do. Most of these plants have been around a lot longer than humans have. The seeds that created this bloom were made in the past. They finally germinated during this precious wet year, but the whole thrust of the extravagant effort was to make seeds for a future bloom in an outrageous cycle of hope. Godoy and I were standing, accidentally, in the middle of a space-time continuum that had absolutely nothing to do with us. We humans just need to not screw it up.

Then it hit me: the risk of chasing awe, of making it about personal growth, is that you dilute its strongest power. Because improving ourselves really isn’t the point of awe at all. I’d been doing it wrong, and it had taken a 27-year-old human and a cluster of yellow tickseeds to help me realize it. The point is this: by listening, we find a small seam in the universe through which to feel ourselves entirely irrelevant.

 

Psychodynamic Nonsense

The art of ‘being for another’ – following, listening to and making sense of another person’s world – has been practised for millennia. Humans have always discussed their lives, their values and their problems, trying to find meaning, solace and joy. Experts at this sort of discussion have been called wise women, shamans, priests – and now therapists. Then, starting with Sigmund Freud, came a series of attempts to create a science of psychotherapy out of it.

But there is very little science to it.

[---]

I became a psychotherapist and psychologist to maximise the good I could do in the world. It seemed obvious that helping people by engaging with the root of their suffering would be the most helpful thing to do. I also became a child psychotherapist to address the roots of suffering in childhood, where they seemed to stem. I experienced how deepening into a feeling could transform it, and learned about pre-natal trauma; I even wrote a doctorate on trauma. Now, two decades into my career, I practise, lecture, supervise and write about all of these things, but increasingly I reject everything that I learned. Instead, I practise the art of ‘being for another’, an idea that arose in conversation with my colleague Sophie de Vieuxpont. I’m a mentor, a friend in an asymmetrical friendship, and a sounding board and critical ally assisting people as they go through the complexities, absurdities, devastations and joys of life.

Along the way, over years of practise, I lost faith that awareness was always curative, that resolving childhood trauma would liberate us all, that truly feeling the feelings would allow them to dissipate, in a complex feedback loop of theory and practice.

The effect of your family environment matters very little when it comes to your personality

It started with returning to an old interest in evolutionary biology, with the release of Robert Plomin’s book Blueprint (2018). An account of twin studies, the book draws upon decades of twin statistics, from several countries, and the numbers were clear: childhood events and parenting rarely matter that much in terms of how we turn out.

That caused me to re-read Judith Rich Harris’s book No Two Alike (2006), which also examined twin studies along with wide-ranging studies of other species. Harris proposed that the brain was a toolbox honed by evolution to deliver sets of skills, leaving each of us utterly unique.

These books are perhaps summed up best in the second law of behavioural genetics: the influence of genes on human behaviour is greater than the family environment. I noticed my defences popping up, desperately trying to find holes in the science. But at the end of the day, without cherry-picking data conforming to what I learned in my training, the simple fact was this: twin sisters with identical genes raised in totally different families developed very similar personalities, while adopted sisters with no genetic links raised in the same family had very different personalities.

That finding, from the journal Developmental Psychology, undermined years of learning in psychodynamic theory. It means that the effect of your family environment – whether you are raised by caring or distant parents, whether in a low-income or high-income family – matters very little when it comes to your personality. If you’ve ever had any training in therapy, this goes against everything you have been taught.

Yet the tenets of psychotherapy did not reflect my clients’ lived experience, or even my own. Instead, we see what we expect to see, and we make sense of our past based on how we feel now. If I am sad, I will recall deprivation and strife in my childhood, while my happier brother remembers a more positive situation; consider the memoirs Running with Scissors (2002), Be Different (2011) and The Long Journey Home (2011), each a radically different depiction of the same family.

In the few longitudinal studies that have been made, where we track children and their adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) from early years to adulthood, there is no link between ACEs and subsequent adult mental ill health. There is only a link between adult mental ill health and the ‘recollection’ of ACEs. This may seem wildly counterintuitive to a profession steeped in trauma theory. ACEs have not been shown to cause mental ill health; it is rather that, when we suffer as adults, we interpret our childhoods as having been bad. I’m convinced that there are rare exceptions to this, of truly horrendous childhood experiences that do leave a mark, but even that certainty falters when I consider the fact that events that supposedly traumatise one person in a group fail to traumatise the others.

