A scarcity mindset in an individual can hijack all sorts of other abilities that I enumerated in my post “The arresting power of scarcity” — the ability to think strategically and reflectively, to apply what you’ve learned, to think creatively, to generate options, and to experience empathy. ,

An abundance mindset, on the other hand, yields a trove of benefits. There are hundreds of books published in the last decade with the word “abundance” in the title. Many of them point in the direction of the upside of the abundance mindset: encouraging people to innovate, to build partnerships, to see strengths (of self and others), and to explore options that one might initially miss.

The literature identifies personal abundance related to feelings of gratitude and generosity, increased resilience and an abiding optimism.

There is also cognitive abundance — when we feel we have “enough,” our brains become more capable of planning, innovating, and empathizing.

There is also a level of Community abundance — the idea that when we do things like invest in one another, or partner with other organizations, we create opportunities that never would have existed otherwise.

There is a chicken-egg issue here. There is a case for believing that we can actually create abundance through imagination, collaboration, trust, and shared purpose.

Personally I can see this when I consider my spouse’s work with performing, literary and visual artists and institutions that would benefit from the arts — and sources of funding that help make these potentially transformational activities a reality. She is a living example of a habit of thinking: inclusion, rather than exclusion; of generosity, rather than possessiveness; of creating possibilities that help strengthen everyone rather than competing for a piece of the pie.

An important point about the abundance mindset is that it does not presume the world is necessarily an endlessly bountiful place. Real scarcity exists. The goal isn’t pretending everything is fine — it’s recognizing that even amid genuine constraints, we often have more options, relationships, strengths, and agency than our minds initially perceive.

Years ago I coached a charter school system superintendent. Let’s call him Matt. Nice fellow, very thoughtful, very planful. He liked structure and predictability. He would map out the school year on giant sheets of chart paper and hang them on the walls of his office. Major events, due dates, operations, infrastructure, testing, roles and responsibilities. Color coded. These were works of art and ingenuity that he used everyday.

His character note was that he would leap to judgment about people. Especially people he worked with. One of his directors sent an email to the school community. Matt felt that the text of the email neglected to include a point that Matt and the director had discussed and agreed on.

Matt, being Matt, knew exactly why the director had done this. It was as though Matt could read his thoughts. Or thought he could.

I have coached many a leader on the risks of jumping to judgment, especially about other people’s motivations — things that are in the minds and hearts of others. “Prepare to be wrong some or most of the time you do that,” was my advice.

“Why?” was Matt’s retort. “I know this guy. I know what he is up to.” And then he proceeded to lay out his theory involving some hidden agenda on the part of the director to undermine Matt in some aspect of something. I don’t remember the details, but I do remember that I helped him think about his thinking.

“I just now thought up three alternative explanations,” I pushed back. “And I think you can, too.”

Matt said he wanted to come up with a counter-move to thwart the director. He didn’t particularly want to entertain other possibilities. Fortunately, he was very competitive, so this was a beautifully coachable moment.

He came up with five other ways to explain the email. Confronted with these other possibilities, his plan of action now included having a conversation with the director to get clear about his intention in sending the email.

Matt had been caught by his scarcity mindset. He had a rigid set of assumptions about the director, and was over-confident in his judgment of the director’s motivations. It was only through exposure to even a small abundance of alternative explanations that he changed his thinking and his tactic.

In thinking about the abundance mindset, it seems super obvious that this is the way to go.

So why does it come easily to some people while others struggle? I confess to a habit of mind that is less hopeful, more wary, more risk averse.

Is the glass half-empty or all the way empty?

And why is there such an abundance of books about abundance on the market? That alone suggests that there is a felt social need to develop the positivity necessary for one to aspire toward a generative mindset. Like it doesn’t come naturally. Like we need to keep reminding ourselves.

One possibility is the effect of advertisers, autocrats or any of the fear-mongers or need-mongers flooding our culture with scarcity thinking.

Or maybe it’s our own habits of thought. I came across this amusing quote from The Soul of Money, a book by philanthropist Lynne Twist1:

For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is ‘I didn’t get enough sleep.’ The next one is ‘I don’t have enough time.’... Before we even sit up in bed, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing.

She goes on to argue that this internal narrative of “not enough” becomes one of the greatest barriers to generosity, creativity, and joy.

Awareness of your internal narrative — whatever it may be — sounds like a good first step.

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Instead, this is about my dog’s last days.

I promise not to craft the kind of memorial that could leave you in a state of vicarious grief. Many reminiscences in prose and verse have dealt with the loss of a beloved pet: E.B. White (“Bedfellows”), Rudyard Kipling (”The Power of the Dog“), Mary Oliver (“The First Time Percy Came Back”), and Lord Byron (”Epitaph to a Dog“ — with the famous line about how the dog had “all the virtues of man without his vices”).

And many others — enough in fact to sustain a small literary sub-genre.

One of the best tributes that I am aware of is James Thurber’s “Memorial” (an essay in “My World — and Welcome to It,” 1942) — which I will return to in a minute.

So I won’t share with you the forested walks we took over nearly nine years; nor will I attempt a sketch of her character which would lapse easily into the use of anthropomorphic terms; and least of all will I attempt the chronological slideshow, from her adoption at a no-kill shelter (thanks for my sister Pat, who worked there), and her early dog training, to her travels by car to Door County, Wisconsin (a favorite place), and the many interactions created by the life patterns of three mammals sharing the same house.

Our sister, Martha, put it this way: the human relationship with a dog is one of mutual watching. We watch to see that their needs are met. We provide distraction (from vexations, such as cats), and treats and adventure. They watch us for patterns, for those occasional treats, and for opportunities to be a part of the scene.

If there was a group of people, Sienna wanted to be in the center, or at least nearby.

If I was alone in my chair, she settled into a place where she could face me. And so on, in various ways, we kept an eye on each other.

I’ll tell you, I will miss being seen, so completely, so constantly, so adoringly. I’d be blessed to be half the person she thinks I am. I am daily surprised by my level of sadness, learning to live on without that companionship.

My sister Pat has had her share of dog entrances and exits. We have talked about grief, how to prepare for it, how to live with it. She told me a story of having attended a shiva. A Jewish acquaintance of hers had lost her husband, and various people were offering their condolences. Pat overheard the words of one mourner, who I imagine had also recently suffered a loss and knew the path of grief. This person said, lovingly, “I can’t do a thing for you.”

We all get support from other humans who understand, but in the end, it is an inside experience.

Thurber talks about experiences from the dog’s point of view. Here are a few lines from Thurber’s ‘Memorial’ that I mentioned above:

The poodle won a great many ribbons in her bench days, and once won Best in Breed at Madison Square Garden. But she would have traded all her medals for a dish of asparagus.

She kept her sight, her hearing and her figure up to her quiet and dignified end. She knew that the hand was upon her, and she accepted it with a grave and unapprehensive resignation. “This,” her dark and intelligent eyes seemed to be trying to tell me, “is simply the closing of a full circle.”

Here is Thurber again. It’s a quote with an uncertain origin, though it is likely from his 1961 “Lanterns and Lances,” a collection of essays:

I never had a dog that showed a human fear of death. Death, to a dog, is the final unavoidable compulsion, the least ineluctable scent on a fearsome trail. They like to face it alone, enduring without sentimental human distraction the Last Loneliness, which they are wise enough to know cannot be shared by anyone.

I think that sums up where we are.

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That’s the takeaway from the book by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity: why having too little means so much. (Times Books, 2013)

Whatever the scarcity — time, friendship, money, options, sleep, food, possibilities — the mind focuses intensely on what is scarce. Lots of brain cells trying to figure out how to find more of what’s missing. Lots of physical action, too, such as cramming last-minute tasks into a constantly diminishing space of time as the clock runs out.

What’s lost when our mind is captured by scarcity? Apparently, plenty.

• We stop thinking strategically or long-term because we are faced with a shortage that must be addressed (or we believe must be addressed) immediately.

• We don’t take time to plan. We are more reactive and less reflective.

• We forget what we have learned from the last time we were confronted by this scarcity. Or, more accurately, we forget to take the time to think about what we learned.

• We lose easy access to creative thinking and the ability to come up with options. I once heard a hospital vice president actually say to her senior team “We don’t know what we are doing, but we have to start now.”

• Scarcity devours mental bandwidth. An American Psychological Association article here on the psychology of scarcity “explores how deprivation wreaks havoc on cognition and decision-making.”

A scarcity mindset might even make us less empathetic. Some researchers used a game setting in an experiment to induce a feeling of either abundance or scarcity: the former group was given 10 tokens for the game; the latter group was given 1 token. Each individual was then shown images depicting different types of human pain. The degree of empathetic response was measured. The article in the National Library of Medicine has this to say:

Behavioral and neural evidence suggests that inducing a scarcity mindset significantly dampens the ability to empathize with others’ pain. These findings shed light on our understanding of how a scarcity mindset may influence social emotions and behaviors.

Thinking you don’t have enough is the same as actually not having enough.

I would argue that this is a pillar of consumerism: to generate a cultural feeling of scarcity in order to compel the populace to buy stuff. This idea is not new. I remember reading The Hidden Persuaders in high school (Vance Packard, 1957). In the first chapter he talks about the difficulty in generating need (i.e., creating a sense of scarcity) in a country where many needs are already met:

As a nation we are already so rich that consumers are under no pressure of immediate necessity to buy a large share—perhaps as much as 40%—of what is produced, and the pressure will get progressively less in the years ahead.

If there is no immediate necessity, the consumerism machine must generate the need.

This book, you might imagine, was very popular with rising middle-class readers, and was vociferously panned by the advertising business as exaggeration and fear-mongering.

Packard, a journalist and social critic, describes a social and cultural shift he saw occurring, seven decades ago. He could be describing ideological and political polarization — stoked by social media — that now grips our country.

