The gods, or god, or the universe, or whatever, is a constant and ruthless killer. Homicide, femicide, infanticide are just part of its murderous repertoire. It is ruthless in especially seeking out the weak and the old, but it varies its methods to deal unsuspected and surprising blows. Always effective. 

A religion or philosophy that ignores these facts is itself dead on arrival. Not only why must we die, not only what does it mean that we die, but most importantly what does a consideration of certain death mean for how we live each of our moments.

This is obviously a topic that I must return to again and again. But I know some things for certain:

• There is no escaping death. 
• The death of people whom we never knew nor knew about does not much affect us. 
• Properly aroused, any one of us can become an agent of death. 
• And society too often resorts to it as a tool for control.

And the elephant in the room is that we are constantly immersed in death, not only in our own replicating cells, but also in our daily meals and habits. Of course in such cases we do not kill people, but the end of life remains.

Thus I open a discussion as I, like others, try to understand what is the proper way to feel – as I do – that I am an immortal while simultaneously knowing I am not.

One of the vast and Inseparable differences between life and non-life is what each is doing when it is “doing nothing.”

Nothing in the universe really does nothing, of course. An inert asteroid is still moving rapidly, turning. A rock on the ground is a seething froth of molecules and energy fields, absorbing or radiating energy, possibly undergoing radioactive change, affected by chemical or physical processes.

But life is nothing but doing something. Always chemical reactions as busy little proteins, RNA, DNA go about their business, as protoplasm sloshes here and there, as molecules are built or deconstructed. All in a moment, infinite and instant, uncountable millions and trillions of changes on and on. All that to mostly survive and continue and replicate.  That is what life is.

So when I sit and do nothing all afternoon I am actually doing quite a lot. Ah, you say, but that doesn’t count because you haven’t willed any of it.

I get your point, but even there I’m not sure I agree. An inaction is really a type of action in a constantly fermenting cosmos. If I do not chop down a tree, for example, that has consequences just as if I killed it for firewood.

Enchantment separates us from the beasts and everything else in the universe. Enchantment is a state of being in which one is carried beyond the bounds of merely living. It may be best distilled in the common experiences of being in love, the religious impulse, or an overwhelming sense of wonder.

It is barely possible to imagine a cat or elephant being enchanted. It is impossible to consider anything else, including the machines we have labeled artificial intelligence, being so. Without enchantment, we are empty and depressed.

Enchantment can be evoked by strong emotions. Or by beautiful environment. Or by a lovely network of logical ideas. Or by stories, or poetry, or science, or other people…. 

Enchantment can also blind us, turn us Inward and obsessive, usually in a good way but sometimes towards evil. Our saving grace is that any given focus of enchantment is fractal and fragile, easily lost, easily fixated on something else. But still the most important attribute our mind possesses.

I try to cultivate it all the time, and should I find it dimming, I usually stop and pause to let the wonder of the universe once more saturate my soul.

What is the right length to communicate a thought? Depends on the circumstances. A vote is simple yes or no, a lecture can go on for hours.

An aphorism must embody seeds of contradiction and complexity, or it is a vapid slogan. An entertainment can go on for a long time with only a simple goal to engage an audience with laughter, tears, or forgetfulness. Traditionally an essay has been useful at least for the last half millennium or so.

I am limiting my attempts here to one handwritten page of lined paper. That means no long, involved chains of logic. But also, like essays and aphorisms, self-contained. Something I would hope to inspire thought, rather than settle provocative issues.

This is an era when written and spoken communication is far cheaper on a mass scale than it ever was. Sure, in the old days, a bar room conversation or argument could continue for weeks, but it remained local. Now via electronics the transitory and internal are commingled and impossible to separate. So it shall be with these small attempts to help myself understand what I may believe this moment.

Not always profound, nor happy, nor desperate. Just more words and thoughts cast out to the void, imagined for the fun of it.

Joan and I went out to eat with her cousins in Port Jefferson. I remember it from decades ago as a fairly dowdy place, a little run down. Today it is all sparkling, upbeat, and bustling with crowds on a late August weekday afternoon.

As an elder boomer I do believe I misread the signs of the times. It’s traditional for old people to lament the times. Nostalgia makes the past seem much more lovely than ever it was. Yes, bread was cheap and we left our doors unlocked _ but nobody accepted checks, there were no credit cards, banks were closed on weekends and every day by 3:00, and nobody had all that much money anyway.

“But, well, we were happy,” we say.  But well, to all appearances, so are a lot of young folks today. It is just a lot different.

Transition times are hard on the aged. It is so easy to focus on the awful.  Sometimes I just want to return to those thrilling days of yesteryear.