If you are denying what I’ve just written out of hand, you may be doing what religious fundamentalists have been doing for millennia. What I say may feel heartless, cold or politically toxic, but feelings aren’t epistemically valid grounds for rejecting information.

Our treatments could be largely pointless and potentially harmful

Instead, consider this: it is possible to care about suffering while reassessing your analysis of how it is caused and how it can be addressed. Perhaps a vast majority of therapy trainings are wrong about why people suffer. People in other cultures with radically different worldviews about how suffering develops and how best to deal with it also care deeply about helping people – they simply have a different way of doing it.

We need to reconsider why people suffer to help them in a better way. Freud and more recent trauma proponents like Gabor Maté tell us that our personalities and sufferings stem from how we were treated as children. This may resonate with us, but it could actually be wrong. If it is wrong, our treatments could be largely pointless and potentially harmful, and we need to critically examine these theories more carefully before we, as a profession, do more harm.

Historically, in many cultures around the world, from Nigeria to Malaysia, or the West more than 50 years ago, childhood has been seen as just one of the stages we move through, with no sacred status. We learn all the time, but suffering stems from how we now, at this time, relate to the world and what our current circumstances are.

Isn’t it a bit arrogant that so many in the West assume that this new, unevidenced theory – that suffering stems from childhood – should be universally true, or even true for us? How does the psychodynamic therapist, faced with their suffering client, feel resolute that they should dredge up the past, when philosophical traditions from across the world say the answer lies in the here and now? The Buddha, Lao Tzu, Aristotle and Jesus didn’t mention a word about childhood’s irreversible stain on the human condition – they saw us as individuals living through choices in the now.

- After decades of practising psychotherapy, I believe it has little foundation in science and often causes harm

My Beloved Monster by Caleb Carr

What a beautiful life is this one we have? Now, imagine that beauty is amplified in multitudes plus in multitude of dimensions when we share this bond with another non-human animal. 

Bloody, I am so damn lucky to have this in this lifetime with Max. I am so damn lucky! 

Now that Max is not present and my time is ticking, he left with Neo, Fluffy, Garph and now this year Saroo and Blue. 

Well, I am not the only one who is lucky; Caleb Carr's final book before he passed away is about his relationship with his cat Masha, My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me (review here).

The beauty of Carr's relationship is - for the first time someone writes this in an inverse way. He is not anthropomorphizing Masha but he thinks Masha was reverse anthropomorphizing. 

In this exquisite book novelist Caleb Carr tells the story of the “shared existence” he enjoyed for 17 years with his beloved cat, Masha. At the time of writing she is gone, he is going, and all that remains is to explain how they made each other’s difficult lives bearable. The result is not just a lyrical double biography of man and cat but a wider philosophical inquiry into our moral failures towards a species which, cute internet memes notwithstanding, continues to get a raw deal.

Carr explains how Masha picked him as her person when he first visited the animal rescue centre nearly 20 years ago. She was a Siberian forest cat – huge, nearer to her wild self than most domestic moggies, and utterly delightful, a long-bodied streak of red-gold whose forward-facing eyes gave her the look of a delighted baby. The rescue centre staff are desperate that Carr take her, and equally anxious that he should understand what he is getting into. This cat, apparently, fights, bites and is unbothered about seeming grateful. But then, why should she be? Abandoned by her previous owners, she was locked in an apartment and left to die. It is an obscenity, says Carr, that goes on more often than we can bear to imagine.

Once Carr gets Masha – a name he hopes sounds vaguely Siberian – home to his farmhouse on Misery Mountain in upstate New York, she starts to show her true “wilding” nature. Mice and voles are taken down with industrial efficiency. She even sees off a bear, dispatching it with a bloody nose. The only creature that gets the better of her is a wicked kind of weasel native to the area called a “fisher” which bites off her luscious tail and leaves her less nimble for the closing part of her life.