A very curious thing has been taking place in this country almost without our knowing it. In a country where individualism—independence and self-reliance—was the watchword for three centuries, the view is now coming to be accepted that the individual himself has no meaning except as a member of a group.

The above was published in 1957, sixty-nine years ago. I am old enough to remember when the term “rugged individualism” was used to define America. And the Marlboro Man.

Those days seem a far cry from the echo chambers of today, identity signaling, identity politics, etc.

In the past seven decades, consumerism has mined every advantage of the scarcity mindset. There are also examples aplenty of national leaders finding effective ways to stoke fear through “you are about to lose it all” rhetoric.

Even the most amateur dictator can see the value of instilling in the public a scarcity mindset.

First, convince people that they have been deprived of something of value — rights, attention, property, status, anything.

Then link the cause of that scarcity to a group of people — immigrants, allies, academics, liberals, anybody.

Lastly, promise the populace held under your thrall that an abundance of good will come their way only when the other tribe is vanquished. Then step back and let the warping power of the scarcity mindset quickly erode long-term thinking, thoughtful reflection, creative, generative thinking, and empathy.

Once those are out of the way, even a demented old man can garner a respectable following.

Next week (or the week after) let’s explore a more refreshing topic — the abundance mindset, and the benefits that accrue from its use.

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But it is the first sentence that I found most arresting and relevant to a person writing anything biographical: our lives are the sum of our choices; my life is the sum of my choices.

Before I print that on my t-shirt, I want to take a look at it.

First, definitions. I imagine that all these infinitives are related to each other: to choose; to decide; to conclude; to select (as a course of action). They all signal the act of committing after considering options, alternatives, “two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” to quote Robert Frost.

The only option, other than committing to one and excluding the others, is to decide not to decide: to stare at the fork in the road, or to wait for the Stop sign to turn green.

The question is ages-old: Do we choose, or are we destined? Are we at the mercy of the heavens, or are we “at some time” masters of our fates “and the fault,” as Cassius suggested to dear Brutus, “is not in our stars, but in ourselves…”?

I found the Latin derivation of the word “decide” to be informative. This is from Word Origins:

Etymologically, decide denotes a resolving of alternatives or difficulties by cutting through them as if with a knife or a sword – dealing with them ‘at a stoke.’ The word comes, perhaps, via French decider, from Latin dēcidere, a compound verb formed from the prefix dē- ‘off’ and caedere ‘cut, strike’.

This question of fate versus choice was addressed in part by the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset in his work La rebelión de las masas (The Revolt of the Masses), published in Spanish in 1930, (English translation in 1932, authorized by Ortega), in the chapter “The Height of the Times.” He integrates destiny and choice beautifully, thus:

Destiny is not a kind of mechanism. We are not launched into existence like a shot from a gun, with its trajectory absolutely predetermined. The destiny under which we fall when we come into this world — it is always this world, the actual one — consists in the exact contrary. Instead of imposing on us one trajectory, it imposes several, and consequently forces us to choose. Surprising condition, this, of our existence! To live is to feel ourselves fatally obliged to exercise our liberty, to decide what we are going to be in this world. Not for a single moment is our activity of decision allowed to rest.

Next week I am writing about abundance mindset versus scarcity mindset, how each one affects our ambitions, our dreams and maybe literally our vision – our capacity for taking in information around us.

But for now I want to look at the analogy of cutting, pruning off future possibilities and committing to one branch, one path. The word “decide” is derived from the idea that for each one thing you decide to pursue, you are casting away a hundred other options. And each day, with each decision, you leave behind an ever-larger pile of closed-off paths.

The world of possibilities seems to be collapsing behind me.

Leaning into my visual side, I wanted to sketch my path so far on this earth, and to use this as a kind of worksheet to ponder how and to what extent possibilities expand or diminish as one moves forward.

The ferry runs from Oxford, Maryland – a lovely village of old colonial-style houses on the east bank of the Tred Avon River – to Bellevue on the west, where there is a small sandy area to the right of dock. I paced off a timeline, starting at zero, with each step counting as two years; each decade was five steps. I gave myself a generous 90-year run, inshallah.

Do not worry, Gentle Reader, that I might take you through the analysis, describing each pace across the decades and back, marking turning points, critical events, and influential people; the transition from son to brother to uncle to father to grandfather; listing the colleges I did not get into, the romantic intersections, and a troublingly long list of musical instruments I have tried to learn how to play.

But here was the surprise. I had placed a large stick at 72 (my age this year) upon which I inverted a 16 ounce red Solo cup I had found. I stepped further inland to capture the timeline on my camera. My beginning was so far to the right I had to search to find it; meanwhile the red cup seemed disproportionately close to the finish line – only nine steps away.

A couple literary anchors come to mind. One is Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, a 2021 book by English author Oliver Burkeman, whose premise is that “the average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short” and that on average we live about four thousand weeks.

Last week I wrote about the trap of verbosity – being in “conversations” with people who can’t or won’t stop going on and on. A couple I know went to an event, at which the husband was the subject of such verbal prolixity from a woman with a lot of information to convey. Always the gentleman and diplomat, he extricated himself and headed to the bar. Passing his spouse en route he whispered to her “4000 weeks…” – short-hand for “life is too short for these sorts of situations.”

Clearly a man taking charge of his destiny.

Related to this, daughter Molly recently reminded me of the poem A Summer Day, by Mary Oliver, which ends:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

I stood at the zero mark, looking out over the timeline. I had marked out the beginning of each decade with scarf-lengths of dried seagrass. The red plastic cup felt lost in the distance, although it was only some 24 yards away. Four steps away from 80, nine steps from 90.

What is it I plan to do with my one wild and precious life?

I do not want these next nine steps to feel increasingly bereft of choice. I want them to feel flush with color, and as full as ever of possibility.

Up the slope along the road there was an older gentleman slowly walking his dog. He sported white slacks, a light blue short-sleeved shirt and white canvas shoes. I wished he had had a hat on his fine, grey head as he walked through patches of sun and shade. His dog was a small, happy, white shape.

Suddenly, I hoped this fellow traveler never felt the need to do what I was doing. I wanted him to feel abundance in whatever was happening for him at this moment.

If he keeps a journal, I hope today’s entry reads something like:

That last hot Monday in July, I had a lovely walk with Ceci down by the dock. There was another fellow doing something or other near the water’s edge with a cup on a stick. He looked up and we waved to each other. I never know who I’m going to meet.

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But enough about me. Let’s talk about you. Have you read my book?

Classic Chamberlin. In three short sentences he captured a phenomenon that I have been studying most of my adult life: the tendency of some people, when in conversation with others, to talk at length as if it were a deposition and not a social chat. I don’t know if this is due to some kind of conversation insecurity. It could be a social habit. Or a handy way to control a social exchange that might, without their intervention, just go off in any direction. As conversations often do. Maybe it is a symptom of social anxiety.

One gentleman I know was talkative because he was hard of hearing — so listening was difficult, and therefore he tended to do most of the talking. Fortunately, he was also an excellent storyteller.

A couple decades ago, we had a loquacious neighbor, where it was wise to have an exit plan before entering into an exchange. I was taking care of a friend’s dog at the time (named Bumpy, a great and patient hound). I had had several pleasant enough exchanges with this neighbor in the past. He was in his yard and we exchanged salutations, and approached me as I tried to continue past his house. He made an initial probe to see if I had visited the Air and Space Museum recently. I don’t remember my reply and I don’t think it affected his presentation. At the ten-minute mark it was clear to me that he was just getting started.

All that I took away from that close encounter was a moment of breath-taking irony, a phrase printed on the front of his T-shirt: “Can you skip to the part where I care?” You can’t script this stuff.

To be honest, my skills as a good listener work against me in situations like this. After decades of being me, I have over-developed some key attention behaviors, such as nodding, and making affirmative and empathetic noises when someone is talking. But what I really excel at is asking questions — which is the conversational equivalent of waving the runner home in baseball, except there is no home plate so he just keeps running around and around.

If I were sixty years younger, I suppose I would also use the silent applause with my thumb and index finger. (“Clock it”? I would need to ask a youth to affirm my use of the idiom which indicates that one notices, recognizes or grasps something. Which clearly I don’t because I was born in the nineteen hundreds.)

There are so many examples of social prolixity2, it’s difficult to choose — but the company picnic stands out. You get to know your colleagues in such festive settings, but you also meet their spouses. I initiated talking with the spouse of a woman with whom I had traveled to Tunisia for some UN contract work some months earlier. I didn’t have an exit strategy, so I have only myself to blame. Apparently I listened so well that I received, over the course of a 45-minute monologue, the party conversation equivalent of a master class in catfishing in Louisiana. For days I was a walking Wiki on the topic: the prime locations he frequents; the salient characteristics of the Blue, Channel and Flathead catfish, their habitats and preferences; lures and techniques; an outline of the typical day in one-hour increments; the type of boat he uses; and the history of the Atchafalaya Basin, all sprinkled with anecdotes about the best catches, and favorite catfish recipes.

Was this an Ancient Mariner situation, where he is destined to roam the earth repeating the same story of his quest for catfish, and I am left, like the wedding-guest, “a sadder but wiser man”?

I doubt it.

My Uncle Paul had a lesson in listening that he steadfastly practiced at the dinner table when my three cousins were young. If any child went on at length with any kind of rambling story (as children do) Uncle Paul would gently intervene with his calm and measured voice: “It’s time to ask a question.” I guess now we would call that strategy “redirection,” but I believe he was making a larger point about the value of a back and forth exchange.

Not surprisingly, I became an executive coach. My job was to ask questions to challenge the client, help them reframe issues, zoom out from their daily grind, see patterns, and find solutions for themselves.

It is rewarding work, but done well, it is exhausting.

I will never forget an after-work weekday gathering I attended at a friend’s house. A person I knew asked me how I was. I must have said two sentences about a challenge I was facing and that I was tired.

