There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. 
 Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act 1, Scene 5)

[NOTE: Yes, this is not new, but then who among us is? So, enjoy the opp to revisit this immortal post and let yours truly go galavanting among the ancient ruins of Rome for a few weeks, with nothing more pressing to ponder than which of the 10,000 delicious Italian dishes on offer should I choose for my next meal?]

Alert readers of this blog may recall a post (“Everything Takes as Long as it Takes”) where I shared a sample of the stuff I scribble on scraps of paper which I then leave all over the house. That particular scribbling noted that One day you’re 30; the next, you’re 60, and yet 10 minutes can seem like forever.

Observations like this take up not inconsiderable real estate in my head. I call them “mysteries.”

I thought it might be a nice diversion from the current journey we seem to be embarked on—going to hell in a handbasket—to share some of these musings with you. Also, I’m packing for a trip and penning advance blog posts at a rate Stephen King would envy. I don’t have time to research, say, the validity of Einstein’s theory of relativity or to follow up on a CNN article Drinking more coffee leads to a longer life, two studies say. I’m willing to take CNN at its word. The press in NOT the enemy of the people, and coffee is our friend.

Excuse me, while I get a refill.

Okay, I promised you mysteries.

Mystery #1: How Can We See the Sky?

I was sitting out on the lawn at Tanglewood (summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra) in July, sharing a picnic with Ed and listening to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor. As it was early evening in high summer, the sky above me was still amazingly blue, feathered with clouds that looked like someone just ran a comb through them. Cirrus clouds, I think (I’m a writer, not a scientist). They arced overhead, a perfect dome, the sky meeting the ground in a complete circle around the Tanglewood lawn, our chairs at the exact center. How cool is that?

It’s rare to have such an open vista without buildings or other debris clogging up the sightlines. I hadn’t quite realized before that wherever we are, it’s like we’re inhabiting part of a snow globe. That Earth appears to be a ball inside another ball (the sky) which encompasses it completely.

Actually, we never experience Earth as a ball. More like a plane, bisecting a sphere. (To clarify this gibberish, see illustration.)

The Boston Symphony Orchestra moved on to a Tchaikovsky symphony (the Fifth, in E minor—I was paying attention, more or less) while I jotted a note on my program: How can we see the sky?

I pondered this through the Andante-Allegro movement and soon realized that, like Pandora’s Box, this question opens up a slew of thorny conundrums:

If Earth is a ball inside the SkyBall, why can we never touch the sky, even with a very tall ladder or, say, from the roof of the Empire State Building? We can’t even touch the sky where it meets the ground at the horizon because, like a pesky older sibling, the horizon taunts us, moving away as we move toward it.

And where oh where is outer space? How does this blue, cloud-scraped sky—a visually opaque ceiling—obscure the cosmos of stars and planets that glitter and spin on a decidedly black background?

This is not as stupid a question as it may first appear. Recall the photos of Earth from outer space—there is no “sky barrier” in the way. Maybe a wisp of cloudy looking stuff but you can still see Earth—the oceans, the continents.

                                   By the Finale (Andante, Allegro, Moderato), the SkyBall had vanished, leaving me to view a sprinkling of stars light years away. Where did that opaque blue barrier go? Is there a day-to-night transparency button somewhere operating on a timer? And when the night is overcast, does that mean the transparency gizmo is out of juice and needs new batteries?

Like I said, it’s a mystery.

Mystery #2: Are We Right-Side Up or Upside Down? 

Okay, gravity is the stuff that keeps us sticking to the earth—our feet squarely glued as sure as Newton’s apple to whatever patch of turf we’re standing on—but are we right-side up or upside down?

Like most of us, I grew up with those cartoons of little kids holding hands encircling the globe, so popular on UNICEF holiday cards. Being from the northern part of North America, I wasn’t too worried because Michigan was fairly high on the top side of the EarthBall. But those kids in Algeria are living at a perilous slant, and the ones from New Zealand and Patagonia have blood rushing to their little skulls 24/7.

As my age advanced to double digits, I began to question such two-dimensional representations. Was north always up and south always down? Up compared to what? Down from where?

We are citizens of the universe, a multi-dimensional space without end, as scientists tell us (and questions within questions—how do they know this?). So, what exactly is “right-side up” in outer space? Does it change with the movement from day to night, the seasons, the place where we live?

And if there is no right-side up in space, are we always upside down or only sometimes?

Is it this constant switch in equilibrium that creates the need for Excedrin, Prozac, a lobotomy? Or just these constant questions?

I don’t know. Do you?

Mystery #3: How Do We Go to Sleep, and How Do We Get Back?

The word on the street is that even the most exciting things—chocolate, sex, bungee jumping—lose their allure, their mystery, if they are repeated routinely.

Well, it’s hard to find a more enduring routine in life than sleep, and yet sleep remains a great mystery. How do we get there? How do we get back? What exactly is there?

If you think this is just me inventing puzzlers in an effort to slap a blog together so I can get out of town on time, try this experiment: 1) Place a notepad and pen by your bed. 2) Tonight, write down the exact time you “go to” sleep.

Not as easy as you thought, eh?

We don’t consciously relinquish our consciousness. It just sort of “happens.” Like walking backwards unawares toward a steep drop-off. That last step… We don’t know what hit us. And we don’t know we aren’t awake wherever it is we “go to.” Except once in a while we realize, “Hey I’m in a dream. I can behave as badly as I like and it doesn’t count.” Which realization is almost as weird as going to sleep itself (though it does show a marvelous talent for taking advantage of unexpected opportunities).

When we’re in dreamland, how do we tune out the burps and beeps of the real world around us? While we sleep, life certainly continues on its merry, noisy way. Thunderstorms thunder. Fire engines siren past. But nothing registers unless it’s REALLY LOUD.  Like the time I was awoken by the bedroom radiator CLANGING in a way it had never clanged before. The sweet oblivion of sleep dropped away in a heartbeat as I realized geysers of boiling water were shooting up from that radiator, at 5:14 a.m.

