I certainly have my ideas, but I’m not going to jinx it or create a self-fulfilling prophecy on the matter. Sometimes the easy is hard and the hard comes easy, and — above all — people suck at making predictions (except in the case of self-fulfilling prophesies.)
Be your authentic self.
And stop touching yourself so much.
But the first advice wouldn’t be understood, and the second would be ignored, so I’m not sure that it would be a productive undertaking.
I am. I wish my country the best, am pained to see ailments of what have always been the country’s greatest strengths (the government being limited and at the command of the people and the law [rather than the other way around] and the courage to boldly lead by building the new technologies and adapting to the world that came to be,) and will not stop bitching about it unless and until the situation rights itself. When I was a young man, I served in the military and waved flags. Now, as an old man, I’m not eager to see America go gently into that good night.
I realize that may sound excessively Pollyanna about America’s past and pessimistic about the present / future. I do realize that the country has always had its flaws, as humanity always does. (And loved it all the same.) There have been missteps and mass movements that would later come to be viewed as wrongheaded and self-defeating. But we always had checks and balances, an Enlightenment norm for tolerance, and a respect for decorum and gravitas in our leaders. Now, as I see the “Putin-Orban Manual for New Populist-Nationalist Dictators” being played out, I wonder if the shark hasn’t been jumped on all that was good, honorable, and impressive in the America in which I grew up.
If such a situation were to avail itself, I would make a law so that no one person — even a high elected official — could change the law unilaterally. (Administrative policies for the bureaucracy not being laws, said high elected official could go to town on them.) Why? Because one person being able to change law is an affront to democracy and to the very concept of rule of law, and if we make it the object of fantasy to be able to do so we are cooked.
We had such a law in the US. It was called the Constitution, and it was glorious. It said that only the legislature (a body consisting of many representatives) could make law, and only the judiciary could interpret and evaluate the legality of a law. And it was okay that the executive was the least democratic of branches because it was to stay in the lane of enforcing the laws as they were written (and shaped by judicial interpretation,) and if the executive started getting too big for his britches, the legislature would turn off the flow of money.
So, my great fantasy is not to be able to unilaterally change law, but to have three functioning branches of government who stay in their own lanes, applying checks as (and only as) described in the Constitution.
Regularly teleports to new and interesting places. Ideally, compact from the outside but comfortable inside. So, I guess a TARDIS would be my dream home.
Seek a second and third independent source. The News is increasingly unreliable.
Velcro and Sticky Notes! We knew how to fasten things, but before then we couldn’t fasten things in a half-assed fashion. As Laozi says in the Daodejing [Ch. 40,] “Returning is the movement of Tao; yielding is the way of Tao.” So, to be able to stick and unstick at will is the highest virtue under heaven.
[NOTE: Technically, research indicates both inventions predate me, but I don’t believe ether became popular for household consumer use until my lifetime.]
I wake up. I don’t die. I go to sleep.
The reclining Buddha oversees
the diligent seated Buddha.
Is this an analogy of the mind,
or just a monk's proclivity
toward a superabundance
of Buddhas?
Tiger Riding for Beginners 