With Carr, though, Masha shows a different side. She is not a lap cat in any sense, but something better, an actively attentive partner. When Carr is racked with pain from his chronic neuropathy, Masha bores her broad Siberian forehead into his clenched body to release the agony. Or she sits by his head for hours at a time, looking anxiously for signs that the discomfort might be easing. “What will cynics call this,” Carr asks rhetorically, “if they will not call it love?” In return he makes her mixtapes of her favourite music, mostly Wagner. And, to help her through the August moon, a time when all cats in the American north-east long to stay outdoors all night, he sets up a halfway house for them on the porch with blankets, camping lights and a television, so that they can get through the high summer madness safely together.

There had been plenty of previous cats in Carr’s life, a succession of spirit animals who accompanied him as he grew up in a household that sounds frankly feral. His father was best friends with Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. Lucien Carr, who was prodigiously clever, madly violent and free with his fists, battered his middle son into profound anti-sociability. Caleb explains how he has spent most of his adult life dealing with these accumulated wounds – a fractured body with a cats’ cradle of internal adhesions, and an inability to hang on to a romantic relationship for more than a few months. Masha is the salve for this lifetime of self-loathing: “how I lived, what I chose to do, my very nature – all were good enough for her.”

The question of anthropomorphism inevitably raises its head. Carr tetchily denies it, maintaining that everything wondrous about Masha – her emotional receptivity, careful social etiquette, even her tactical stealing of visitors’ socks – can be explained as intentional either by the growing academic literature on animal consciousness or the close observations of her clever vets. Altogether more plausible is his suggestion that it is Masha who is doing a kind of anthropomorphism in reverse, ascribing traits of her own species to Carr in order to make his behaviour comprehensible.

By the end, though, it barely matters. Carr has become so enmeshed with Masha that it is getting hard to tell them apart. When she is diagnosed with terminal lymphoma you know that it will not be long before he follows. And, indeed, in May this year Caleb Carr died of cancer at the age of 68. He has left behind a beautiful book, one of the finest meditations on animal companionship that I have ever read.

Max's Gift - How to Live an Unregretting Life

The price we pay for being children of chance, born of a billion bright improbabilities that prevailed over the staggering odds of nothingness and eternal night, is the admission of our total cosmic helplessness. We have various coping mechanisms for it — prayer, violence, routine — and still we are powerless to keep the accidents from happening, the losses from lacerating, the galaxies from drifting apart.

Because our locus of choice is so narrow against the immensity of chance, nothing haunts human life more than the consequences of our choices, nothing pains more than the wistful wish to have chosen more wisely and more courageously — the chance untaken, the love unleapt, the unkind word in the time for tenderness. Regret — the fossilized fangs of should have sunk into the living flesh of is, sharp with sorrow, savage with self-blame — may be the supreme suffering of which we are capable. It poisons the entire system of being, for it feeds on the substance we are made of — time, entropic and irretrievable. It tugs at our yearning for, in James Baldwin’s perfect words, “reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error” and stings with the reminder that eventually “one will oneself become as irrecoverable as all the days that have passed.”

- Maria Popova on George Saunders

I was consumed by these thoughts all through my teens and twenties. I had no idea what to do nor how to tackle nor why it engulfed my life? 

And then Max came. Poof !! all those thoughts were gone while Max taught me to live life in the present with an awareness as humanely as possible. 

Plus what else I can ask from life when I had Max in my life? Everything else is just a bonus. 

Incarcerated Women & Buttery Redemption

One of the greatest failures of our generation is crime against incarcerated men and women. 

There is nothing even remotely close to rehabilitation nor reformation for these people. Loss of complete life while living, disintegration of families, economic cost and worst perpetuating cycle of violence. 

I am glad there is some hope with this change. No surprise, this is coming via our fellow sentient beings we share the planet with. This is just hope for incarcerated people but maybe a precursor to who we rewrite our economics and how we work. 