Do you know how hard it is to get a plumber at five in the morning? Those 24-hour emergency services listed online? Just phone check-ins that contact a plumber when he or she rises at a more civilized hour.

We surrender our consciousness each night never doubting it will mysteriously “return” in the morning. Now that’s the kind of deep faith most religious proselytizers would envy.

But how is it we do “return” to the real world each day? And why don’t we fall out of bed in our sleep? We certainly move around in our sleep, so why aren’t we hitting the floor in great numbers, regularly? This has never happened to me, but it did happen to Ed once when we were taking a weekend in NYC. Believe me, it was frightening—waking up suddenly to see him tumbling over the edge of the bed, with a nanosecond to hope he didn’t take his eye out on the corner of the nightstand (he didn’t, though he did suffer a nasty cut on his cheek).

Sleep—there’s a Gordian knot of mysteries involved here.

Mystery #4: How Do Cats Know Where to Go?

As mentioned in my August post (“I Always Wanted an Orange Kitten”), I have had many cats in my life. Most of them were indoor/outdoor creatures, which means there came a day in their young lives when I opened the back door and allowed them to explore the wide world beyond. Without exception, they all returned after a few hours. No one got confused about which house was theirs—the mock Tudor in need of a paint job, or the Cape with the sagging steps and the rusting swingset?

How do they do it—how do cats unerringly zero in on their house wherever they’ve wandered? I mean you wouldn’t want to try this with your three-year-old.

This mystery deepens as I recall an afternoon in my college days. I went with a carload of friends to a party, a cookout hosted by a couple who lived in the university’s married student housing.

Several hours into the event, my hosts asked if someone would ride down to the convenience store six blocks over to pick up some more drink mixers. They offered the use of their bicycle. I volunteered and off I went. Finding the Mini-Mart was easy. It was up on the main drag. Finding my hosts’ house again—that was the challenge.

Like cats released into freedom for the first time, I was operating on limited information. Having hitched a ride to the party with friends, I hadn’t bothered to check the house number. Or the street name. Married student housing was laid out in nothing resembling a grid, and all the houses were identical. All 500 of them.

I rode around for a while, Cokes and tonic water warming, bagged ice melting in the bike’s basket. I would probably still be riding if one of my hosts hadn’t chosen the moment I was circling his circle for the hundredth time to set out an empty keg on the front porch. I have rarely been so glad to see anyone.

Cats. Mystery is their milieu. The Egyptians held them sacred. Believed they guarded Egypt from invaders. Next time you see a cat, bow your head in acknowledgment of the inexplicable powers they hold, including the ability to always find home.

 Mystery #5: What Are We?

Okay, one more.

Some years back, a friend invited me to an art exhibit at Smith College. I can’t recall exactly what the theme of the show was, but it included a photograph of the poet Tennyson taken after his death.

In the photo we see Tennyson’s head resting on a pillow, eyes closed, a peaceful expression on his face, as if he were just napping (recall Mystery #3). But he’s dead.

I stared and stared at that still face. Looked at some more of the exhibit. Returned to Tennyson. There he was—head, shoulders, torso—all of him except the thing that was him. The “Tennyson thing.” The thing that was a poet rather than a cab driver or a hip-hop artist. The thing that preferred Skittles to Milk Duds, or favored the Yankees over the Mets. Okay, I’m improvising here—well, fabricating wildly—but the question is: Where did the mind-personality-heart that was Tennyson go? How was it there one moment and—poof!—gone the next?

I relate all this as background to the greatest mystery of all: What are we?

The startling glimpse I had into this most amazing of riddles came while I was visiting London twelve years ago with my youngest. As well as enjoying galleries and museums, parks and pubs, Lauren was talking to admissions people at several UK universities. This particular day, they were talking to someone at King’s College London about studying microbiology (they wound up majoring in public policy in the States, but that’s a completely separate mystery and nothing to do with the topic at hand).

While they were chatting with the admissions folks, I wandered around and discovered a little anatomy “museum” on one floor. A kind of 19^th century exhibit of spare parts—like a Victorian penny dreadful. Among the displays I recall were stomachs and brains, lungs and large intestines, hearts and kidneys. There was even a set of fetal Siamese twins. All floating in some murky preservative in voluminous glass jars.

It brought me smack up against all my assumptions about the species Homo sapiens, and changed my head 180.

Up to that moment, I thought of human beings in the lofty, ethereal way you might expect from a lit major/writer/daydream believer. We were ideas and dreams, philosophical meanderings and heart-throbbings. But as I stood, gazing at these jars of stuff that looked nothing so much as a lot of cruddy dilapidated hot water bottles and crusted tubing, I had to admit: That’s us.

And when that junk stops working, the game’s over.

The mystery is how something as mentally and emotionally complex, as creative and resourceful as us emerges from what appears to be about five dollars’ worth of spare parts.

You can see how a Hitler or a Trump might come out of this muck, but a Tennyson or a Van Gogh? A Nelson Mandela or a Frida Kahlo?

And yet it is the truth of us.

Mysteries. Life is full of them. I embrace them. I like the way they keep my brain on a Socratic buzz—asking and answering questions, which then generate more questions—as I puzzle out the oddities of this world.

It all comes down to this: When the SkyBall goes transparent tonight, giving way to a universe of stars, I’ll be thankful that whichever way my head is facing, I don’t fall off the planet. And when I come back from the land of sleep tomorrow morning, however that happens, I’ll be grateful for another day, crossing my fingers that the mucky parts and crusty tubing keep on ticking.

The first day of the Paris Olympics, as ESPN was interviewing Americans in the crowd, one man announced that he had bet a friend $175,000 on the outcome of some event and won.

“A hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars!” I exclaimed to Ed who was sitting next to me.  “Think of all the food, the medical care, the shelter that money could have bought for people who are hungry or sick or homeless, and this guy blows it on a bet, a bet!”

I will not identify the man because the issue here is much bigger than any one person. The issue is about insatiable greed, the unending need to trounce all comers, and beneath that, a vast insecurity. As Genghis Khan is believed to have said twelve centuries ago: “It is not sufficient that I succeed—all others must fail.” Some might call it the spiritual poverty of excessive wealth. I just think of it as the Billionaires Disease.  

