Endings and Improv

“Fifty years earlier, in a state of agitated anxiety, he had told an interviewer, ‘I don’t care about being forgotten. I fear getting to the end of my life and feeling I’ve wasted it. I don’t want to get to the end and think I haven’t tasted enough and touched other people enough and had a good enough time,’” wrote Mark Harris in his superb biography: Mike Nichols — A Life.

“In old age, that fear had vanished. All of his desperate urgency had given way to a serenity he had taken a lifetime to find. At one of his favorite restaurants, he had lunch with a friend whose son was about to go out on his own; he was looking for some advice he could share. Did he have any wisdom he could offer?

“He thought for a moment.

“’Well,’ he said, ‘just s long as he knows that things that start out poorly don’t always end poorly.’

He thought some more.

‘That,’ he said, ‘and study improv.’”

The Fracking of the Mind

I’ve long been aware what a dreadful attention sink we’re in now as a society.

It’s a topic that Laura Marsh talks about in the March 27, 2025, New York Review of Books.

“In The Attention Merchants, (Tim) Wu likened these developments to another kind of resource extraction. The smartphone ‘appeared capable of harvesting the attention that had been, as it were, left on the table, rather in the way that fracking would later recover vast reserves of oil once considered wholly inaccessible.’ Wu, a legal scholar who has written extensively on antitrust, tells this story through sketches of the corporations that unlocked new segments of our attention. (Chris) Hayes writes more often from the perspective of the user; the person whose mind is being fracked feels, he remarks, ‘that our very interior life, the direction of our thoughts, is being taken against our will.’ Distraction has always been big business, but the immersive quality of digital media, in his account, makes it much more powerful and toxic.”

“(T)he algorithms of social networks can show each user content tailored specifically to them, based on all the things they’ve clicked on before. (This is how Hayes loses an entire hour, one stoned evening, watching videos of people assembling sandwiches and slicing them in half.)

“Social media can also capitalize on direct appeals to the audience by name. One of the more intriguing facts that Hayes cites comes from a 1959 study of people’s ability to tune out background noise and conversation when they wanted to focus: ‘The only stimulus so far found that will break through,’ the researchers wrote, ‘is the subject’s own name.’ Platforms that notify users each time they are ‘mentioned’ work on this principle; the most reliable way to draw someone in, even if the content on offer doesn’t particularly appeal to them, is by creating the impression that other people are talking about them.”

If Only This, If Only That

“Moods dictate my behavior,” wrote Stephen Batchelor in Buddhism Without Belief.

“If something makes me feel good, I want to have it; if it makes me feel bad, I want to get rid of it; if it leaves me indifferent, I ignore it. I find myself in a perpetual state of conflict: emotionally pulled one way and pushed the other. Yet underpinning both attraction and aversion is craving: the childish and utopian search for a situation in which I finally possess everything I desire and have repelled everything I dislike. Deep down I insist that a permanent, separate self is entitled to a life removed from the contingencies and uncertainties of existence.

“And I invest my icons of craving with absolute finality. Be they sex, fame or wealth, they shine before me with an intoxicating allure unsullied by the ambiguities of lived experience. 

“I do not consider their implications. Diapers and tantrums figure as little in my fantasies of sexual conquest as do journalists and taxes in my daydreams of fame and wealth.”

“Instead of solving my problems, this new situation replaces them with others I had never suspected. Yet rather than accepting this as the nature of living in an unreliable world, rather than learning to be content with success and joy and not to be overwhelmed by failure and pain, rather than appreciating life’s poignant, tragic and sad beauty, I grit my teeth and struggle on in thrall to that quiet, seductive voice that whispers “If only…”

Carefully the Crow

Carefully the crow

soaks its prized piece of popcorn

in the water dish.

A Glass Half Broken

Psychiatrist and philosophical seeker Mark Epstein had a question for the Buddhist monk Achaan Chaa, who lived in a forest hermitage on the Thai-Lao border,

“What are you really talking about?” Epstein asked him. “What do you mean by ‘eradicating craving?’”

“Achaan Chaa looked down and smiled faintly. He picked up the glass of drinking water to his left. Holding it up to us, he spoke in the chirpy Lao dialect that was his native tongue; ‘You see this goblet? For me, this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on a shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say ‘Of course.’ But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.’

“Achaan Chaa was not just talking about the glass, of course, nor was he speaking merely of the phenomenal world, the forest monastery, the body or the inevitability of death. He was also speaking to each of us about the self. This self that you take to be so real, he was saying, is already broken.”

USA RIP

In 2001, I feared that unbridled lies disguised as journalism on Fox News, coupled with the corruption of the GOP and the excuse of 9-11 terrorism, could lead to a fascist dictatorship in America and the death of the Constitution. 

Well, despite the best efforts of many of us, here we are. 

What now? 

What next?

I guess we can only hope that on some finer day in the future, the words “Republican Party” will be greeted with the same visceral, historical loathing that the term “Nazi Party” inspires.