My occasional enthusiasms often begin when I am surprised at the mediocrity of some new hot item or idea that really seems quite awful. “Heck,” I think, “I could do better than that.”

But, of course, mediocre novelty succeeds not because it is better but because it is new. Entertainment requires an element of surprise. By the time anyone starts to do it better that validity has passed. 

In our crowded world of eight billion there is no way to think something highly original, no thought that hasn’t been turned into an essay. No clever aphorism that is not already on the internet. Trying to be the all-time best at anything is a fool’s pursuit.

America is famous for being the land of “keeping up with the Joneses.” Lately, that has also been brutally difficult, not to mention expensive. Any given next door Jones can tear down the house and build a palace. A new coat of paint on mine isn’t going to help much.

Perhaps that ethos has become stretched to fatigue. I’m not sure that in the current social framework being better than others has any real meaning.

Some claim a purpose in life is essential. I disagree. It is fine to have goals. But a purpose is blinding, obsessive, limiting, and often destructive. It is easy to change goals, very difficult and shattering to change purpose.

My candidate for a valid purpose in life is simply to remain enchanted with existence. To be as happy as possible, I suppose, but much more than pure hedonism. Not always possible, but a worthy thing for which to strive, in all levels of engagement and at all times.

Money, fame, power (the grand tautology) are adequate goals for a few. Being or, better, doing good serves all of us well. Family, society, history – we all slip in and out of how we evaluate our lives. All of these are slippery and transient, easily corrupted, often malignant to others.

Enchantment on the other hand, is a state of mind which will always bring happiness and harms no one. It is life as a child encounters it, full of possibility, mystery, and wonder. There is never enough time to fully appreciate the miracle of being.

So when I am told I must have a purpose in life, I rarely argue but secretly smile. Perhaps I can never change anyone’s mind, it is their loss that they so belittle their possibilities.

Things can begin, as well as end, not with a bang but a whimper. After much consideration of great and epic-making efforts, I have instead decided to merely slide back into writing an almost daily blog as I did for a few years a decade ago.

I find that writing is a useful tool for my own life, even though it has no external impact. A daily one-page journal that I have kept for twenty five years has helped me remember many fine things _ even if I never reread it. The very act of focusing each day made me better able to appreciate the magnificence of existence. 

My daily thoughts are almost always only concerned with what I have come to call my “personal bubble.” No apologies. That is, after all, my “real life.” I work at making that as enchanted as possible.

Nevertheless, I am entertained constantly by news and events beyond my sphere. Some of it encourages an internal reaction, and I seek to comment on it.

But there is no room nor reason for such in my personal diary, so I will once again attempt to focus and ease the aggravation with brief quasi–essays on whatever fine and grand topics I may consider interesting at the moment.

Philosophy and religion usually seem concerned with a static universe. Absolute truth, eternal gods, ideal forms, rigorous logic. People as transient players on the fixed stage of unchanging existence. That was the one constant in all those ideological logical systems for thousands of years, self-evident to any deeply thinking person.

Evolution destroyed that concept. Everything is in flux, there is no permanence, accidents occur.

Species fit well into a current ecology, change and specialize, are wiped out by other species or sheer bad luck. Individuals only win by surviving. Maybe individuals don’t even matter and it is simply a game of genetic continuance.

Any modern philosophy, then, must begin with a treatment of evolution. Traditional religions do so by calling evolution an illusory evil. Traditional philosophies do so by pretending it is irrelevant. But if there are no permanent rules, no purpose, no grand universal design – what then?

One answer is solipsism – I am the only reality and the only purpose. That hardly describes who we are in normal social life. 

Trying to discover exactly what evolution means to our relation to society is the genuine philosophic necessity of our age.

There are moments when a very intelligent person has carefully considered all the evidence and forms a conclusion on almost any matter large or small. Then, somehow, in order to preserve sanity and have room for the rest of life, this opinion is frozen forever. Not only frozen, but fiercely defended as truth, no matter what additional evidence may come to light.

Sometimes this fanaticism is apparent in the very young, overwhelmed by infinite choice. It can, of course, afflict anyone at any age, but such rigidity becomes a tragic mark of aging for a lot of us.

History is full of examples. The grand gestures are in science, war, and politics. But within families are frequent intergenerational conflicts. Old people know the right way; the young find it useless to their own lives.

Why people tend to become this way probably has a lot to do with simply trying to cope with everything. And one way to do this – especially with the bigger issues we can neither influence nor change – is to buttonhole all such into tiny rigid boxes with static response.

That in itself is fine. The terrible happens only when one of those imprisoned truths becomes a core principle of a fanatic’s life.