A Bottomless Insecurity

The first symptom I detected of our American in Paris having succumbed to The Billionaire’s Disease was his need to announce—in a worldwide broadcast—the exact dollar amount of the wager he’d won. He could have said, “I bet an old friend on that last event and won.” But he wanted us, needed us, needed millions of strangers to know that he was so wealthy, such a major wheeler-dealer, that $175,000 was a trifle—chump change—he could gamble and lose if it came to that. Wow! (he imagines), all those people listening will envy me, will wish they were me. But even if this were true, envy is not the same as esteem. And what I believe people afflicted with Billionaires Disease most crave is the esteem of others—millions of strangers—because deep down inside they doubt their own true worth as a human being.

So Much, Too Much: A Boundless Greed

And it’s never enough. The payouts, the ever-increasing profit margins, the millions, the billions. The need for more and more and more, it never stops, is never satisfied. Why have only four homes when you can have five? Why restrict yourself to one private jet when you can have a fleet of them?

Last fall, the world’s second richest man (with a net worth of $209 billion), Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, purchased a seven-bedroom, 14-bathroom mansion in Miami-Dade County, Florida’s exclusive gated community, Indian Creek. It is the third property he owns on this man-made barrier island. In addition (naturally) to his numerous other mansions scattered across the U.S. from Manhattan to Beverly Hills.

Even the “poorer” of the uber-wealthy (those whose net worth is a piddling $30+ million) can boast of owning 3.7 homes on average. And the high prices they can afford to pay, combined with the number of properties they purchase, are one factor driving up single-family home prices beyond the reach of the average American. At a median price of $431,000, some three-quarters of all homes on the market now have become the impossible dream for most Americans.

What’s Mine is Mine, What’s Yours is Mine

But it’s not just that the super-rich are buying multiple homes for themselves. They’re also buying large tracts of single- and multi-family housing across the country at bargain prices (cheaper by the dozen!) via their hedge funds and private equity firms. In the case of single-family homes, hedge-fund groups turn the houses into rental properties for a never-ending stream of revenue, thus forcing America’s middle class to keep pumping their earnings into enriching the hedge-fund managers while destroying their own chances of building the equity they need to buy a home. Private equity firms, on the other hand, tend to buy up apartment buildings, then jack up the rent far beyond the residents’ ability to pay. In both instances, the big-money landlords have a reputation for letting these properties fall into disrepair and evicting any tenants who complain. They then unload the buildings at a substantial profit.  

If young working people, including professionals, can’t buy homes, and many struggle to pay the steep rents, what is happening to Americans making minimum wage, people who are between jobs at the moment, people with disabilities? The U.S. experienced its biggest increase—12 percent—in homelessness last year, with one in every 500 Americans (roughly 653,000 total) left stranded on the streets. The highest number since tracking began in 2007.                          

All of which makes the Supreme Court’s June 28 ruling that cities can ban the homeless from sleeping and “camping” in public spaces the more invidious and downright inhuman.

Criminalizing the Need to Sleep      

The 6-3 (surprise, not!) SCOTUS decision overturned lower court rulings that held criminalizing homelessness to be “cruel and unusual” under the Eighth Amendment. After all, people must sleep. And if one has no options for lodging, what can one do?  

The case was brought by Grants Pass, a city of about 40,000 people in the mountains of southern Oregon. Grants Pass has a longstanding prohibition against sleeping or “camping” in public spaces, including parks. One is not even permitted to use a blanket or pillow to nap on a bench.

Grants Pass claimed the lower courts’ rulings encouraged homelessness (as if this were something ‘desirable’ many people aspire to) and endangered public safety. But that’s not the whole story—just the part the city’s elite want you to hear. The truth is lower courts had ruled that cities have a right to restrict when and where people can sleep, but they must first offer these homeless citizens adequate shelter. Trouble is, the city of Grants Pass has no public shelter now, and the shelter it offered before 2022 had just 25 beds. This facility has now been taken over by UCAN, a private non-profit org, who added eight-and-a-half “tiny homes” to shelter up to 17 more people, with a community building that includes a bathroom, kitchen, and showers. And that’s it. Guess we should be glad there’s a bathroom.      

Forty-two UCAN shelter beds? Grants Pass has roughly 600 homeless folks on any given day, as the Supreme Court noted. And Grants Pass is just one of many cities that can now crack down on those who can’t afford the spiking rents that further enrich the already wealthy. A humorous line from my college days ran: You can sleep in your car, but you can’t drive your house. Not so funny these days. Many cities now forbid sleeping in your car in a public parking lot or street parking space.

Money for Prisons but Not for Housing

So, what happens to those without a home or at least a room to rest their weary head? In the irony of ironies, Grants Pass policy is to fine these unfortunate folks $295. Multiple offenses will result in criminal prosecution with up to 30 days in jail. I’d like to point out here that people sleep rough because they don’t have $295. I strongly suspect if they had somewhere better to go, they would go there. I would also argue that if a city has the money to imprison innocent people down on their luck, it could use those same funds to help them.

As Diane Yentel, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, asked: “Where do people experiencing homelessness go if every community decides to punish them for their homelessness?” And Ed Johnson of the Oregon Law Center, the org that sued Grants Pass on behalf of the accused homeless, noted that a criminal record imposed by the city makes it even harder for these people to ever get housing. He also laid the blame squarely where it belongs: A severe shortage of affordable housing for half of all tenants. Housing that the richest of the rich have gobbled up to make themselves still richer. Funny, if you have millions, all laws and restrictions disappear—poof!   

You Got a Few Centuries—or Ten-thousand Years—to Play Catch-up?

As I was outlining this month’s post, I got an email from the AFL-CIO (The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations). As it speaks so eloquently to the sickness—and cruelty—of Billionaires Disease, I will reprint it here:

Do you know how long the median employee in America would have to work in order to earn what a CEO makes in a single year?

