What does it mean to be a kid at heart?
The capacity to see humor in flatulence, even when it’s your own.
Oh, wait, maybe I’m thinking of a “kid at fart.”
PROMPT: Kid at Heart
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Category Archives: Life
PROMPT: Moon
How much would you pay to go to the moon?
Not one thin dime. I have no pressing need to go to a place without breathable quantities of oxygen for longer than I can hold my breath. If complex technology is required every millisecond to stay alive… well, I know where I’m not wanted.
I’ll leave it to the billionaires who have enough spare change lying around to fund personal space programs.
I’ll stick to gazing at it admiringly from afar.
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PROMPT: Historical Events
What major historical events do you remember?
From the Iranian Hostage Crisis onward, pretty much all of them — given they were considered “major” in whatever place I was living at the time.
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PROMPT: Emergency Plan
Create an emergency preparedness plan.
For Zombies: walk briskly.
For Global Thermonuclear War: Find a nice place near a likely ground zero for instantaneous demolecularization — so as to avoid slow death by radiation sickness & nuclear winter starvation.
For Climate Change: carry a Nomex suit, a rubber raft, and an umbrella.
For aliens: assume Roddenberry was right until proven otherwise. (If Hawking was right, we’re screwed anyway.)
For all else: maintain a peppy, can-do attitude.
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Ubiquity [Blank Verse]
I ran into a seeker from far lands,
and asked him what he sought in my hometown.
He said he sought what's true and beautiful.
I asked him if it was here, more than his home?
"Sometimes you have to walk a thousand miles
to find that which resides beneath your nose.
To unlock truth, the tumblers must align
from the shake of experience and time."
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PROMPT: Security or Adventure?
Uh, we are all seeking both. That is the fundamental strain of being human — the struggle between a need for novelty and a need for familiarity. We are all both tribesman and traveler — though in varied proportion. I love the traveler more in my own particular self.
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PROMPT: Better w/ Age
As far as life experiences, I find just about everything gets better with age. It’s probably to do with the dawning realization that most of the shit one has gotten worked up about over the years wasn’t worth it (as well as the realization that one has fewer years ahead than behind and so one had better get on with it in an aware kind of way.) As icing on the cake, I’m virtually certain to be long gone before the oceans boil or the robots rise up and massacre humanity.
If the question is what kind of things get better with age… certainly not french fries.
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PROMPT: Comfort
What strategies do you use to increase comfort in your daily life?
I don’t, but I have a lot of strategies for being more content in the face of various situations and environments — including uncomfortable ones. These include the yogic practice of dispassionate witnessing, minimalism, travel (and specifically minimalist travel to places – the less familiar the better,) and intense physical activity.
I think comfort as a major objective in life is overrated, and virtually insures a discontented life. A life in which one can be content, whatever may come along, is a happy life.
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PROMPT: Vacation
Describe your most memorable vacation.
That’s a tough one, but I have to go with a trip to the Peruvian Andes about twelve-ish years ago. As a person from Northwest Indiana (where anthills appear on topographic maps,) it was my first time in the Very High Altitude range. We hiked through the Salkantay Pass (15,000+ft / 4500+m) on the second day of a trek with me vomiting (water, as my stomach was long devoid of other contents) every couple switch-backs. I’m told I was literally green, but can’t confirm for lack of mirrors. But I trudged through, one glacial step at a time.
At the end of our trip, we were in Arequipa and needed to get back to Cuzco for our flight out. After buying bus tickets, we discovered that the road from Arequipa to Cuzco would be shut down by a transportation strike, and that everyone was honoring the strike as they sometimes turned violent. After a day of frustration, we surrendered to the situation, traded in our Arequipa-Cuzco tickets for Arequipa-Lima tickets, and we got into Lima (where we had a layover) early enough to arrange to join the flight there.
The reason this stands out as such a wonderful trip (besides all the beautiful sights: Titicaca, Machu Picchu, the Andes, all the Incan ruins and old Spanish churches; not to mention the delicious food) is the powerful life lessons it taught me. First, I’ve never felt closer to death than crossing through Salkantay Pass, and yet one step at a time got me through. Second, I learned not to butt heads with changing circumstance, but rather flow over, around, or under. Lastly, trips where things go wrong produce the dividend of great stories. Nobody cares about your trip to Paris where everything went smoothly, but they can’t get enough about the trip to Zaire where you got Malaria and were caught up in an insurrection or the cruise where passengers started turning to zombies.
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PROMPT: Gratitude
I have a daily practice of FEELING gratitude for this awesome life and all that contributes to said awesomeness. I don’t place much emphasis on EXPRESSING emotion beyond the usual social protocols and niceties. Quite frankly, I think expression of gratitude is overrated. It binds the process up with ego and desire for reciprocity, and the next thing you know you’ve lost all touch with the experience of gratitude and the powerful influence it has on fostering a positive outlook.
Furthermore, when one emphasizes expression, one tends to develop a blind-spot, thinking that the only entities worthy of consideration of gratefulness are other intelligent beings (or constructs attributed intelligence — e.g. gods.) I begin (though do not end) my practice of gratitude with my body (/ mind) and its systems. I’ve been told many people have trouble fostering gratitude when they focus on their body, but I don’t think one really understands gratitude if one can’t feel deep gratitude for one’s body and mind (literal warts and all.) For the body is the means by which one experiences everything, and one can only be unconditionally grateful for it. [For those who have trouble being grateful for body and mind, I’d recommend the book, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” by Jean-Dominique Bauby. It’s a short read because it was dictated using eye-blinks by a man who developed “Locked-in Syndrome,” a condition that left its author only with conscious control of an eyelid.]
Tiger Riding for Beginners 