Heather wears her dark hair in braids. She’s also wearing a bright red sweater marked DOC for Department of Corrections, identifying her as an inmate of Mission Creek Corrections Center for Women, a minimum security prison located near Belfair, Washington. Heather is not her real name. She says she feels lucky to be participating in this work while she serves her sentence here. She shows me around with a proud, almost parental smile. Along with eight other incarcerated women, Heather is entrusted with the care and feeding of nearly 4,000 members of an endangered species, the Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly. With this trust comes the privilege of working just beyond the razor-wire fence during the day before returning to life among the general prison population each night.

[---]

Recognizing the need for urgent action, the Oregon Zoo began a captive breeding program for the species in 2003. In 2011, the zoo helped establish the breeding program at Mission Creek as part of The Evergreen State College and Washington State’s Sustainability in Prisons Project. Since then, the work undertaken by these incarcerated women has become one of the last best hopes for the species’ survival.

On this mid-March morning, the air inside the program’s two greenhouses is warm compared with the shade of the surrounding forest and the adjacent prison yard. Metal racks containing hundreds of identical plastic cups house hungry caterpillars waiting to be fed the leafy green plantain the women grow in a garden outside.

After spending six months in a hibernation-like state known as diapause, the caterpillars roused in late January and have been busy bulking up ever since. After they’re released, they will continue to eat and grow through mid-March to mid-April, after which they’ll pupate beneath dry wood and vegetation and undergo metamorphosis. Their chrysalises, with cream-and-gray bands alternating with orange and black dots, offer a pastel preview of the butterfly to come. Only a few chrysalises have been found in the wild. In April or May, they emerge as adults and take to the air on wings of vivid red or orange and white, outlined in black, calling to mind the brightly hued geometry of stained-glass windows. Their life as butterflies is fleeting—just one to 14 days—but they use that time to mate and lay clusters of approximately 100 bright yellow, quinoa-sized eggs that take on a maroon hue before hatching. A single butterfly can lay up to 1,000 eggs. From those eggs, new caterpillars will appear, fatten up, enter diapause in June or July, and then awaken in January or February to, hopefully, continue the cycle in the wild.

[---]

“When I told my family what I do,” Brooke explains, “they said, ‘we’re so proud of you, that you are doing something that has such a profound mission in the world.’” She finds the work meditative, and despite the “shocking” amount of data she must record, she says the work provides a feeling of satisfaction at the end of the day.

Heather agrees, and admits the job is also on her mind at night. “I literally have dreams about being able to sleep in these greenhouses.”

Over the course of about a week, most of the caterpillars are taken away for release in the wild. For the women who raised them, it’s surprisingly hard to let go.

“I just didn’t think you could form a bond with an insect like that,” Heather declares. “I cried yesterday, saying goodbye.”

Before they leave, she has a message for them: the fate of the species is riding on your shoulders. “You got this,” she says. 

 

Jon Stewart Remembers His Best Boy, Dipper

 Boy! My wish for you is to find that one dog. 

 

I got more than I dreamt for in this life from Max. People don't understand that unique oneness which transcends everything I know as a human being. 

I am blessed because of you Max. 

I miss you and miss me in you my love. 

But I have you in me which keeps me going.

The Cognitive Foundations of Fictional Stories

Abstract

We hypothesize that fictional stories are highly successful in human cultures partly because they activate evolved cognitive mechanisms, for instance for finding mates (e.g., in romance fiction), exploring the world (e.g., in adventure and speculative fiction), or avoiding predators (e.g., in horror fiction). In this paper, we put forward a comprehensive framework to study fiction through this evolutionary lens. The primary goal of this framework is to carve fictional stories at their cognitive joints using an evolutionary framework. Reviewing a wide range of adaptive variations in human psychology – in personality and developmental psychology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary biology, among other disciplines –, this framework also addresses the question of inter individual differences in preferences for different features in fictional stories. It generates a wide range of predictions about the patterns of combinations of such features, according to the pattern's of variations in the mechanisms triggered by fictional stories. As a result of a highly collaborative effort, we present a comprehensive review of evolved cognitive mechanisms that fictional stories activate. To generate this review, we listed more than 70 adaptive challenges humans faced in the course of their evolution, identified the adaptive psychological mechanisms that evolved in response to such challenges, specified four sources of adaptive variability for the sensitivity of each mechanism (i.e., personality traits, sex, age, and ecological conditions), and linked these mechanisms to the story features that trigger them. This comprehensive framework lays the ground for a theory-driven research program for the study of fictional stories, their content, distribution, structure, and cultural evolution.