On average, the median employee of an S&P 500 company would have had to start working in 1755 (prior to the start of the American Revolution) to earn what the average CEO received in 2023. At the worst offending company this year, the median employee would have had to start working in 8,354 B.C. to earn what the CEO made in a single year. In 2023, CEO pay at S&P 500 companies increased 6% over the previous year—to an average of $17.7 million in total compensation.

We Can No Longer Afford the Uber-Rich 

In explaining his decision to stand with Grants Pass and against the homeless, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote: “Homelessness is complex. Its causes are many. So may be the public policy responses required to address it … A handful of federal judges cannot begin to match the collective wisdom the American people possess in deciding how best to handle a pressing social question like homelessness.”

Complex? Really, not so much, Neil. Homelessness is the result of greed and indifference to the fate of our fellow human beings by those who possess the means to alleviate their suffering. After all, there’s no profit to be derived from helping those folks.

As for federal judges not possessing the collective wisdom of the American people to deal with homelessness, I recall you ruled against the Chevron doctrine that same day, declaring that the courts’ fundamental duty to interpret the law overrode federal agencies’ interpretations, thus setting yourself up as “experts” on an array of complex issues from drug safety to environmental poisons to nuclear weapons. The thing about homelessness, Neil, is it doesn’t require a Ph.D. to see what’s needed. All it requires is a conscience to call out wrongs when we see them and a heart to care for our fellow human beings.

“It is not sufficient that I succeed—all others must fail.” Genghis Khan’s words echo down through the centuries. Billionaires Disease is a lethal sickness. It’s killing the planet—the oceans, the skies, the land. It’s killing the animals, the birds, the sea creatures. It’s killing us. And we can no longer afford to let the unbridled greed of the few destroy the right of the many to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They will take everything and still it won’t be enough.    

In many ways, increasing the joy in your life is no different from building the strength of your abdominal muscles or biceps. The secret to both is daily exercise. The more time you devote to joy, the lighter your heart feels, the stronger you are when the going gets tough. The best part? You don’t need any special equipment or fancy workout gear. There are no fees. And you start to enjoy the results right away.

Exercise #1: Breathe Deeply and Reflect

Turn away from all distractions for a moment—social media, house and yard chores, errands that need running, problems that need solving. Then take a deep breath and think of all the things you love to do.

Now, jot them down, these things that bring you joy. (My list includes traveling with Ed, writing fiction, reading, art projects, walking and biking, visiting bookstores and art galleries, playing guitar, and neighborhood get-togethers—I have great neighbors).

Continue to breathe deeply and exhale slowly as you imagine yourself engaged in each of these various pleasures. Feel the happiness they bring, the sense of well-being, a lightness of spirit.

Then reflect on how much time in the last week, the last month, the last year you’ve spent enjoying each of these things you love? If you’re not engaging regularly with the activities and people you most enjoy, ask yourself: What’s stopping me?

What Gets in Our Way: The Joy Blockers      

Endless red-tape: Ever since the pandemic, when real-people assistance vanished and most companies went to automated answering machines—those maddening robot “service reps” who demand you say “I’m a member” or “Question about my bill”, and then insist they don’t understand what you said—ever since then, everyone I know has spent hours and weeks, even months, trying to straighten out the simplest cockups. High frustration and a major waste of time. A real joy drain.

I recently racked up 16 hours in the course of one month trying to untangle incorrect dental billings. My dentist is fabulous, but the business office—whewee! They want you to pay every bill, in full, at time of service while they take their sweet time sending in the claim to your insurance. Since over a period of two months, this would have involved my shelling out thousands of dollars upfront, I resisted. And a good thing I did, as my insurance covered the sum in question and a bit more. But the 16-hour loss was real, and the accompanying aggro, stressful—all the mornings I woke up thinking about how I could fight their constant demands to pay now.

Mundane tasks: The weeds are taking over the garden. The cupboard is bare—someone must get to the grocery store pronto (you can only order so many take-out pizzas!). Your desk is buried beneath an ocean of papers. The laundry basket is overflowing and threatens to swamp the surrounding territory. It’s always something, as the saying goes. And days disappear, never to return, in the time-suck of our to-do lists as we dream of the things we would love to be doing. If only. Last week, my “Lazy Susan” broke down and an entire afternoon was lost to emptying the shelves, fetching stacks of books to leverage the top tray from beneath, and when that failed, tracking down a jack small enough to fit the space, then squeezing head and shoulders into the gap, groping for the pinhole at the back in near darkness, all the while hoping the top shelf wouldn’t collapse on my neck…

Work: In 1866, the newly-formed National Labor Union, a group composed of workers both skilled and unskilled, campaigned for Congress to enact a law limiting the workday to eight hours “in all States of the American Union.” The NLU disbanded seven years later, mission not accomplished. More than two decades would pass before the government even bothered to track workers’ hours. Among their findings? Full-time factory workers were racking up an average of 100 hours a week. Surely that would convince the powers-that-be. Nope. It would take almost another fifty years before Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, limiting the workweek to 44 hours (amending it two years later to 40 hours) and mandating overtime pay for hourly workers.

And now here we are—84 years on—and that 8-hour day hundreds of thousands struggled for, even died for? The 40-hour week? The two-day weekend? All fading fast in the rearview mirror. Thanks to a combination of COVID, technology (smartphones and Zoom meetings), and just plain corporate greed, many professionals are clocking longer hours—in excess of sixty per week in a range of competitive industries, like tech, finance, law. Working from home—remember how great that sounded in the early days of the plague?—has erased all boundaries. You’re always “on call.” And it’s not only white-collar employees doing the grind. Many factory workers in the South, where unions have always been suppressed, are reporting twelve-hour days, and not just Monday through Friday.    

Exercise #2: S-t-r-e-t-c-h The Way You Think About Time

Many of us plan our days around a to-do list—a litany of work, errands, house and garden chores, phone calls to straighten out messes like the bollixed-up dental billing I mentioned earlier—promising ourselves day after day, month after month, year after year that we will get around to the things we love, the activities that bring us joy, the sense of a life well-lived… as soon as we finish that day’s to-do list. And then the day ends, and all we can do is hope for a happier outcome tomorrow.