The Clock in the Storm

“Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

And to think that Stevenson lived in the 19th century, not the 21st. I have long maintained that mindfulness practice is a necessary antidote to the digital age’s unabated assault on our attention and ability to focus.

The Fox News Reality-Reversal Machine

How can Republicans possibly offer such uniformly low-grade, corrupt and often ignorant candidates for the highest office in the nation? 

Because they have developed a corporate media propaganda echo chamber/fog machine so high-grade that it’s capable of conning any number of citizens into believing that black is white, government is evil, invasion is liberation, poverty is freedom, health care is luxury, stupid is smart and contemptible is heroic.

If you have sufficient propaganda power over the news media, you can launch and sustain just about any horror. You can, for example, demonize an unarmed boy who had committed no crime, and make a champion of the man who stalked and killed him.

Serving the Idol of Ignorance

The human species is capable of both discovering wisdom, and of ignoring it. We’re busy with the latter right now in the U.S.

“We sneer at experts,” observed David DeWitt. “We spit epithets like ‘academic elites’ at professors dedicating their lives to pursuing discovery that benefits humankind. And we worship flashy internet hucksters selling lifestyle scams. 

“We mock intelligence and glorify egomania and materialism. We worship spectacle and are voyeurs for anger, confrontation, and violence. We live in fantasy worlds where what we want to believe is true regardless of whether it is true, because what we want comes first no matter what, certainly no matter any facts, this decadence of mind and body only afforded to us by modernity’s remarkable luxury and technology.”

“It is in these ways that I regard a very great many adults as simply overgrown children.”

Michael Bell wrote, “With the accumulated knowledge of all history at our fingertips, willful ignorance still wins the day.”

“Anti-democratic forces benefit from ‘post-truth politics’ because in the absence of truth, truth is defined by power,” as Chrissy Stroop observed.

And that’s why accepting lies as facts is a snake pit out of which all other evils crawl.

Flying the Flapdoodle Flag of ‘Freedom’

In America, the word “freedom” rings out like gunfire.

“Today we hear it used to shout down and bully school boards during their public meetings,” noted Bob Minor. “Nurses, school teachers, flight attendants and people just walking down the street have heard it used by people while the shouter assaults them. 

“Freedom” has become a meaningless moron word, having “…attained a status so undefined, so empty of a definition by those who constantly hide behind their invocation of the term, so lacking in thought about what it could mean, that it seems to be an excuse to do whatever one wants and to hell with those others affected by whatever it is someone wants to do."

As one wise wit once said, “The absolute funniest art of capitalist ideology is that they somehow managed to convince everyone that ‘freedom’ meant the freedom to choose between 63 kinds of shampoo, and not the freedom to quit a job you hate without losing your health insurance.”

The sad truth is beyond their rhetoric, a lot of Americans have never been comfortable with real constitutional liberty. They find the winds of freedom frightening, not bracing. They’d really prefer to smooch some strongman dictator’s bottom and just CALL that “freedom.”

“Freedom, among the base of Trump’s Republican Party, means license to do whatever you feel like on impulse — too bad about the cop you concussed on Jan. 6th, or the elderly woman deathly ill from COVID because you refused to wear a mask, or the election worker now in hiding because of your death threat,” Mike Lofgren wrote. “This kind of freedom is the freedom of the Freudian id, bursting out of its civilized constraints like the alien creature in John Carpenter's The Thing.”

What Republicans MEAN by “freedom” is they want perfect freedom for themselves (including the freedom to commit crimes) and they want you clubbed over the head by cops or the military the moment you say or do anything they don’t like.

Republicans love to shout “freedom!” while silencing everyone else in sight.

Panic and Perception: The Hare and the Fruit

A hare fled terrified from the noise of fruit falling from a tree, convinced that it was the end of the world. Other animals — including deer, buffalo, elephants and tigers — asked him the reason for his fear and joined him in his flight, until a great host of animals were running for their lives.

A lion, who was in fact the future Buddha, realized that the animals risked death if they continued to rush headlong toward the sea. He halted their flight with a mighty roar and questioned each animal in turn, finally coming to the timid hare. The lion realized what must have occurred and took the hare back to the tree, where he made certain that the noise had indeed been caused by a falling fruit. The other animals were reassured and calm returned.

— The Daddabha Jataka

For Once in My Life

Ichi-go ichi-e (一期一会) is a Japanese idiom that means “once in a lifetime,” “for this time only,” or “one chance in a lifetime.” It's a cultural concept that encourages people to appreciate the unique nature of each moment and to enjoy it fully before it passes. 

The phrase originated in the 16th century during Japanese tea ceremonies, where participants would meet to have tea knowing that the exact ceremony would never happen again. The term is made up of two words: ichigo, which means “one’s lifetime,” and ichie, which means “experiencing something just once.”

The concept of ichi-go ichi-e suggest that you: 

Be open to new people

Say yes to spontaneous invitations

Be present with loved ones and friends

Allow all emotions to flow

Look forward to the next encounter with curiosity.

(Copy and art created with the assistance of AI)