She said the three most beautiful words: Tell me more.

I still get misty eyed, remembering that feeling of being seen.

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I was tuned into the word “believe” for days. Listening for it. Watching for it in print. It is used in a surprising number of contexts.

Before the New York Knicks won the NBA championship, a Spurs victory was predicted as highly likely; by some measures they had a 99.6% probability of winning. New York Mayor Mamdani used this idea — “a .4% chance” — as a theme in his speech at the Knicks’ parade.

There is one thing the pundits don’t get about this team, that they don’t get about this city — it is in that .4% when we go to work… It is in that .4% that [coach] Mike Brown keeps his team believing.”

While I was visiting a new vet with my sweet yet reactive dog, the young, bright-eyed technician gave me instructions on how to get a urine sample from Sienna. I admitted to the tech, “You make it sound easy. But I’ve never done this before.” Without hesitation she looked me in the eyes and proclaimed, “I believe in you!”

The title of this piece is often attributed to Wayne Dyer (American self-help author, 1940-2015) but I became familiar with it through photographer and motivational speaker Dewitt Jones.

I was introduced to his photography from the book Robert Frost: A Tribute to the Source (1979 Holt, Rinehart and Winston). Forty-four of Jones’ color photographs grace this collection of some of Frost’s best poems. The accompanying biographical text by David Bradley1 connects the poet and the natural world of New England.

Jones went on to become a motivational speaker. Years ago I attended a seminar on progressive leadership concepts, and one of his short films, Celebrate What’s Right with the World, was part of the presentation. This concept of looking with the expectation of seeing possibility influenced his work as a photographer. Simply put, if you believe there is a beautiful possibility in the subject you are photographing, you will try this angle, try that background, experiment with lighting and so on. Eventually you get an amazing shot that you might have walked away from if you had stopped looking.

Here is an excerpt from his Lake Tahoe TEDx talk:

I figure that no matter how dry and desolate, no matter how bleak and devoid of possibilities a situation might seem, if I could just celebrate the best in it — in this case by dropping down into that slot canyon and looking back the other way — I could find a perspective that would transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Belief, in this case, is a tool — an attitude, a philosophy if you will — that encourages further exploration despite setbacks, despite the lack of evidence that something great might happen.

There is an implication here for progressive management theory that I found hard to sell. When a participant asked “how do I deal with my problem staff person,” I found myself saying, almost by reflex: “First, stop referring to the person as a problem. If you look with the expectation of seeing a problem, you run the risk of only seeing a problem. And you might miss seeing anything else.”

There is a benefit to believing that something is there, even if it isn’t obvious. In writing this essay, I made an implicit distinction between religious faith in a beneficent Almighty and these other types of believing: belief in self, belief in a cause, belief in the viability of a start-up organization, belief in the efficacy of a certain dietary regimen, belief in the value of teamwork. Those sorts of things.

Having belief seems to generate or encourage confidence in oneself. Belief nurtures the patience required to keep looking, to keep striving. It nudges one to persevere and take the next step rather than throw in the towel. It imbues one with tenacity. Moreover, practicing belief strengthens the capacity to use an optimistic and appreciative lens through which to see the world, to confront obstacles, and to see possibilities.

Sign me up, right? I mean, look over the bolded words in the paragraph above. All of these benefits attend the adoption of a positive mindset. Where is the downside of believing?

You could also ask “What is the downside of a hammer?” There is none. It is arguably the perfect tool for doing things that a hammer can do.

Same with belief. And just to follow the tool analogy, adopting belief as a mindset is one tool in the toolkit. I would like to think that my personal toolkit contains, among others, my curiosity about how things work and appreciation for the many ways that things break; my Irish sense of doubt; my internal gauge of risk-tolerance; my endless search to see holistically, which often includes assessment of multiple viewpoints, some optimistic, some skeptical some neutral.

I’m not saying this is the right toolkit, only that it is the one I have and use a lot.

I have been listening for affirmations, all the different ways people in conversations express confidence. They range from the simple “I believe in you!” to the more complex

“I believe in America. Not the current executive branch nor the repressive and corrupt wiles of certain men. I believe in our creed, in the founding ideals, and in the American people who work with each other every day.”

I give ‘We the people’ good odds.

On a closing note, here is Dewitt Jones talking about the light within, in reference to the montage below:

I could show you a thousand pictures of this light, but I’ve chosen three - an eighty-year-old great-great-grandmother, a cider press operator, and my own son.

Look at these faces tonight, then let the faces of all the wonderful people in your life fill your mind. See, feel the light in their eyes. Then stretch further to the faces of all the people, both known and unknown, in your community, your country, your world.

It’s the same light.

The land on the other side is Zambia. The water flowing off the cliff is part of the Zambezi River. It flows for miles over a plateau of basalt until it reaches the transverse chasm separating Zambia from Zimbabwe.

Though the cascade is of modest height - 350 feet - the fall line is over a mile long. That’s a lot of water.

I was reminded of this colorful procession recently when I joined a congregation of worshippers walking a mown path across a field to witness the baptism of three children, the youngest of whom was my six-week old grandson, introduced in previous essays (Preparing the ground, Waiting for Lewis, One grip at a time, Big idea, small package, and Baysian Baby).

We were headed to the banks of Murphy Creek, a slow and shallow stream barely 15 feet across, maybe two feet at its deepest, shaded by oak and poplar and hidden under maple saplings, willow and spice bush edging along the forest.

Pastor Neal held sleeping little Lewis, lowered the back of his head until it touched the water. Not surprisingly, Lewis cried out in dismay. After bravely enduring two more dips, he was delivered into the waiting arms of his mother and fell promptly back to sleep.

These kinds of rituals are a mystery to me. I have felt through the decades an increasing curiosity about religion in general and the practice of Christianity specifically. It is part of my heritage that I am trying to understand. So, I was interested in Pastor Neal’s take on baptism. Daughter Molly sent me a page of his thoughts about the meaning of baptism. Here is an excerpt:

In baptism, we reject the death-dealing powers and principalities that seek to control and manipulate the Earth and all living beings. We are cleansed from all that destroys life, violates love, and erodes trust and are refreshed by grace, relationship, and resilience.

For Lewis, the ritual was a momentary interruption of a nap. But in this passage, Neal is talking about the effect of baptism on the witnesses. In a sense, we are all cleansed and refreshed to face the travails of this experience of life.

He could be talking about all of us in these times. Our country deals in death on a daily basis. Love is violated in ways large and small. The land of the free feels oppressive, like the recent heat wave sitting on the east coast, punishing the vulnerable and those without power; like the dramatic surge this week of heartless ICE arrests.

On the banks of Murphy Creek, Lewis was anointed with oil; Neal made a tiny cross on his forehead, and welcomed all three newly baptized. He beseeched the Lord:

Give them an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works.

However you feel about the particular deity, or deities in general, this is a darn good ask. May these three have occasion years hence to reflect on how they might let their lives speak the felt truth in their hearts.

The congregation then walked back through the field. May we find the opportunity to walk in goodness, refreshed as we are “by grace, relationship and resilience.”

A cup of water is the humblest of offerings. It is a hospitality motif dating back millennia. Water has revived the shipwrecked, the fugitive, the fleeing hero, the dispossessed. Roughly two thirds of the human body is water. We are drawn to the water, to see it, to hear the “Thundering Smoke,” to refresh and sustain ourselves in a most basic way.

May we become even more emboldened to hearken to the thirst of others. If anyone gives even a cup of cold water1 to a stranger, both taste joy here and now.

It took me in two directions. One direction is to try to answer the question by reflecting on times when fear of failure (and of all the implication about myself that would accompany said failure) had held me back. If success were guaranteed, and the fear of failure somehow evaporated like the alcohol from cooking wine, what venture would I take on — presumably with more confidence and a lighter step?

The other direction is a related question: To what extent does fear limit my capacity to act on things I want to do?

Turns out, to a great extent. I see this when I reflect on the substantial catalogue of items over the course of my life that I chose not to undertake specifically because there was — in my mind — a high probability of failure. Or unmitigable risk. Or too many unknowns. Or simply because “why take on something that you feel is beyond your ability to accomplish successfully?”

There are lots of things to do. I simply prefer those that play to my strengths, have some guarantee of closure or completion, sooner rather than later; that I can get off my desk with dispatch, and — this might be the most revealing characteristic — will minimally inconvenience other people.

So, it is with great interest that I am reading “The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology” by Simon Winchester, sent to me recently by my west-coast brother-in-law.

It is the story of a man of modest means who, at an early age, took an interest in the fossilized shells he found in the dirt and embedded in various outcrops of rock in and around his home in Somerset, England in the late 1700s. The shapes and patterns of what we now know as ancient marine life were similar to those of modern snails and crustaceans. The notion of evolution was yet to be formulated. The idea of deep time was absurd.

Popular at the time was the notion put forward by James Ussher, the Archbishop of Armagh in 1650, based on his reckoning from the Bible, that the earth was not yet 6,000 years old, having started on Saturday evening October 22, 4004 BC. Sunday was the official first day.

Against this and related kinds of thinking, William put together his theory of stratification. A surveyor and canal-digger, he was arguably the first to note the predictability of geologic strata — which layers appeared in which order — and the consistency of these patterns across the country. The relative age of any given strata could be determined by the fossil content. The age difference between two layers of red mudstone, for instance, might be determined by the distinct fossil content of each.

The result of his life’s work was the first geologic map covering a large area in such detail; a massive chart, eight feet tall and six feet wide, titled: The Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales with part of Scotland; exhibiting the Collieries and the Mines; the Marshes and the Fen Lands originally overflowed by the sea; and the Varieties of Soil according to the Variations in the Substrata; illustrated by the Most Descriptive Names.