- Full Paper Here

Charles Darwin & Alfred Russel Wallace - Humanity Raises Its Head From Its Collective Abyss Of Ignorance

Darwin is not ready for this blow. His infant son, Charles Waring Darwin, born with Down syndrome, is not doing well: the boy is infected with the bacterium that causes scarlet fever, the same disease that killed his older sister seven years ago.

After this girl, Anne, had finally succumbed to the disease, Darwin wrote that his wife Emma and he had buried “the joy of the household,” and he settled into a long sadness.

And now it is happening again.

These catastrophes transpire while Darwin is laboring on a huge book about a simple idea he calls natural selection. For over twenty years he has solicited specimens from collectors scattered all over the world; selectively bred pigeons and orchids; sat for hours observing the behaviors of ants; boiled the flesh from rabbit carcasses and compared their bones. In the process he has accumulated thousands of pages of manuscript.

This is all done to propose a mechanism for an old idea–“the transmutation of species,” what Darwin prefers to call “descent with modification”–an idea that has not gone away in spite of scorn heaped on it by natural philosopher and clergyman alike.

The essay in Darwin’s possession has come from the hand of one of those collectors from whom he has solicited evidence. Alfred Russel Wallace is no stranger to suffering and loss. Like Darwin, he once spent four years in South America collecting massive numbers of specimens. During that time, he nearly shot off his own hand; lost his brother, Herbert, to the mosquito-borne virus that causes yellow fever; became shipwrecked in the middle of the Atlantic, losing everything he had accumulated except his diary and some sketches.

The essay he sent Darwin was written under extreme duress: Wallace had contracted malaria, another mosquito-borne plague, this time a parasitic protozoan instead of a virus. While feverish in bed, he envisioned the same mechanism for species change that Darwin had been documenting for decades.

[---]

Convinced his life’s work has been “forestalled,” he gives the paper to his friends Charles Lyell, author of Principles of Geology, and Joseph Hooker, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, as Wallace has requested him to do. They come up with a plan to simultaneously credit Wallace’s originality while preserving Darwin’s precedence: They solicit from Darwin a book extract, “On the Variation of Organic Beings in a state of Nature; etc.”, and they present these men’s ideas jointly at an upcoming meeting of the Linnean Society of London and publish them side-by-side in the Society’s journal.

As these revolutionary works are being read aloud to an audience of thirty listeners, one author recovers from illness in faraway Borneo; the other attends his baby son’s burial in Downe.

Thus, on two sturdy limbs, humanity raises its head from its collective abyss of ignorance. Through them, we are permitted to gaze back, back, back upon our original selves and discover that we are not what we once thought we were.

- More Here

Oxytocin, Maximus, & Me

I have written so many times that Max changed my life. 

What does that even mean? What did he change ? And How did he change?

When such questions come up; I think of Ellie Arroway's lines played by Jodie Foster in the movie Contact: 

Senator: You come to us with no evidence, no record, no artifacts. Only a story that, to put it mildly, strains credibility... Are you really going to sit there and tell us that we should just take this all on faith? 

Ellie Arroway: Is it possible that it didn't happen? Yes... As a scientist I must concede that. I must volunteer that. 

Michael Kitz: [raises voice] Then why don't you simply withdraw your testimony and admit that this journey to the center of the galaxy, IN FACT, NEVER TOOK PLACE!!?? 

Arroway: Because I can't! I had an experience... I can't prove it, I can't even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real! I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever... A vision of the universe that tells us, undeniably, how tiny, and insignificant and how ... rare, and precious we all are! A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves, that we are not — that none of us — are alone! ... I wish I could share that. I wish, that everyone, if even for one moment, could feel that awe, and humility, and hope! But ... that continues to be my wish. 