But, just for a moment, s-t-r-e-t-c-h the traditional concept of the to-do list. Expand what must be done (according to whom?) to include what you’d love to do and start your list with those activities. Of course, you can’t do everything you’d love to do in any one day, but giving priority to 2-3 joyful things daily and limiting the “have-to” tasks—the mundane, the tedious, the downright irritating—to one or two items brings immediate relief. I began doing this last month and it instantly lifted my spirits. Which gave me more energy. Which made it easier to accomplish the “have-tos.” I also reframed larger chores—like gardening, which as all gardeners know, is never-ending throughout the growing season. But I put a time limit on the task. No more than three days a week, and then for only 30 minutes a day. There will always be weeds.

Among a number of activities I’ve long wanted to do is create a memorial vase for my cats, Tibby and Coosh. Tibby died three years ago. Coosh followed seven months later. But it took a whole year before I managed to purchase the vase, and another year lapsed before I got around to creating the design. It wasn’t until this summer—after committing to put joy at the top of my to-do list—that I actually put pencil and paintbrush to pottery. By working in half-hour spurts, I’ve nearly finished the job!  

If you work for someone else, especially in those long-hour jobs where no one seems to have heard of the weekend, you still need joy. In fact, you especially need it. Break major work projects into steps. A day for X, a day for Y. List joy-boosting activities for the “down-times”—waiting for a client call, the half-hour gap before the Zoom conference. Without a list of joyful items at the ready, we tend to space out and waste those opportunities. And definitely tilt what days or half-days you do have free to the joy side.  If you have one of those 6-days-a-week/12-hours-a-day factory jobs mentioned above, all I can say is vote for candidates who believe in labor unions. You have a right to a life, a right to personal happiness. You are so much more than a cog in a machine.

Of course, there will be the occasional, unavoidable time-eaters: dental and medical appointments, car repairs, the lazy-Susan fiasco I mentioned above. But making things you love to do a planned part of everyday life will give you the strength you need for the final exercise here…

The Heavy Lift  

No getting around it—American democracy has taken a couple of brutal hits in the past month. Not from some outside aggressor bent on taking “the land of the free” down a couple of pegs but from our own Supreme Court. Foremost, on July 1, six of the nine justices charged with upholding our Constitution and protecting the rule of law, decided that a U.S. president has NO limits on their power. They simply cannot be prosecuted or held accountable in any way for breaking the law, including—and I am not making this up—ordering the murder of political rivals, which Trump’s legal team insisted would be his prerogative if re-elected. So much for the Ten Commandments far-right Louisiana governor Jeff Landry has declared must be posted in every public school classroom by 2025. As SCOTUS Judge Sonia Sotomayor so eloquently noted in her dissent: “In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law…This majority’s [decision] will have disastrous consequences for the presidency and for our democracy…With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

This thoroughly unAmerican and totally antidemocratic ruling was preceded by another dangerous decision just two days before when SCOTUS overturned the 1984 Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council ruling which said the federal judiciary must defer to a government agency’s interpretation of a law in cases of ambiguity. This new decision means that if, say, Big Oil wants to challenge the EPA over standards or practices that agency mandates, it will be SCOTUS who has the final word. As Chief Justice Roberts wrote, only the judiciary can “say what the law is.”

There are 438 U.S. Government agencies and sub-agencies including the Food and Drug Administration, Health and Human Services, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Do we really believe SCOTUS has the expertise to make better judgments about the risks any particular drug poses than FDA officials? And—show of hands—who wants the far-right, bribe-hungry (at least in Thomas’s and Alito’s cases) SCOTUS majority to override the authority of the NRC concerning the use of nuclear materials?

Then, there’s Project 2025, the 900-page wet dream waiting-to-come-true of the far-right Heritage Foundation (in conjunction with over 100 other conservative orgs). Self-described as a “wider crackdown on ‘woke’ ideology,” Project 2025 seeks to gut environmental regulations, dissolve the Department of Education, dismiss thousands of government employees, dump the FBI, and—wait for it—place the Department of Justice under the president’s direct control! And that’s just for starters. The progressive public policy advocacy group, Move On, has described Project 2025 as a: …plan for a white Christian nationalist takeover of America…written by at least 140 former Trump staffers in an effort to ensure that…Trump will have a meticulously, thoroughly detailed plan that can be implemented on Day 1 to dismantle our democracy and give him absolute power.

Add to all this the nerve-wracking, nail-biting weeks we endured after the June 27 Biden/Trump debate and, as Robert Reich (professor, lawyer and former Secretary of Labor under the Clinton administration) put it in his excellent Substack post, “You’d have to be nuts not to be going nuts.” Like many of us, all I can say is thank you, thank you, thank you for Kamala!

So, how do we tackle the Heavy Lift? How do we keep our fears from destroying our hopes?

Using Our Joy to Fight Hate with Love

Stress, sadness, fear—they agonize the mind, break down the body. But joy lifts our heart, gives us strength. Energizes us to fight for our community, our country, our world. I’ll close this post with a couple of paragraphs from my 2016 post-election blog, Fighting Hate With Love, written in the dark days following that debacle:

As a force in the world, I’m not certain love is stronger than hate. But it certainly is healthier. Hate maims, kills, sucks all the oxygen from our lives, from the planet. Love creates, rejuvenates, breathes life, breeds joy and connection. In the face of the fight ahead, we will need great quantities of love to fuel our efforts. Without love, how can we fight for a more loving world? Hate robs us of our humanity. Without our humanity, how can we build a more humane society? The signature of love is social justice. The signature of hate is revenge. I want to fight hate with all the love in my heart.

And when enough of us do that together, love will trump hate.

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.”   ~ Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)

Recently, as I was waiting in my local hair salon, I overheard another customer ask the stylist if she had seen some issue on the news. The stylist replied that she never watched the news. “I just don’t want to know,” she said.

I was surprised, and distressed, by her words. Our country is at a crossroads such as we have not experienced since the Civil War. In that time, the issue was whether the union would endure. The question before us now is whether we will remain a democracy or become a dictatorship, our Constitution and fundamental civil rights consigned to the trash heap of history. None of us can afford to look away.