Winchester spotlights the significance of Smith’s work thus:

The fact that one half-educated Oxfordshire yeoman working alone — with compass and notebook and clinometer1 and an abiding appreciation of the beauty and the importance of fossils — could surmise with such accuracy what a thousand surveyors and geologists have in the decades since only succeeded in confirming, is little short of a miracle.

The question at the top of this essay might not have occurred to someone like William Smith. There were logistic and mechanical challenges. There were disbelievers. There was blatant class-ism (an unstudied man surely could not have come up with these ideas on his own). And there was the complex bending and folding of rock layers over time for which there was no known mechanism. (The idea of plate tectonics would not enter the popular culture for another 150 years, in the 1960s.)

He was, as Winchester summarized, “stubborn and visionary, highly motivated, and single- minded. He never once gave up nor ever thought of doing so.”

Here is what I admire about this man’s life calling: the drama of his trials was his own; his peer group was small, supportive, but distant from Smith’s private and solitary craft; he bore the burden of his financial debt and made good on his promises; furthermore, as the consequences of any of his decisions, no fellow kinsman was swept up in the vagaries of his occupation.

As I see it, William Smith lived his life without need of guarantees of any sort. He ran the all the risks on his own.

Another version of the question above might be: “What is something I would attempt to do if I were guaranteed not to inconvenience nor perturb the spirit of any other soul?”

There were three of us, all in our late teens, responsible for getting these cold, wet gargantuan blocks from the truck, down a metal ramp and into the store room where the temperature was kept at a brisk 22 degrees Fahrenheit.

Our job was to take these blocks one by one to the ice-cutter, a machine that turns a block of ice into ice cubes. Six inch circular saws sliced vertically creating a grid on the top 1 inch of the block. Then a huge horizontal saw sliced off the top layer, creating 200 ice cubes. The block is raised an inch and the process continues. The finished cubes got shuttled down a ramp into another room where they were bagged in plastic and tied with baling wire. Bags of Brewster Ice would fill the freezers of supermarkets and gas stations up and down the Cape.

The only way to negotiate a 300 lb block of ice is to grab it with a set of steel ice tongs and gently rock it side to side as you pull it toward you to get it moving. Because it is ice, it slides with some ease across the metal floor or down a ramp.

It was while steering a block of ice that I yanked it the wrong way, and set off a spasm in my lower back on the left side. I took a day off, but made a full recovery in time to visit Edward Gorey, another story altogether.

I had lower back issues on and off for almost two decades until my mother-in-law, Nancy Graham, suggested acupuncture (which I had never done before) and referred me to Dr. Wu. His office was an unassuming home on MacArthur Blvd. I went there on an autumn evening after work.

After completing some paperwork, I was escorted to a treatment room. After a short wait, he shuffled in, looking very much like the embodiment of “alternative medicine.” He was clad in a wrap-around smock, loose fitting trousers and cloth slippers. I described my situation. He listened, then quietly studied my pulse for more than a minute. “Lie down here,” he said. He inserted needles in various places nowhere near my back. On his way out, as he switched off the exam light, he said over his shoulder: “Twenty minutes.”

Best treatment ever. After three sessions I was cured of that chronic malady.

It was not until later that I heard the rumor that my Dr. Wu is the titular character in the Steely Dan song Doctor Wu (on the 1975 album Katy Lied). Claude.ai helped validate my story by identifying two rumors that have been circulating for decades:

One holds that Wu was based on Dr. Jing Nuan Wu (1933-2002), an acupuncturist and artist based in Washington DC who emigrated from China, graduated Harvard, worked as a Wall Street venture capitalist, and later set up a Taoist clinic in DC in 1973, supposedly helping one of the band overcome drug addiction in the mid-70s.

Fast forward five decades, I am falling off a ladder. I was only a few feet up, but still there was enough time to have two thoughts: don’t hit your head; protect your back.

I was able to do both of these maneuvers. After all these years, I still know how to fall. Age, however, has affected my ability to land. So, there I was in the emergency room of my new local hospital, being tended to by a staff of professionals whose average age was less than the age of my youngest child.

The intake interview was straightforward: How did you fall? Did you hit your head and lose consciousness? What hurts right now? Can you move your neck/fingers/leg? On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the worst, how would you rate your pain?

These same questions were asked in pretty much the same order by a) the intake nurse, b) the lead ER physician, c) the radiology tech, d) my assigned nurse, d) my assigned doctor. By the third round, I felt like they were trying to check my story for consistency.

Diagnosis? Sprains in the knee and wrist, and a strained trapezius. All on the left side. Oh, and possibly two hairline rib fractures. Nothing broken. Could have been much worse. If I had to fall at age 71, this is a fortunate outcome. All I need is lots of Tylenol. And an ice pack.

I am not discounting the possibility of my having a guardian angel. In my case this might be a former venture capitalist turned Taoist medical practitioner.

Here is my takeaway: If God had meant 70-year-olds to climb ladders, he wouldn’t have created 20-year-olds to climb ladders. Or in my case, a 60-something brother-in-law with balance, caution, strength and confidence. I held the ladder.

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Week by week his gaze seems to be taking on an intentionality. Looking here, then slowly looking there. Settling on a face. Many of his facial expressions are inscrutable, but one has to assume that his 12-14 ounce brain is assimilating data at an astounding rate. No wonder he sleeps so much.

I recently watched a TED talk by Anil Seth (here) about consciousness. A Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at University of Sussex (U.K.), he describes his theory of consciousness as a controlled hallucination.

Imagine being a brain. You’re locked inside a bony skull, trying to figure what’s out there in the world. There’s no light inside the skull. There’s no sound either. All you’ve got to go on is streams of electrical impulses which are only indirectly related to things in the world, whatever they may be.

So perception -- figuring out what’s there -- has to be a process of informed guesswork in which the brain combines these sensory signals with its prior expectations or beliefs about the way the world is to form its best guess of what caused those signals. The brain doesn’t hear sound or see light. What we perceive is its best guess of what’s out there in the world.

The theory reflects Bayesian logic1 – that we make assumptions about the world and constantly update our prior assumptions, revising what we know as we gather new clues.

It is not hard to imagine Lewis engaged in this process of successive approximation during his waking hours. Each movement of his arms tests some elementary idea of what is “in reach” based on what he touches, versus when his slow swing catches nothing but air. When he and I looked out of the front window today to view the approaching rainstorm, he seemed to scan the salient features with a pre-verbal interior monologue along the lines of “Big square frame, used to have lots of light inside. Note to self: it looks really different this time.”

Hundreds of trial arm movements each day, hundreds of impressions all contributing to some catchment of assumptions about the world around.

Dr. Seth goes on to point out the distinction between perception — how we take in information about the world around us — and interoception, which is the term for how we sense what is going on inside our physical body.

Experiences of the body from the inside are very different from experiences of the world around us. When I look around me, the world seems full of objects -- tables, chairs, people. Even my own body in the world; I can perceive it as an object from the outside.

But my experiences of the body from within, they’re not like that at all. I don’t perceive my kidneys here, my liver here, my spleen ...I don’t know where my spleen is, but it’s somewhere. I don’t perceive my insides as objects.

In fact, I don’t experience them much at all unless they go wrong. And this is important, I think. Perception of the internal state of the body isn’t about figuring out what’s there; it’s about control and regulation — keeping the physiological variables within the tight bounds that are compatible with survival.

When the brain uses predictions to figure out what’s there, we perceive objects as the causes of sensations. When the brain uses predictions to control and regulate things, we experience how well or how badly that control is going.

What are the percentages of perception and interoception in Lewis’ waking consciousness? I am sure someone has a benchmark for the first months of life. I’m guessing there is more than we might think in the direction of “keeping the physiological variables within the tight bounds that are compatible with survival.”

For Lewis this is expressed in some pre-verbal version of “All you who have ears, listen!” followed by one or more of a few specific items pertinent to control and regulation: hunger, dampness, sleepiness. The list is not long, but the signal is clear — some physiological variable requires outside intervention, preferably sooner than later.

Meanwhile, here am I — deep inside my controlled hallucination, and have been for decades. Fortunately, as Dr. Seth observed, “We’re all hallucinating all the time, including right now. It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, we call that reality.” And so far, it has worked pretty well, as evidenced each time I use a pedestrian cross-walk and cars stop for me.

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So, I will begin with baby Lewis, the grandson. He has a little faint red spot on each eyelid. By tradition they are called “angel kisses.” They can represent a sign of protection, of a past life, or of blessings to come. Some view it as a “symbol of one’s divine connection… a portal to heaven, linking the child to the angelic lineage.”(fromtheangels.com)

Is this little guy a descendant of angels? I would like to think that if one person is, we all are. All connected to the ground of all being in some way.

There is something amazing, miraculous about Lewis’ tacit abilities. No one is telling him how to live; he just does it. Granted most of life at this point is sleeping and eating, but all his reflexes — sucking, swallowing, crying, even those perturbed movements of this hands and fingers often joined by that of his legs and feet — all these are untaught. They are spontaneous and uncontrived.

Lewis does not deliberate at this point in his life. His movements are life itself, unadorned by words or measurement or intention — all these are ascribed to him by older humans.

This brings to mind an alternate cosmology as referenced by Alan Watts. In one of his lectures he said that “Hindus see god as a cosmic centipede with a thousand arms.” And the thousand arms… are us.

In his 1966 book “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are” he says:

What you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call 'here and now,' and you are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing. Every wave is the whole ocean waving.

We are all something that everything is doing.

Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.

Right now Lewis’ unique action is growing at a pace that seems to us surprisingly fast.

His unique action is in those deep, limpid eyes that one moment take in nothing and the next, everything.

His unique action is to feel so utterly connected to everything around him, that he can’t even distinguish himself from the whole.

He has yet to develop the concept of “I.” Everything is altogether. A great unity.