One of the gifts Max gave me is the gift of observation. I saw how observant he was while I picked the wrong friends, the wrong marriage which ended in a divorce and so many wrong things because I couldn't see what was right under my nose. 

Max changed this. Our love for each other made me extremely observant. At this point in life; I can tell so much about a person without language just by observing their eyebrows move, their eyes, twitching of nose, lips and other subtle emotions without any sound.

But I couldn't even explain this gift properly. 

Until now this new research slowly unveils little details on how Max changed me:

When love is in the air, what’s happening in the brain? For many years, biologists would answer, “Oxytocin!” This small protein — just nine amino acids long — has sometimes been called “the love hormone” because it has been implicated in pair-bonding, maternal care and other positive, love-like social behaviors.

But lately, neuroscientists have been revising their thinking about oxytocin. Experiments with mice and other lab animals suggest that instead of acting as a trigger for pro-social behavior, the molecule may simply sharpen the perception of social cues, so that mice can learn to target their social behavior more accurately. “It turns out it’s not as simple and straightforward as ‘oxytocin equals love,’” says Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University. If something similar is true of humans, that may, among other things, add a fresh wrinkle in attempts to treat social disorders such as autism by tinkering with the oxytocin system.

[---]

“There’s a lot of noise in the brain,” says Larry Young, a behavioral neuroscientist at Emory University who, with coauthor Robert Froemke, explores our new understanding of oxytocin in the 2021 Annual Review of Neuroscience. “But when oxytocin is released, it turns down the static so the signal comes in much more clearly.”

That clarity is familiar to new parents, says Froemke, a neuroscientist at New York University Grossman School of Medicine and Young’s coauthor. “I’ve got two little kids,” he says. “Even two rooms away, air conditioner on, and I’m deep asleep, the baby starts crying and right away I’m awake and attending, full-pupil-dilated.” 

[---]

Neuroscientists also note that even though oxytocin clearly plays an important role in regulating social behaviors like pair-bonding and parental care, it’s not the only actor. “Falling in love is a full brain and body experience,” says Kozorovitskiy. “It has sensory elements and cognitive elements, and memory is important. Is oxytocin one of the many modulators that is mediating all those changes? Absolutely. But can we pin it all on oxytocin? That’s definitely an oversimplification.”

Unusual Friendship Between Wolf And Bear Documented By Finnish Photographer

 

“It’s very unusual to see a bear and a wolf getting on like this” says Finnish photographer Lassi Rautiainen, 56, who took these surprising photos. The female grey wolf and male brown were spotted every night for ten days straight, spending several hours together between 8pm and 4am. They would even share food with each other.

“No-one can know exactly why or how the young wolf and bear became friends,” Lassi told the Daily Mail. “I think that perhaps they were both alone and they were young and a bit unsure of how to survive alone…It is nice to share rare events in the wild that you would never expect to see.”

- More Here

What I've Been Reading

This book is not about sadness - at least, not in the modern sense of the word. The word sadness originally meant "fullness" from the same latin word, satis, that also gave us sated and satisfaction. Not so long ago, to be sad meant you were filled to the brim with some intensity of experience. It wasn't just a malfunction in the joy machine. It was a state of awareness - setting the focus to infinity and taking it all in, joy and grief all at once. 

When we speak of sadness these days, most of the time what we really mean is despair, which is literally defined as the absence of hope. But true sadness is actually the opposite, an exuberant upwelling that reminds you how fleeting and mysterious and open-ended life can be. That's why you'll find traces of blues all over this book, but you might find yourself feeling strangely joyful at the end of it. And if you are lucky enough to feel sad, well, savor it while it lasts - if only because it means that you care about something in this world enough to let it under your skin. 

Wow!! I would in the top 0.0001% of the people in the world who hates constant happiness in life. 

Pleasure, happiness, joy are such a small subset of zillion feelings all living beings can experience in their life time. Limiting oneself to just "happiness" robs one of these other innumerable rich and wonderful experiences which are necessary for a fully lived life. 