And yet, many of us are. Looking away. Ever since the pandemic—an event initially presided over by a MAGA-hatted president who advised us to drink bleach and who left the individual states up to their own devices when it came to procuring masks and dealing with overcrowded, understaffed hospitals as the bodies piled up in trucks during the summer of 2020—ever since then, increasing numbers of Americans have been “tuning out.”

 A Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism survey reports that more than 40% of Americans say they avoid news about national politics altogether. “It’s such high stakes, no clear resolutions,” NPR’s media correspondent David Folkenflik summed up the respondents’ comments.

High stakes, indeed, in an election year. Who will we elect president and what will be the consequences? Yes, the news can often feel unnerving, even frightening at times, but we must all ask ourselves this: Do we really want to be ignorant about the people and policies that will shape our lives, our children’s lives, that will heal or destroy the environment, improve or demolish healthcare, save or terminate Social Security and Medicare, protect or outlaw our right to protest, equal treatment under the law for all Americans, access to birth control, gay marriage?  

Consider the Source

“You don’t know what to believe; it’s so much information to soak in that you sometimes don’t know if it’s true or not,” one woman said in a recent Pew poll on the subject of following national politics. To be sure, the present media deluge of he said/she said/they did that/they didn’t do that can feel both confusing and exhausting So, how to choose which news to view or read?

I cannot emphasize this strongly enough: Everything has a point of view. Every newspaper article, every news broadcast, every topical book, every social media post dealing with political issues, every blog post—including this one. Think of The New York Post versus The New York Times. Or Alex Jones versus Rachel Maddow. Clearly though, while everything has a point of view, not every view is equally true, i.e., based on the facts. Toss in the nefarious strategy Trump buddy Steve Bannon calls “flooding the zone with s**t” to intentionally confuse readers/viewers/listeners, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for chaos. As Bannon bragged, “This is not about persuasion. This is about disorientation.” Beware the bamboozlers who are trying to confuse the issues—and you.   

In his excellent op-ed for The Hill, Joe Ferullo, an award-winning media exec, producer and journalist who has worked for ABC, NBC and CBS, noted the steep decline in both viewership for the major nightly TV news programs and readership for print newspapers. At the same time, people are consuming ever-increasing amounts of what Ferullo calls “unpackaged” news—an endless series of unmoored headlines, updates, tweets, and notifications on their phones and tablets. A jumble of one thing after another without depth or connection. How are we to develop “a comprehensive picture of politics, the nation or the world?” Ferullo asks. Contributing to this quagmire is what CNN cites as the tendency of social media platforms to boost the “most extreme confrontational and conspiracy theorist voices.”

Sifting the Facts: Panning for Truth

Sifting what is fact versus fiction can require a little digging and cross-checking. Generally, I rely on the news agencies AP (Associated Press) and Reuters or fact-checking websites like Politifact and FactCheck.org. As an example, I’ll use an email I received yesterday from Color of Change, a self-described progressive nonprofit civil rights advocacy org. The email reported that:

Neo-segregationists have won two crucial legal victories in their fight to enshrine Jim Crow-era advantages for white people.

First, two Trump appointed judges blocked the Fearless Fund, a Black-owned venture capital firm, from issuing grants to support Black women-owned businesses. They perversely cited a Reconstruction-era law meant to protect Black people from economic discrimination. Given that Black women-owned businesses receive only 0.0006% of total funding from venture capitalists, this ruling makes it clear that neo-segregationists want to exclude Black women from access to financial resources for their businesses.”

I copied the words in bold and put them in my search bar. Up popped the AP News website where I read:

A U.S. federal court of appeals panel suspended a venture capital firm’s grant program for Black women business owners, ruling that a conservative group is likely to prevail in its lawsuit claiming that the program is discriminatory.

The ruling against the Atlanta-based Fearless Fund is another victory for conservative groups waging a sprawling legal battle against corporate diversity programs that have targeted dozens of companies and government institutions.   

     The case against the Fearless Fund was brought last year by the American Alliance for Equal Rights, a group led by Edward Blum, the conservative activist behind the Supreme Court case that ended affirmative action in college admissions.

Color of Change email verified! And I learned that this case was brought by the same right-wing group that spearheaded the (sadly) successful effort at the Supreme Court last June to end affirmative action in higher ed. The whole process took just three minutes. The time it takes to read and respond to one or two Facebook posts. Is the future of our democracy worth it? I think so.

Our Democracy Has Basic Rules

Contrary to what you may have heard recently from a certain orange-haired person found guilty in the first degree in a New York State trial on 34 counts of falsification of business records, the president of the United States is not above the law. Presidents cannot do whatever they want. Whenever they want. America is not a dictatorship—yet. As citizens, our best interests are served by knowing the basics of how our government works and being alert to those who would run roughshod over our Constitution and curtail our rights.

In our democracy, there are checks and balances to prevent a president from acting like a dictator: Congress, the courts. The framers of the Constitution made sure these checks were down in writing. They did not want any one person to seize power, be they king or dictator. The president cannot make new laws or change existing ones. Legislative power belongs exclusively to the House and Senate. However, in the spirit of checks and balances, the president can veto any bill they believe unconstitutional, unjust, or just plain risky.

But that’s not the end of it. The president’s veto cannot simply amend or alter the proposed legislation. Instead, the president’s objections are sent back to the House or Senate (depending on which branch of Congress originated the legislation) where the bill will be reconsidered. If two-thirds of that body still agree to pass the bill as written, it is sent to the other house for the same process. And if two-thirds of that house still approve the bill it becomes law. This is spelled out clearly in Article I, Section 7, clause 2 of the Constitution. This procedure prevents Congress, as well as the president, from seizing total power. No dictators whether on “Day 1” or “Only on Day 1.”

What a President Can Do

Reading across a wide array of Internet articles, I repeatedly came across reports of undecided voters leaning toward Trump because they blamed Biden for the sharp uptick in the cost of groceries and other consumer goods. Okay, first of all, I travel outside the U.S. each year. Prices are up everywhere. Second, the leap in prices began soaring as COVID gripped the country in early 2020, well before Biden was elected. Supply chain issues and so forth, companies said. Once Biden took office in 2021 and got the plague under control with his vaccine roll-out, companies saw no reason to yield the big profits they’d been enjoying. Third, and most important, in a democracy, in a capitalist country, the president cannot unilaterally lower costs. They cannot simply order private companies to drop their prices.