Maybe we can’t get closer to the truth of the world than where he is right now.

This is my 66th weekly post on Substack. The number is not significant. I started March 5, 2025. I wanted to explore the processes by which we make meaning, and the errors and difficulties along the way, and to do this through stories, anecdotes, and reflections.

But as with everyone I know, a lot of our attention has been bent around the warping effects of the black holes of self-absorbed world leaders and the chaos that emanates from them. For instance, a national news headline on March 5, 2025 was “T— warns that death awaits Hamas leaders and Gazans if hostages aren’t immediately released.” Bluster. Name-calling. It’s like someone took a bicycle pump to the archetypical grade school bully until it swelled into an outsized, mango-colored maelstrom.

It has been challenging for the Quaker/Humanist side of me to contemplate “that of God in each of us.” If he is, then his presence must be highly concentrated in some and very, very diluted in others — measured in parts-per-trillion, if you know what I mean.

The challenge is to find the light that is still out here in the world, and to believe against a lot of evidence that there is some unifying principle or force that ties together communities, nations, humanity. It is tempting to give up on the quest, but something calls us back, I believe, to keep looking for it.

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Yes, there have been a lot of change in this particular corner of my world: a move to a new state; the birth of a new person; my own entrance into a new phase of life.

Sure, there is some disorientation – living in a new town, spending part of each day in two different houses, remembering how to change diapers, getting used to cradling this new baby boy, our grandson, Lewis. But this disorientation is of the gentlest kind.

Our new little family group has a lot going for it. As a kind of mental exercise, I think about challenges I don’t have to face. We don’t have to choose between buying food and paying rent. Or drive for hours to get to a health clinic. The weather is tolerable for us, despite the warnings about the effects of the El Niño Southern Oscillation. Our country is not facing the outbreak of a deadly virus. We are not being forced out of our home by war.

We have even been largely spared from the worst of the societal harm wrought by, to quote David Brooks, “one man’s damaged psyche.” (The Coming Trump Crackup, New York Times opinion, January 23 2026)

I would like to think that putting 100 miles between us and the big seat of executive power has had a soothing effect.

So, let’s say there is a modest amount of constructive disorientation as we figure out how best to arrange ourselves to help get this little guy started — to orient him, if you will. He is all about orientation. Mostly around figuring out which part of mom is serving the drinks, but other aspects of life, too.

There is something about this little life that focuses my attention.

It’s like a slow-motion big bang. There was nothing. And then, whatever it was started expanding. Heaven knows how. Cells multiplied and got signals about how they should assemble, what they were going to become, and where they needed to be.

As I said in my previous post, at the moment of his coming over into this world, he filled a void, a holding place just for him. Our niece, Carina, postulated “at some micro-second, he was the youngest human being on earth.” And then he swiftly joined the big event.

But right now, Lewis has a very short list of concerns. If he isn’t nursing, he is mostly either settling into sleep or sleeping. He makes his displeasure known, but his rants are short-lived. He has moments of pensive gazing, and episodes of gesticulating to the air.

For his first few days, his arms were unfolding, moving twitchily, flexing his perfect tiny fingers. Lately he has taken to exploring the space around his head, and off to the sides in both directions. Even within the frame of nearly a fortnight, his eyes are open more. He stares with that unblinking moist-eyed baby stare. Does he see in grayscale? Or more shapes and patterns of light and dark? Does he recognize my voice?

Impossible to imagine what he is going through. Figuring out the world, I guess, starts with learning how not to knock yourself in the face.

We were sitting around our dining table after dinner with a few friends who were stopping over for one night on their way south. Each of us had our cup of tea, and we collectively nibbled on green grapes and homemade biscotti. The conversation focused on various events in each of our lives, against the backdrop of current events, including the specter of AI.

“I won’t mind not being around to see how this all turns out,” said one of our guests, and I’m glad she did. In any group in the range of septuagenarians (people in their 70s, so you don’t have to look it up), inevitably someone says something along these lines.

“It’s not our world anymore.”

I would like to imagine Lewis reading about these days forty, fifty years from now and musing to himself, or to a group of his peers:

Look at all the quaint and esoteric issues my grandparents worried about. Climate change. Rising authoritarianism. The threat of AI. Income inequality. Declining bee populations. Micro-plastics. We have solved a lot of this. If they were alive now they wouldn’t believe the world today. How could they have anticipated any of what we are grappling with now? They would be very disoriented.

We were on the screened-in porch near sunset. His grandma was holding him, she talked to him, sang to him, asked questions. His eyes touched on hers now and then, but mostly he was staring over the top of her head to something profoundly new and stunning just to the right. I looked back to see what marvel it might be. There were two large shapes. One was dark and straight – the beam running across the top of the porch. The other was large, vast, and bright blue – the sky outside.

For the time being this person quiets the world he is coming to grips with, one grip at a time.

It might not be “ours” anymore. It’s not his yet.

But it will be. And that will be a good thing.

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I spent the day thinking about Martha and pondering what I might write about in light of the latest member of the clan, Lewis Amzi Hickman, joining us some 72 hours earlier.

What happened instead was that I read various communications from Martha. The subject matter of these was so varied and interesting (to me) that I felt called to make a list — an annotated list of five artifacts that came into view for me that day:

1. The information about the Wicker family came from a set of essays she wrote about our (Martha’s, Pat’s and my) eight great-grandparents. Here is how the Wicker essay begins:

The Wicker line of our family arrived from Devonshire, England, in the form of William Wicker (b. 1693) around 1710. He hoped to settle in Roxbury MA, but he was a Baptist and the Puritans reportedly did not care to have such a person in their midst. An officer of some authority (I’m not clear on what sort of legal system was in place) advised him to look for opportunities elsewhere. Apparently he travelled west; his name is on the charter of the town of Leicester, MA, which he had a role in founding and where he lived out his days.

Our humble beginnings in the land of the free!

2. Ever the archivist, Martha would share with us artifacts from our family history at various times — old letters, drawings, photos. From an email from Martha to Pat and me:

Today I was looking through a bookcase for a music album and (it was a sort of mixed collection of items on the shelf) I found an old music notebook. What should it have in it but Mom’s own notation of “It Was a Lover and His Lass” as sung by Marna and herself. Apparently I persuaded her to write it down at some point.

The song is from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Our mom and her sister both had very fine and complementary singing voices.

3. I came across the playlist Martha curated entitled “Music Mom Played.” We were all familiar with the repertoire that Mom would render on the William Knabe console piano in our living room. Martha had, at her own initiative, scoured the internet to locate artists who played this or that tune in a style and tempo close to how she remembered our mom playing.

Martha selected Balazs Szokolay’s interpretation of a Bach C minor prelude, and for a prelude in C major Wilhelm’ Rubsam’s rendering came closer to how Mom played it. Andrea Bacchetti. Angela Hewitt. Janos Sebesteyen. Mary Shields. Keith Jarrett. Cyprien Katsaris — over a dozen pianists, twenty one tunes in all.

Who knows how long this took Martha, visiting digital music libraries and YouTube clips to find the “most like Mom” interpretation. I remember her exclaiming that it was a joyful process.

4. It appears to me that whatever the subject matter, Martha’s mind swept up all the information she could and allocated time to give new ideas some thoughtful reflection. Here is an excerpt from a piece she wrote dated Easter, 2023:

I first encountered the term “responsibilization” in the context of social work theory, as copy editor for an academic journal. So I don’t know a lot about how it may have originated or how other disciplines may use it.

But in the context in which I encountered it, in anti-sanist literature, it described a power imbalance between distressed individuals (the “mentally ill”) and authorities in medicine and government. Rather than acknowledging and addressing any structural causes of distress, authorities defined the cause to be an illness, making individuals responsible for effecting their own cure by subjecting themselves to medication, behavior modification, shock treatments, etc. In other words, although the causes of distress may have been structural, complex, and substantially not of the individual’s making, the solution was off-loaded onto the individual, protecting the system from change.

For me, this is a fabulous example of an idea that one can not un-think. This was one of a set of draft ideas she sent me. The title of another was “Capitalism as a Rouge Technology,” which deserves it own discussion.

I will just say here that Martha was never an agent of alarm, nor was she an activist in the conventional sense. I have described her thinking as “post-conventional.” There is the way most people see things — and there is Martha’s take. I have always been enriched by this part of her.

5. We siblings valued her wise counsel over the years, and we would tell her. She would only admit to being a good listening ear. One always felt seen, heard, and validated. Her writing is similarly engaging, her voice unpretentious, her sentences crafted with unusual care. One of the last essays she shared with me was titled “On Growing Old.” In it, she challenged the notion that old age must be characterized in a certain way, and that we should accept our decline across the board.

What other gifts lie hidden in growing old? The aging mind finds it more challenging to make decisions and nearly impossible to multitask. The aging body wearies and aches. It can be hard to stay focused and also hard to quickly shift focus. This can make it difficult to replicate the linear efficiencies that are conventionally valued, whether in the study, yard, kitchen, craft room, or elsewhere.

But I have challenged myself, and invite others, to withhold judgment and instead look for the virtues in being creatively, enjoyably unproductive: taking massive amounts of time and care to accomplish just a little; wandering from and coming back to tasks; making missteps, undoing, and redoing; starting and not finishing — even planning but never starting. Sometimes I feel in this happy, freewheeling, accepting approach a unique and unfamiliar joy, as if meeting my own dear child self on the path.

Her prose is full of surprises, such as that last phrase.

I could go on. I was looking for a particular early memory she wrote somewhere about her early interest in rocks — each with their distinctive color, texture and heft; each with their own story about where they were formed, how they moved thither, and what happened en route.

I have presented only five sample artifacts.

But know, the full list is long.

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In this case, it is Lewis. Soon he will come into one of our long series of days, and will see everything for the first time without any words or sense of self to establish the limits or boundaries of anything he experiences. On top of that, he changes everything for us. He is the embodiment of change itself.