Who knew one day I would devour a dictionary in no time plus relish each page of it? 

That's the feeling I got while reading The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig. 

Here's my favorite word: 

Ambedo - a momentary trance of emotional clarity. 

You look around at all the people who happen to share this corner of the world, and imagine where they came from, marveling that all of their paths managed to cross at this particular point in time. You think back to the series of events that bought you here, your choices and your mistakes and your achievements, such as they are. All the twists and turns over the years. It wasn't what you thought it would be and yet you can still look back on all the things you've lost, and the opportunities that cat came and went, and feel a pang of gratitude that it happened at all. And now here you are, feeling a kind of joyful grief for your life, in all its blessings and mysteries and chances and changes. 

You look around with a new sense of gratitude, taking in the complexity of things" raindrops skittering down window, tall tress leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee. Everything falls quiet, and the words start to lose their meaning. It all seems to mix together, until you can't tell the difference between the ordinary and the epic. And you remember that you too are guest on this Earth. Your life is not just a quest, or an opportunity, or a story to tell; it's also just an experience, to be lived for its own sake. It doesn't have to mean anything other than what it is. A single moment can still stand on its own, as a morsel of existence. 

But after a minute or two, you'll feel your hand reaching for your phone or the car radio, eager to drown out your thoughts with distraction. Perhaps there's a part of you that's instinctively wary of lingering too long in any one moment. 

We breathe this world in, and hold on to it as long as we can, but we can't just stop there. We have to keep moving, digging around for some deeper meaning, hoping to find an escape hatch between one experience and the next. So we never feel stuck inside one little little moment, one little life. 

And maybe when you read this book, you will find some of your rich feelings and experiences has a new word for it. And when you coin a word to an emotion, maybe it will make you more grateful and humble. Just, maybe. 

The Coincidence Project

In February 1973, Dr. Bernard Beitman found himself hunched over a kitchen sink in an old Victorian house in San Francisco, choking uncontrollably. He wasn’t eating or drinking, so there was nothing to cough up, and yet for several minutes he couldn’t catch his breath or swallow.

The next day his brother called to tell him that 3,000 miles away, in Wilmington, Del., their father had died. He had bled into his throat, choking on his own blood at the same time as Beitman’s mysterious episode.

Overcome with awe and emotion, Beitman became fascinated with what he calls meaningful coincidences. After becoming a professor of psychiatry at the University of Missouri-Columbia, he published several papers and two books on the subject and started a nonprofit, the Coincidence Project, to encourage people to share their coincidence stories.

“What I look for as a scientist and a spiritual seeker are the patterns that lead to meaningful coincidences,” said Beitman, 80, from his home in Charlottesville, Va. “So many people are reporting this kind of experience. Understanding how it happens is part of the fun.”

[---]

Beitman defines a coincidence as “two events coming together with apparently no causal explanation.” They can be life-changing, like his experience with his father, or comforting, such as when a loved one’s favorite song comes on the radio just when you are missing them most.

[---]

People who describe themselves as spiritual or religious report noticing more meaningful coincidences than those who do not, and people are more likely to experience coincidences when they are in a heightened emotional state — perhaps under stress or grieving.

The most popular explanation among survey respondents for mysterious coincidences: God or fate. The second explanation: randomness. The third is that our minds are connected to one another. The fourth is that our minds are connected to the environment.

For Beitman, no single explanation suffices. “Some say God, some say universe, some say random and I say ‘Yes,’” he said. “People want things to be black and white, yes or no, but I say there is mystery.”

He’s particularly interested in what he’s dubbed simulpathity — feeling a loved one’s pain at a distance, as he believes he did with his father. Science can’t currently explain how it might occur, but in his books he offers some nontraditional ideas, such as the existence of “the psychosphere,” a kind of mental atmosphere through which information and energy can travel between two people who are emotionally close though physically distant.

In his new book published in September, “Meaningful Coincidences: How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen,” he shares the story of a young man who intended to end his life by the shore of an isolated lake. While he sat crying in his car, another car pulled up and his brother got out.