What a president can do is propose legislation. They can urge Congress to enact it into law, but that’s the limit. The president cannot introduce it in the House or Senate. Biden’s Build Back Better Act was introduced into the House by Rep. John Yarmuth (D-KY) in September 2021 and passed by that body in November. Described by Arvind Ganesan, business and human rights director for Human Rights Watch, as legislation that “could help reverse decades of underinvestment in social protection”, the Build Back Better Act included major investments in free universal pre-school and the highly popular child tax credits, affordable housing, expanded healthcare, the right to four weeks of paid leave, and increased penalties for workplace safety violations or violation of workers’ right to unionize. The icing on top was $555 billion to fight climate change and authorizing Medicare to negotiate prices for a lengthy list of prescription drugs. In a Senate split 50/50 between the two parties, and no Republicans willing to vote for the bill, it would take every Democrat with VP Kamala Harris breaking the tie, to pass the act. That’s when Sen. Joe Mansion, a Dem in name only, announced he would not vote for the bill as written.

A much-watered-down version The Inflation Reduction Act was passed into law in 2022. The new bill retained the funds for healthcare, a 15% minimum corporate income tax, and record spending for climate (though substantially less than the initial bill), but the right of Medicare to negotiate drug prices was immediately contested by pharmaceutical giants Johnson & Johnson and Bristol-Myers Squibb, among others, who currently have lawsuits pending against Biden’s Health and Human Services Department to stop the negotiations.

Undaunted, Biden has continued to press for more and better, asking Congress last March to increase the number of prescription drugs Medicare may negotiate from 20 to 50 per year. His proposed budget for FY2025 would expand Medicare’s $2,000 annual out-of-pocket limit on drug costs to people of all ages with private insurance. In June, Biden announced he is forming a “Strike Force on Unfair and Illegal Pricing” to be co-chaired by the Federal Trade Commission and the DOJ to investigate and stop illegal corporate price-gouging practices in groceries, housing, healthcare and financial services that hurt or cheat American families. This is what a president can do and Biden is doing it.

Ignorance is Not Bliss

The need to protect their mental health was a reason cited by many respondents in the Pew poll of people who have largely or completely tuned out of national politics and the news. Others expressed frustration over the two-party system. “I hate the fact that you’re forced to pick between the lesser of two evils when voting. No, I don’t want either of them. Next,” a man in his twenties complained.

However much one agrees or disagrees with that man’s feelings, the bottom line is one of the two major candidates, Biden or Trump, will remain or become president in November. The four other candidates—Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an outspoken anti-vaxxer whose legendary family has disavowed him and publicly supports Biden, is running as an independent, as is activist Cornel Wes, along with the Green Party’s Jill Stein, and the Libertarian Party’s Chase Oliver—combined will only draw a few percentage points of the vote, but possibly just enough to swing it one way or the other for Biden or Trump, as Jill Stein’s candidacy may have done for Trump in 2016.

As for “protecting one’s mental health”, I don’t buy it that tuning out stops the worrying. The hair stylist I mentioned at the outset? She’s still depressed, worried, agitated. Ignoring what’s happening around you, the threats our country and our world faces—it doesn’t bring inner peace. The body still remains stressed, the mind exhausted with the great effort to silence what is occurring out there.  

Engaging with the world, taking positive action for the outcomes you wish to see—I know from experience that can help and it can make a difference. In 2020, I wrote 250 postcards to Georgia voters to help elect U.S. Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. They both won their seats. Of course, 250 postcards was a drop in the bucket but when all the “drops” were combined—the efforts of all my fellow postcard writers—it was enough. Likewise, if we close our eyes and ears to what’s happening in the moment, what’s at stake, our failure to engage may be enough to bring about the dark future we fear.

In this critical moment, it’s worth remembering that when Hitler seized control of the German government in 1934 and began his “make Germany pure again” program—rounding up and exterminating the Jews, Communists, trade unionists, Black people, Roma people, gays, the mentally- and physically-challenged—many “good Germans” said, “It doesn’t affect me. I’m not in any of those groups,” and looked the other way. They couldn’t have been more mistaken. Eleven years later, when Germany finally surrendered to the Allies, Hitler had fomented a world war that killed nearly 60 million people, including six million Jews, and decimated his own country.

However distressing it is to see what’s happening in the world now, it is nothing compared to the disaster that awaits us if we close our eyes.

“The only time you ever have in which to learn anything or see anything or feel anything, or express any feeling or emotion, or respond to an event, or grow, or heal, is this moment … You’re only here now; you’re only alive in this moment.”   Jon Kabat-Zinn

(NOTE: This is an “ancient” (meaning anything older than three months in today’s vernacular) post, but I think it’s even more germane today than when I penned it in 2017. And I needed some pithy words to post here while I regain my sanity in London. See you all next month with fresh words.)

I’m lucky to live in a state that has over 300 miles of rail-trails, so when I’m done with the morning’s writing (and it’s not January), I often go for a bike ride. Lose the tension in my shoulders. Let go of whatever problems my characters have posed for me that day (and those pesky people can cause real trouble when they choose).

My favorite loop, about ten miles out and back, takes me to Look Park, a vast oasis of  green lawn and blue ponds. The trail there mostly goes through wooded areas. At one spot, chickens and ducks waddle along the verge, scouring the long grasses and wildflowers for a snack to supplement their caregiver’s feed. The first time I saw them, I worried for their safety—so many bicyclists whizzing by—but over the years, I’ve come to realize they are proof of Darwin’s law:  Adapt or perish. They are obviously smart fowl.

At another spot, the land falls sharply away from the trail, and I glimpse the skeleton of a 1940s truck, blue in the patches that rust hasn’t eaten. Time. It’s always there, at some moments shouting, at others whispering.