The mother-to-be is preparing. Midwife and the support team are at the ready. Supplies to the home have kept up a steady flow. Grandparents are in place and helping as they can to assemble and organize baby paraphernalia, cut the grass, run errands.

Lots of doing going on. But I am also noticing an interior shift. I can only speak for myself. The shift is profound yet subtle.

I have noticed the thinness of time. We are here, as we have always been. He is somewhere else. Suddenly he will be before our eyes, like life’s greatest magic trick. Presto.

I feel an emptying. I don’t know of what. Best I can describe, it is a sense of a tiny sphere of void somewhere in the midst of us as I move through the day. A baby-sized place holder, empty but moving, gesticulating, shaping the air that he will occupy.

I hear the sound of an internal blackboard being erased. Some of us remember that sound of the block of felt eraser being drawn back and forth across the dull black surface of the chalk board, smearing the lines, the equations, the images — rubbing them all to the ever-fainter residue of dust. Am I preparing for a new lesson? It is as though I want to receive this newcomer with an openness, a newness that might not even have words yet, or ever.

Lately I have been taking note of what others are writing about children and the people that babies become. There is a Millennial columnist “Viv” whom my daughter Molly likes. Viv writes a critique of a phenomenon she calls “ambitious parenting.”

It is a fabulous piece written with wit, humor and honesty. Here she reflects on a contradiction in her generation:

It’s puzzling! It’s strange. It seems we all share the same posts about how sad it is that childhood seems to be going away. How a delimited existence is a dim thing for a child. How Gen-Z is all fucked up because they never learned how to go outside… And yet. And yet. We share these posts, and then happily go back to discussing our plans for carefully delimiting our future children’s existences.

There are no formulas, and contradictions abound. Related to this theme is the challenge of raising children in the Information Age, with a lot of hand-wringing about technology.

The tools of the Information Age — computers, networks, the internet, and digital communication — allow us, for better or worse, to connect with any one, any where, all the time about anything.

And anyone at any age can avail themselves of the digital device. It can be the size of a juice box and contains more computing power than was available in 1969 to the entire Apollo space program.

Molly shared with me this post on X by Matt Bateman.

I strongly recommend giving a 4yo an iPad, strictly for the child’s sake. Details in next reply.

As a provocative post, it hits all the bumpers (to use a pinball machine analogy). But he presents what seems to me like a plausible argument which he laid out in his subsequent Substack:

Higher Ground's Friday Notes

A sensitive period for texting

Happy Friday, everyone…

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2 years ago · 32 likes · 7 comments · Matt Bateman

His argument is specific and nuanced. The salient point is that he set up the iPad to offer his child three specific and limited “affordances” — she can take pictures, type notes, and text with family and a small group of friends. That’s it. He tempered the tool to benefit the specific user.

What I found interesting, and somewhat alarming, were the sheer number of comments. Some were laudatory (e.g., “This is the best take I’ve seen about limiting bad screen time and maximizing good screen time”). A few expressed curiosity, but many were surprisingly critical (e.g. “I’ve heard some dumb things in my life, but this is top 10,” and “This guy hates the future generations,” and the classic “Idiot.”)

My favorite exchange:

His argument for the benefits of this approach raises the interesting point about helping the child adapt to the specific time in which she has come to live.

In a world of people bent on taking their own anxiety about technology and introjecting it as full blown misanthropy and civilizational alienation in every child, give your child the humanistic gift of loving the information age.

It is difficult to imagine a corollary in the previous ages of human development — parental anxiety about exposure to stone, or bronze, or iron.

Lewis already has what I would call an auspicious beginning. His starting place will be filled with a network of amazing people, the center of which is his mother who has, I can say with total objectivity, all the qualities of a fabulous Mom.

As he grows he will adapt to a world that we can barely imagine. How will he and his peers balance time in the digital world with time in the one with the blue sky? How will he hone the skills of information literacy1 in the age of truth-bending?

I have no idea. But he will. I believe they all will.

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He was an unremarkable man, large, middle-aged, with a fleshy face and a bearing that was convivial especially when the topic was close to home. I remember only one line from that evening — his response to the question about the secret to his success. His delivery was at once prophetic and self-explanatory, obvious:

“I think about money all the time.”

I was only beginning to think about what sort of adult life I wanted to fashion for myself, but I do remember making a mental note: Well, I don’t want to be like that!

At that point, however, I didn’t reflect on the obvious philosophical follow-up question: is there anything you do want to think about?

Recently I installed a mezuzah on our door frame. For those of you who don’t know, a mezuzah is a small piece of parchment inscribed with specific biblical passages from Deuteronomy (the fifth book of the Jewish Torah) that is rolled up in a container and affixed by many Jewish households to their door frames in conformity with Jewish law and as a sign of their faith.1

For some reason, the houses we lived in the past decade all came with mezuzahs pre-installed. Seemed like we should have one.

Being a Goy — a non-Jew, a Gentile — I got a lot of things wrong. Written on parchment from a kosher animal, written in Hebrew with a quill pen, by a specially trained and devout scribe? I’m 0 for 3 so far. I did, however, say the prayer — in Hebrew — prior to affixing the case at the proper height on the right side as you enter, so there’s that. And yet, I could be accused of cultural appropriation, even religious blasphemy.

So, why this ritual, albeit conducted in a non-kosher manner? I see it as a nod to the Jewishness that is infused in this otherwise Protestant family. The children from my first marriage are Jewish. Our daughter Molly’s anonymous sperm donor is an Ashkenazi Jew. My wife Busy’s surname, Graham, morphed from the Austrian Großbaum, sometime in the early 20th century.

In performing my due diligence about the significance of the mezuzah, I learned something about choosing what to focus on — the value of thinking about something “all the time,” or even some big part of the time.

Below is one of the passages from Deuteronomy that is scribed onto the mezuzah. I don’t share it here with any particular religious interest or fervor — that’s not the point. The passage is a testimonial to the power of training your focus on a bigger picture. Something transcendent. Sort of like getting perspective on “what it’s all about.” Like taking a slow, deep, cosmic breath.

Here is the practice as described in Deuteronomy chapter 6, verses 5 through 9:

⁵ Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.2

⁶ These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.

⁷ Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.

⁸ Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.

⁹ Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.3

Whatever is most important: Keep it in your heart. Bring it up with your children while resting, walking, last thing at night, first thing in the morning. Tie a ribbon round your finger as a simple memory aid. It’s your sixth chakra between your eyebrows — associated with inner wisdom, clarity of thought. Think of it as you enter your home, and pass between rooms in the course of the day.

So. What can I think about all the time? I would like to think I have a choice. If it’s money, fame or fortune, I sincerely doubt that at any point I will be able to say to myself “that’s enough; I’ve got what I need.”

I am thinking that if I worship these things, I will always want more. Same for worshipping pleasure, youth, power.

“There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships,” said David Foster Wallace. He goes on to say:

The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.

On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

In other words, to think about it all the time.

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I find myself looking back as well, to when our daughter was born in 1994–and those early years. I remember the Siege of Sarajevo by Bosnian Serb forces was in its second year. The first Information Superhighway Summit was held in Washington, D.C. at which government officials, industry leaders, and academics discussed the future of the internet. The Dow had yet to top 4,000.

But all of that was background noise. At Columbia Hospital for Women in Washington DC there was a new person, yet unnamed, who invited all our attention. When she wasn’t nursing or sleeping, her darting eyes were scanning the new world with what seemed like focus and deliberation. Hours into life she was already collecting data.

When it was time to take our baby home, the checkout nurse stopped by the room. She had a brusque but efficient bearing. She was filling in a form on a clipboard, and asked for the baby’s name. We had contenders, but hadn’t settled on one.

“You don’t have a name? You need one before you leave here. If you don’t, you’re going to have to visit the DC vital records office. The long lines, the bureaucracy, they take up time you never get back. You don’t want to deal with the DC vital records office. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

We took out our short list of names and were able, in a matter of minutes, to take home Molly Graham Hickman.

Bureaucracy would come up again at the time of baptism. We thought it would be fitting to make a pilgrimage to Wilmington, Delaware, and have Molly christened at our old Episcopal church.

I recently came across this letter from my mother, which recounts her effort to scope out a venue. Here she is writing to the Reverend William Lane at Christ Church:

Dear Bill Lane:

The clergy have always seemed fond of the concept of joy; therefore, I thought I’d report that I saw some of it a couple of weeks ago on the faces of my family when my son’s baby was baptized at the Cathedral Church of St. John.

In offering early on to scope out the Wilmington churches for this Washington, D.C. branch, my first call was to you since Christ Church is where I’ve been trying to find my way back to the denomination. You told me about the necessity for current parish membership as a prerequisite for baptism.

Ditto, my call to St. Andrew’s in which “vineyard” I’d worked the kitchen, the choir stalls, the classroom, the board room and the lectern. Hardly someone who had just wandered in from the street - although, come to think of it, that might have been an advantage in that particular church.

Moving on to the Cathedral [Church of St. John]. Canon Kerr agreed immediately to the christening and I was mightily relieved not only because I could report good news to my family but also because I was spared a perhaps terminal case of rancor over the church that preaches individualized ministry and inclusion and then gets its feet tangled in frivolous legalities. As a clergy friend parodies: “Like a mighty glacier/Moves the church of God.”

All this said, I do like that grand old parish of yours out there where many of my oldest friends are pillars - and I intend to darken its doors now and then!

Sincerely,

Janet Hickman

I am sure our family will not confront any ecclesiastical hindrances this time around. And as for the name, a front runner was selected months ago by the mother-to-be. (It was her boss’s Sufi grandmother, whom Molly met in Istanbul, who first predicted it was a boy, and went so far as to assign him the name Aziz. With all due respect, Molly has since made other plans.)