When the young man asked for an explanation, the brother said he didn’t know why he got in the car, where he was going, or what he would do when he got there. He just knew he needed to get in the car and drive.

- More Here

What I've Been Reading

Before that day, I had always thought that I needed to be somebody in the world. That rhino and the path he walked told me something different: don’t try to be someone, rather find the thing that is so engaging that it makes you forget yourself.

The Lion Tracker's Guide To Life by Boyd Varty.

What a book!! I never know Lion tracking is a profession leave alone that one can learn immensely from it. Talk about realities of life right under the nose but yet we aren't aware of it. 

Thank you Boyd Varty for penning your experiences in the beautiful book. 

• That’s how mentors should be made: not through titles or words but through actions. On the ground, in the face of a leopard, one feels acutely alone. To be guided in a moment like that, with such extreme stakes, creates a bond that is rare in modern life. 

• Unlike modern men who have been taught to live in competition, Renias lives in profound relation with his surroundings.  

• Too much uncertainty is chaos, but too little is death.  

• I transition from endless doing into a steady being.  

• Trackers try things. The tracker on a lost track enters a process of rediscovery that is fluid. He relies on a process of elimination, inquiry, conformation; a process of discovery and feedback. He enters a ritual of focused attention. As paradoxical as it sounds, going down a path and not finding a track is part of finding the track. Alex and Renias call this "the path of not here." No action is considered a waste, and the key is to keep moving, readjusting, welcoming feedback. The path of not here is part of the path of here.  

• The core of coaching does have a powerful central premise: you beliefs about life are not a reality. A great coach asks you to question your deeply held beliefs and rules for yourself. You can go only as far into the experience of creating life as the limits of your personal belief system will allow.  

• If you never left a place, you may never know how deeply it has gone into your cells. Only in its absence, a world away in another land, would you hear its song calling back to you, playing the music of your longing.  

• The tracker reimagines the hypothesis based on new evidence. He then does what scientists who have studied tracking call "speculative deductive tracking." 

• In truth I am done. I could go home now and be happy. I hear Joseph Campbell: "People are not looking for the meaning of life, they are looking for the feeling of being alive." If that was it, I found it.  

• Step off the superhighway of modern life and go quietly onto your own track. Go to a new trail where you can hear the whisper of your wild self in the echoes of the forest. Fin the trail of something wild and dangerous and worthy of your fear and joy and focus. Live deeply in your own inner guidance. There is nothing more healing than finding your gifts and sharing them. 

The miracle is not walking on water; the miracle is walking on the earth. The miracle is all around us as the awareness of life itself. 

- Thich Nhat Hahn

And the final thoughts from Boyd: 

You must become a tracker and set out on the trail of your wild life. If you track your authentic life and uncover its meaning, it will catalyze other possibilities for living, and what's important to you will immediately change. Meaning doesn't want more; when you're in deep touch with your wild self, you know you have enough and are enough. From that place of enough, you act in service, because that's what feeds you. It's a lot of individuals going on that journey of discovery that will create transformation. 

Remember to prepare for the call. Know the call when it comes by the fact that not doing it would feel profoundly wrong. Open yourself to the unknown. Develop your track awareness. Amidst all of the information that surrounds us, learn to see what is deeply important to you. Use the feelings in your body as a guide. Live on the first tracks. 

Anything that puts you into your essence, no matter how small, is valuable. Even if you don't know where it's going, play with it. Find friends to track with, lose the track, keep trying things, get feedback. Find your flow and remember to see how many unexpected things come into your life by living this way. It will be scary at times. Let the fear bring you to life. I suspect that if you give yourself the room to live each day as a tracker, a deep calling to serve will emerge. 

These Lyrics Still Brings Tears...

I think this will be an everlasting emotional redux - Relationships Are Everlasting Stories. 

This relationship of ours was a short story but yet, it is a small part of the least understood and everlasting human-animal bond. 

These simple bonds will not only outlive self-centered humans but someday might save and protect this beautiful planet. 

Thank you Max for giving me a glimpse of life before I fall.