No matter how scorching or muggy the day, a breeze lifts my hair, cools my skin, empties my busy brain, and I tune into the birdsong, tranquil. Which is what makes it all the more jarring when I pass a woman, walking with her toddler and talking into her cell phone. Seconds later, I cycle past another walker, this one with ear buds connecting her to an iPod while she texts on her phone, fingers flying over the keyboard. There’s even a bicyclist—and I’m not making this up—pedaling along while texting two-handed.

It’s lovely that all these folks are out here enjoying the rail-trail, but my question is: Are they actually enjoying the rail-trail?

Selfie Madness

We’ve all seen the absorbed texter (maybe even bumped into them!) walking through the airport, oblivious to others and their luggage or, like an errant pinball, caroming down a crowded city sidewalk only to step off the curb into traffic, unaware.

People speak of life passing you by, but our digital addictions are causing us to pass by life without pausing to register its pulse. Texting. Tweeting. And then there’s selfie-madness.

In June, I was at a Yankees-Red Sox game with my husband. Since we only go once a year, we treated ourselves to field level tickets along the first base line. These seats aren’t cheap, so I was surprised at how many people around us spent the entire game taking selfies, their backs to the ball field. They seemed to prefer snapping photos of themselves attending a Yankees-Red Sox game to actually watching the play on the field. And it was a great game. Tense. The lead bouncing back and forth. Close score. But it often felt like my husband and I were the only ones following the action, a task not made easier by the bodies hurtling through our line of sight in search of the perfect location/angle/backdrop for a selfie.

The Digital Invasion

I first glimpsed signs of what would become our digital mania in 2003 while vacationing in Florence, Italy. We were visiting Il Duomo (Santa Maria del Fiore) when I noticed a man walking about with a video camera, filming, his wife and kids doggedly trotting after. Although camcorders still used videotape at this time, they had shrunk considerably in size from their dinosaur predecessors of the mid-1980s. And this man was determined to make use of their newfound mobility.

He continued filming as we strolled about the piazza, admiring Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise—ten dramatic bronze reliefs that depict Old Testament scenes on the doors of the Baptistery—and Giotto’s polychromatic marble-faced campanile with its della Robbia panels.

The camera remained glued to his face when we entered Il Duomo beneath the clock designed by Uccello, and traveled up, up, up the 463 steps to stand amazed beneath Brunelleschi’s architectural miracle of a dome, its interior graced with Vasari’s frescoes of the Last Judgment.

I never saw his face that day. In my mind, he remains a figure ambling about with a large camera where his head should be. I’ve often wondered if he and the family ever got around to watching the hundreds of hours I’m guessing he filmed during his Italian vacation. Or did he just move on to the next destination, camera at the ready, missing more moments of his life amid the wonders of the world? Perhaps he morphed into the guy I saw a decade later during another trip to Florence, a selfie stick strapped to his forehead, a camcorder suspended from its top, dutifully recording everything he was walking away from in the Piazza della Signoria, his face in the foreground.

Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing

With smartphones, the capture of every moment is only a click away. On the same trip that took us to Yankee Stadium, we spent a morning in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We were hanging out in European Paintings 1250-1800, soaking up the dark mysteries of Rembrandt, the pink fulsome flesh of Rubens, the broad Flemish landscapes of Bruegel. Darting all about us, like a gnat you can’t seem to lose, was a woman snapping photos of every painting. And not only the paintings, but the little description cards that accompanied each work. Snap. Snap. Snap. She paused only a nanosecond to capture Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher before buzzing off to give Franz Hals’s Portrait of a Bearded Man with a Ruff the same blink of her camera.

I can report she missed not a single painting, but in another, more significant way she missed them all. If that seems an exaggeration, pick up a postcard of Van Gogh’s extraordinary painting of a chair, called reasonably enough Van Gogh’s Chair, and compare it to the original that hangs in London’s National Gallery. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but an amateur photo of a major artwork is… squat.

Patti LuPone Takes On The Texters

And when we’re not filming, we’re texting. Two years ago, while starring in Shows for Days, actress Patti LuPone grabbed the cell phone of an audience member in the front row who had been texting through the entire first act. The cast and audience had already endured four separate cell phone rings during that day’s show, so tempers were somewhat frayed.

“She was sitting in the light, so everyone could see her texting. It’s ridiculous,” LuPone said.

Lupone returned the phone after the performance was over, but gave vent to her distress. “I’m defeated by this. It’s not changing, it’s only getting worse … If something isn’t done, I will think twice before I get back on a stage again.

“It’s not [about] theater etiquette,” she explained. “It’s human etiquette. We’re living in an isolated society, the phone controls our every move, and we’ve lost sight of our neighbor, the people surrounding us.”

One of the great ironies of our cell phone addiction is that it was preceded by an innovation that freed us from our phones: the answering machine. They were a revelation, a revolution. No longer did you have to worry about missing an important call. It would be there on the little cassette when you got home. You were free to go about your day, or travel the world, without once thinking of your phone. It was a golden time, however short-lived.

Surprise: Pop Quiz!

Okay, I’ve had my moment on the soapbox. Now it’s time for you to play along.

When did you last:

-Take an evening off Facebook and Twitter to hang out with friends and neighbors?

-Visit an art gallery or museum using only your eyes, no camera (photos of you and loved ones in front of the museum don’t count here)?

-Pick a dining spot in a city not your own by walking along the streets “window shopping” restaurants and cafes rather than googling TripAdvisor or Yelp?

-Enjoy a cup of coffee or glass of wine at a cafe with your significant other and no cell phones in sight?

-Browse a brick-and-mortar bookstore–with actual shelves and real books you can open and read–rather than surf Goodreads for recommendations, then order from Amazon?

-Go for a hike or a bicycle ride “naked”–no iPod, no earbuds, no smartphone?

If you can’t recall the last time for any or (yikes!) all of the above, I suggest you get out into the world immediately. Talk to real people. Listen to the sounds of summer—the buzz of bees, kids laughing, birds trilling, the lap of water at the beach. Literally, stop and smell the roses.

And give your texting thumbs a rest. For there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your mobile apps.