We are making the world ready for him, and he is suitably preparing himself for his excursion into this world. He will be lovingly received, attended by every blessing.

There is an incipient garden plot in our back yard, maybe ten by twenty feet, demarcated by landscape timber. Over the years it has hosted onions, tomatoes, green beans and such. It has been fallow and I had no plans for its use. Yet there I was recently, garden spade in hand, turning over and over rich shovelfuls and busting them up. Where we came from, up north, the ground was compact and rocky, and what soil strata existed was thin. This land holds more promise.

I will start small, maybe a few rows of wildflowers. Something new in the furrows to echo the new delivery of life upon which our love and attention will come to focus.

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There is a profound suggestion here: that the corvid brain might be capable of empathy, of imagining what is going on in the mind of another being and thinking about the impact of their own actions on others.

Researcher Nicky Clayton with captive Eurasian Jays. Photo: Trevor Ray Hart

Empathy can be a helpful human trait. We used to think it was exclusively human, and now we know that it appears in many species, even in a bird brain.

With empathy we humans can connect, derive pleasure from reading books and watching sports, hold meaningful dialogue, and share perspectives and thoughts. And with empathy, we can predict the impact of events and words on others.

We practice empathy every day. We can feel when it is present in the conversations we have with others – when we share information, stories and opinions. And we can feel when it is missing, for instance, in encounters that leave us feeling intimidated, ignored or humiliated. We can feel it missing from much of our political dialogue, certainly. The national tenor of conversations, debates, and dialogue is unprecedentedly shrill and mean.

The moment when civility is absent can be disheartening and frightening for those who don’t understand that the other side has taken off the gloves and has moved suddenly from friendly conversation to what I would term hostile zeal – a kind of assertion of a point of view that is forceful, uncompromising and uncaring about the impact on others.1

It is this phenomenon — the rise and acceptance of hostile zeal — that might compromise a foundational tool of civilization: civil discourse.

Civil discourse is the engagement in conversation intended to enhance understanding. We introduce children early on to the art of civil discourse. It starts with some basic ideas or rules that we all know. “Use your inside voice,” “Slow down so I can understand you,” and “Don’t interrupt; let your sister finish her sentence,” are examples we might hear around the house. In school we might hear “Who haven’t we heard from?” and “Let’s see if we can talk this through.” You get the idea.

These kinds of statements aim to ensure that:

1. voices are heard,

2. people and ideas are respected,

3. tone and force are proportionate to the situation and

4. interpersonal connections are preserved or enhanced.

From these foundational values have evolved applications at every grade level: elementary school students trained in conflict resolution skills for the playground; social skills workshops in middle school to teach empathy and encourage self-control; the use of restorative justice practices in high school; a focus at all ages on mindfulness and centering as a way to decrease stress and build resiliency.

Clearly, we value these things in schools and homes: inclusion, respect for people, and a sense (through empathy) of the appropriateness of tone and force in different social situations.

We also value, as a nation, the robust debate, the open sharing of views, and the validity of vigorous disagreement on issues.

Yet in public discourse we seem to lack the wherewithal to talk constructively about our difference of views.

I found this little diagram called “Ways of Talking” in connection with my work as an organization development specialist for Human Resources at Johns Hopkins Hospital in the late 1900s:

Most people are familiar with the process on the right-hand side of the model; we are taught through the educational process to advocate and defend our point of view. Many professions are siloed into areas of expertise. You have a problem. I have knowledge and experience. Your role is to listen. To me. Society reinforces this talent (of expressing opinions) through the celebration of one-sided takes, whether coarse, indignant, and simplistically certain, as in the ecosystem that followed Rush Limbaugh, or polished, ironic, and researched, as exemplified by John Oliver.

Advocate/Compete/Convince can, in extreme cases, be manifested as an act of violence, causing the person on the receiving end to feel humiliated, flee for safety, or fight back.

In one sense, the Advocate/Compete/Convince approach, and resolving the conversation by power (or intimidation and abuse) is easy and efficient (for the advocate) as long as the advocate doesn’t care about – or see the relevance of, or have the skills to pursue behaviors that lend themselves to – building relationships with other people.

The approach on the left-side is more nuanced, and less instinctive for many than the right-side path. The behaviors of listening, accepting and trust-building are all derived from an interest in the act of inquiry, which is based on having curiosity as a mindset.

The curiosity mindset is not dramatic. It relishes sharing of viewpoints, not “take downs.” It marvels at the variety of human thinking, not narrow rightness; it is broad, not truncated. It is arguably the result of empathy and imagination.

We need both Advocacy and Inquiry; but while the former is easily grasped, practiced and rewarded, the latter might be in a state of atrophy and in need of rehabilitation.

Maybe we can see the antics of a crow (with her walnut-sized brain, demonstrating empathic thinking and behavior) as a call for all of us to “up our game,” so to speak. Sometimes it feels as if the art of inquiry, and the attendant skills of curiosity and empathy are at risk, even in our conversations.

I believe we can strengthen our empathy and our caring – things many of us learn while young and maybe lose sight of.

We can be better than children, in this regard, and certainly better than crows.

At stake is civil discourse and the benefits that will accrue with our evolved understanding of each other — in the wide, troubled world, and at our own hearth and table.

We close today, Thursday. We move Saturday. There are a lot of moving pieces. A lot of long inner good-byes that don’t have words. I need to call upon a story from my past. To get some perspective. I hope you understand, Gentle Reader.

I wrote an essay in June 1998, after I visited the home of my childhood. Earlier that month neighborhoods in the northern suburbs of Wilmington were subjected to a microburst — a sudden, violent downdraft of air that accompanied a particularly vicious thunderstorm.

A tree fell into the house where my pal John lived when we were young. And the woods behind our old house at 23 Briar Road had been leveled. I visited the site, following a sense of obligation to witness the devastation that had been meted out upon the sylvan backdrop of my childhood.

Here is the essay, edited for length.

Most of the trees I had ever really known as a child were knocked over one night recently, so I went to see what it looked like. These were the woods behind the house where I grew up. Less than a quarter acre, the woods could hardly qualify as a disaster area; but in its compact assembly of mature trees, undergrowth, paths and woodpiles, it contained the stuff of almost a quarter century of activity. I came to the site feeling like an archivist, hunting for a catchment of memory.

I’ll just take a peek. Just to the edge of the house, I thought. Just along the garden.

Something pulled me in, past the edge of the house, in toward what had been the edge of the woods. What had been a lush backdrop of green was gone, decimated, swept, raked over. As when an actual rake, thoughtlessly drawn over a patch of small blossoms, will push over many of them and ruin horribly the uniform spread and tiny altitude of those flowers, so to oaks, and maple and poplar did this recent wind wreak havoc.

Some were standing. I noted them as I drifted in a mix of mourning and fascination toward that woods — moving toward a place at which I would never arrive. Where was the single white rose by the ash tree? The rhododendron? Where was the forest edge? How did a 100mph downdraft remove this precise grove of trees while leaving all the houses around it intact?

A few neighbors in the development behind ours moved slowly across their back yards, gathering and moving branches to one side. They can see me, and I them, because the green is gone. It reminds me of jungle deforestation in the Philippines; whatever lushness there was stops at the edge of human enterprise. Perhaps a hundred feet back across the devastation, the woods suddenly resume, as dense and green as I remember it.

I walked toward the back porch, toward the person moving to greet me, who, I would soon find out, was the owner of 23 Briar Road, Ms. Steele. I introduced myself and explained my mission. She told me the story of that weird and frightful night. Thunder cracked and incessant lightning popped like flashbulbs. The entire family migrated to the basement for safety. Then, in the riot of wind and hail, a seismic thud — a grove of old-growth trees being swiped down in a second.

In the ensuing conversation, we put the woods back together, its history since they moved in, and before we moved out. We watched the neighbors move branches and piles from here to there. Ms. Steele would invite me, my mom, and my children Andy (12) and Hannah (10) to tour the inside of the house, my first view of it in eighteen years.

I never saw the woods for the first time; it was always there. I was six months old in May 1955 when my family moved to 23 Briar Road, and at that point ours was one of two houses on a quarter mile long cul-de-sac off Wilson Road. This development, to which my mom would give the name Briarwood, had, at my earliest memory (circa 1958), only 13 houses, numbered 1, 3, 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21 and ours. The other 10 lots were empty.

Over the course of the next decade the sapling growth would give way, one by one, to houses, but the woods behind us and in the lot to the west of us, remained — sort of a legacy of the forest, orchard and farmland which all this land was before the Great World Wars. This woods, positioned as it was at the end of the cul-de-sac, was exempt from development. It was my backdrop, a canopy, an enclosure, a hug of green. A corner of peace and sustainability, amidst the change of suburban sprawl, of the riotous 1960s, of my own growth, toddler, teen to man.

Year upon year, in much the same way the woods would shake its bare branches against the cold darkness, and hold and bounce sunlight in the summer, or carry the wood thrush call. The Woods just Were, year upon year.

As much as the trees defined the space, I marked the area in my child’s mind by paths and clearings. Here is where woodpile was, and the old hammock, and here between oak and maple we put the new one. The trapeze hung off the slanting red oak, and past that point a path led back to the clearing where the two trees grew together. Way beyond that (and well off our property) was Big Rock, a dark basalt landmark indicating time to turn back.

Directly behind the house there were the four sassafras trees of uniform height, forming a rectangle that invited construction of various forts. From there a path parallel to the fence brought one, within a few steps, to the stables of imaginary horses, a mote, a meeting room, a tunnel behind the viburnum and another clearing where we would spring from the split rail fence and swing off a sweet gum tree branch. This last spot was near the end of the driveway, where stood the tulip poplar – one of the few great climbing trees in the constellation.

This path along the fence followed, we later ascertained, an old drainage ditch which one could follow past the sassafras, past the birch trees, to a low area behind the double tree where, each of Hickman children swear, there once was a small marshy area. I thought there was running water there at one time. Pat remembers salamanders and guppies. That part of the woods, the clearing, was always dense and cool.

The double tree was now on its side, blown down to the northeast along with its companions: two white oaks, the maples, others. The woods was a confusion of snapped trunks, northeast-blown trees, huge rounds of bleached roots clung with light gray and yellowish soil, many taller than I. What remained of the underbrush were a few stems with sparse leaves turned the wrong way. The red oak, which grew at a southwest slant, stood still, all but three stout limbs busted off, and of them only one had leaves to speak of.

Near the trapeze was the spicebush. Dad had shown us children how to spot its oval leaves which, when crushed between your fingers, imparted a sweet smell. That was thirty years ago. I picked one leaf, rolled it in my fingers and kept its fading fragrance in my hand.

Standing in the woods, the echoes of past activities seemed particularly faint, my feet and body particularly large on this stage where so many small events happened: singing with my sisters as we raked leaves; the hammock; the few campfires near the split tree; setting off firecrackers; building the sassafras forts; raking out clearings and paths and passages and meeting rooms and the hideaways; tending the animal graveyard, resting place of beasts wild and domestic, just behind the maple in the yard. The beginning of my nature watching. Naming bird tunes. Noting the color of bark.

There is nothing really to do but reflect, the magic having been completed sometime earlier when I wasn’t looking.

I remembered the trees as footprints where they stood, and as billows where they lived in the air as blended clouds of distinct texture and shape. Even on this sad day, I move around the blasted landscape as I felt I should, a pilgrim coming home.

Ms. Steele and I find some solace in remembering the woods, but the pain is deep, the ruination too fresh. No one was hurt, but the Steeles keep the living room window curtain closed in mourning.

Seventeen years later I paid another visit. Ms Steele was happy to say that trees were coming back. She had the curtains open.

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We were visiting, at her suggestion, Antietam National Battlefield where, 143 years previous, a great and horrible battle took place.

We parked near a forested area, and there were other swaths of trees further out and all around. In some way we were typical tourists. We started at the visitor center, studied dioramas of the landscape and the troop movements, read summaries of the battle, death tolls of wars over the years, and learned a little about what happened in our nation’s history that brought 132,000 men to this site on September 17, 1862.

Exploring outside we approached statues and placards with a kind of slow reverence. I don’t know what it is about a battlefield site, but I wanted to walk carefully, as though the hallowed ground were still and forever wounded. We read each sign, and discussed the issues quietly. We followed a trail across the fields and through a patch of forest, and there came upon a small graveyard. It was well-tended but off the path and slightly hidden in the dappled sunlight.

Molly and I fell into a moment of thoughtful reflection, alternately bending to read a name and standing there, taking in the sober nest of stones.

After a few minutes it occurred to me to ask: “If one of these soldiers could talk to us, what would he say?”

Her reply came quicker than I had anticipated, delivered with a characteristic clarity and decisiveness: “He would ask, ‘What are we doing in Iraq?’”

At that time, the U.S. and its coalition were just beginning year three of the Iraq War (2003-2011). I can’t remember the details of the conversation that followed but it must have touched on the implications of that question, and what it would mean for the poor young man, who perished in 1862, and was now trying to make sense of his country in 2005:

What did I fight and die for? So that our brave nation would send more boys like me overseas to do battle with another poor band of young men? And for what? It’s been nearly a century and a half since all of us here gave “the last full measure of our devotion.” How long can we keep doing this? Have we learned nothing about peacemaking?

Molly is older now, with a career, a community of friends, a home and a child on the way. Sitting with her in church this past Easter Sunday, we heard Pastor Neal open the service: “Find your balance on holy ground. Breathe deeply the breath of life. Be emptied of small concerns.”

For me, I had to quiet the background noise of this new Middle East war with Iran, launched 15 years after the end of the previous war we started in the Middle East with Iraq.

At several points in the service Pastor Neal reflected on the value of community — how we all practice the hard work of love and forgiveness as we live and grow toward the light. He talked about death and resurrection, and the process of “repentance” — which comes from the Greek word meaning “to change one’s mind.” In the religious sense this is more than an academic exercise; this is the heartfelt transformation of one’s mind, attitude and actions.

It can happen. In moments hidden in dappled light. In a moment of kindness to a stranger. In a 100 year-old church. We breathe deeply the breath of life.

We can turn away from where we are headed. The Hebrew word teshuva (which we translate as repentance) is derived from the verb ‘to turn.”

Supply chains are global. The arms business thrives. Oil tankers drift at a sleepy pace across the oceans. The tremors of war are felt in every heart. Some days darkness seems like a growing force.

It is not.

But life is. The seed dies so that the stem might flourish toward the light (to paraphrase Pastor Neal). Then it grows to connect with a thousand other lives in its realm. And it keeps going. Life rejuvenating. Life everlasting.

Maybe peace and community are local things, residing in tangible signs of coexistence such as this intentional congress in a small church in Red Hill, Virginia, and millions of places — religious and secular — where two or three (or more) are gathered and find balance with each other.

If there is a lesson in peacemaking, maybe it is here.

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My sister Pat (two years older than me, and in 12th grade in 1970) had a 1969 white Volkswagen Beetle, which I learned to drive. Trunk in the front, engine in the back. Stick shift. Roll-down windows. Nothing fancy.

Do you remember the miles per gallon of your first car? Of course not. Nobody does (according to my research). That’s because in 1970 it cost about 4 bucks to fill your entire tank. Price per gallon in 1970 was about $0.35.

And this price had been remarkably stable from the end of World War II to 1973. During those decades gasoline prices rose so gradually, one hardly noticed. The shock of 1973 wasn’t just that prices went up — it was that, for the first time in a generation, they moved at all.

What happened? Even a little research on this topic made me feel like I had inhaled too much car exhaust. Proposing a simple explanation for political events in the Middle East is never a good idea. I’ll let Wikipedia summarize the First Oil Crisis:

In October 1973, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) announced that it was implementing a total oil embargo against countries that had supported Israel at any point during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which began after Egypt and Syria launched a large-scale surprise attack in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to recover the territories that they had lost to Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War.

So, it all began in 1973, or maybe 1967. Or when the Ottoman Empire after WWI was partitioned by the western European powers and shaped the modern Middle East. Hard to say.

The interruption in the oil supply caused gasoline shortages. Some stations ran out, or rationed gas. There were long lines at the pump. When my 19 year old self in the VW was waiting in line at the Texaco station, I was only aware that “OPEC” was the cause of this faint (in retrospect) disruption in my life. Suddenly my $0.35 per gallon regular unleaded was costing me $0.54.

There was also a stock market crash from January 1973 until December 1974 that I knew nothing about. But I did know I was paying more than $6.50 to fill my tank.

What also went unnoticed was the close of an era — the end of (relatively) cheap and abundant gasoline. Underlying all those post-WWII decades was an invisible system of interdependence. After 1973 the system — now broken — became visible: the U.S. was dependent on foreign oil, the oil-producing nations were asserting their power, using oil supply as a weapon, and the whole postwar economic picture was now seen as fragile and uncertain.

I was only slightly more aware six years later with the Second Oil Crisis in 1979. This time oil production dropped in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution. Another summary via Wikipedia:

Oil markets’ reaction raised the price of crude oil drastically over the next 12 months, more than doubling it to $39.50 per barrel [in 1980]. The sudden increase in price was connected with fuel shortages similar to the 1973 oil crisis. In 1980, following the onset of the Iran–Iraq War, oil production in Iran fell drastically. Iraq’s oil production also dropped significantly, triggering economic recessions worldwide.

Due to memories of the oil shortage in 1973, motorists soon began panic buying, and long lines appeared at gas stations, as they had six years earlier.

What I remember distinctly during this period was how the then Big Three automakers — Ford, Chrysler and GM — all downsized their automobiles, and small, fuel efficient Japanese cars flooded the market. My car at this time was a used, yellow 4-speed 1977 Datsun 1200 sedan. The previous owner had taken out the catalytic converter, so I was getting 43 miles per gallon on the highway — a situation to which I turned a moral blind eye, even when my environmentalist girlfriend at the time broke up with me over this issue.

At this point, it’s hard not to notice the recurring theme of the supply of oil used for political and economic power, and the persistent casting of the usual suspects in the oil drama: Iran, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the U.S.

Jimmy Carter, in his 1980 state of union address1 had this to say:

An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States.

The more things change, the more they are all about oil, am I right?

This was a few years before the term “globalization” was in popular currency. It’s all connected. We all depend on each other and on unencumbered trade with each other.

If something interrupts the oil distribution system — for instance, two tough guys take out a rival mob leader, whose gang controls a key waterway — the world adapts to bring things back to normal. Even now, America is leading the way toward stabilizing global markets. And the automobile industry is fully incentivized to make more electric vehicles (EVs), and make gas cars smaller and more efficient.

Totally kidding. They are not doing any of that.

Federal regulations to encourage electric vehicles have been rolled back. The tax credit for EV purchases ended. The best selling vehicle of any type in the U.S. is the Ford F-Series pickup, and has been for the past 44 years.2 The gas version’s average mile per gallon is 16 city - 21 highway. Their “EcoBoost” model gets 17 and 25.3

By comparison, the most efficient non-hybrid car is the 2025 Honda Civic, which has an average mpg of 33 city - 42 highway.

As of this writing, gas prices are over $5 per gallon in some places. So far no shortages or long lines or odd-even rationing. The economic turmoil generated by this arguably unnecessary war is far more punishing and catastrophic in other places in the world and on other livelihoods and other lives.

As for the tiny ham-fisted leaders of our Executive branch, they would like us to think their “excursion” is going to plan. But as we learned from the oil crises of the past, sometimes a system is invisible until it breaks.

Or someone breaks it.

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