Tag Archives: mental-health

Roasted lamb shank, mashed potatoes, and vegetables cooked by the author in May 2025.

On Little Things

On Little Things – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, recent events have inspired me to think about the wide, wide world on a smaller scale.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Click here to buy a copy of my book Travels in Time Across Europe which tells the stories from my year living in London that began 10 years ago this week.
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This week, recent events have inspired me to think about the wide, wide world on a smaller scale.

Last Wednesday, after publishing “On Democracy, Part II” I took my place in the driver’s seat of my car, the Mazda Rua, and went out on a day trip to Jefferson City to join the protest against the congressional redistricting underway here in Missouri. I wanted to drive long distance at highway speeds again like I used to four times a year on my Long Drives East and West between Kansas City and Binghamton. There’s a lot of little things about those drives that I miss now that I’m more rooted here in Brookside. Today, I don’t drive every day. Often times if I can I’ll choose to walk to wherever I want to go in the neighborhood. It’s healthier to be sure, and I get the same free time away from the obligations that crowd my desk to listen to music, podcasts, birdsong, or to just think. These walks aren’t terribly taxing, Apple Fitness likes to remind me that the difficulty is “easy” to “moderate,” yet each one adds up into a sum which says that I am healthier today in mid-September than I was in mid-February or mid-March, let alone a year ago now. Moreover, I loved driving even just about town for that free time. Drivetime was often my podcast time. Now, I’m also reassured that I’m not operating a large and potentially dangerous vehicle while I’m listening to an engaging conversation or story; instead, I can focus on the story itself and not split my attention between that and the road.

So, last Wednesday I did try to recreate the things I loved most about those road trips that marked the beginning of this decade. On the outbound drive I listened to a fascinating discussion about political philosophy and space policy on Planetary Radio and on my return trip I listened to the pilot of the new audio drama Star Trek: Khan. Yet as much as I was thrilled to be back on the road and experiencing things that I felt like I had lost, even at my own volition, I still found that some of the little things got to me. For one, I was annoyed at getting stuck behind a semi-truck on the outbound drive for about 10 miles east of Sedalia and even more frustrated that I couldn’t pass a pair of semis that were ahead of me on the return drive as we transitioned from the two-lane divided highway in Cole County back to the one-lane country road that is US 50 in between the state capital and Sedalia. I know well that I control how I react to things, and therefore that I ought to react better to most things today than I did in my younger years, yet getting stuck behind those larger, slower vehicles on the stretch where passing was far more difficult really annoyed me. The beauty of a country drive is lost somewhat when you’re staring at the same big box retailer’s advertisement on the back of their vehicle for mile after mile.

These little things are what give our experiences life. The great, grand gestures that get remembered are one thing, yet they cannot be sustained without the small tokens of affection or whispered advice that comes from living and making the choices that define who we are. I believe that we are fundamentally formed by our experiences for good or ill. I’ve often ended up resorting to grand actions to try and solve questions or puzzles that find their way onto my desk. Marking something off a checklist is one of the most satisfying things I can do in my life. Those grand acts often become boxes which I can fill with the little things that I undertake. Currently, I am working on editing my translation of André Thevet’s (1516–1590) book Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique to send its book proposal off to an academic press. I have enough of my translation edited to send to them now, the first 16 chapters to be precise, yet there’s more still I need to do. This publisher prints page-facing translations and requires that the original text be sent alongside the translation. So, now I am spending my time typing out the original Middle French text of these first 16 chapters to be included in my proposal. There is a Wikisource page for this book, taken from the 1878 French edition that I could copy and paste from, yet it lacks the folio numbers from the original that are vital signposts to navigate the text and has enough nineteenth-century re-renderings of the sixteenth-century French original that I decided it was better if I just went ahead and typed it out myself. The first chapter took me about an hour to do, so I figure in all I might be able to have most of this typing done by the time I publish The Wednesday Blog next week.

Each character here is a little thing that together add up to the surviving thoughts and memories of a man who lived 450 years ago who exists in the scholarly memory of his time yet rarely in the spotlight. In my work, I hope to turn that spotlight on him and demonstrate his erudition and centrality to the cosmographic profession as it existed in the 1550s and 1560s. All this boils down to the same solution I’ve used to get through big projects for years. On Monday I smiled hearing a friend say essentially the same thing with her work in the history of mathematics, that the best way to solve a problem is to break it down into its constituent parts and figure it out piece by piece. A decade ago, this week when I moved to London, I found that the only way that the move was not overwhelming was to think of each thing I needed to do separately. My frustration rose when I found that I couldn’t make sense of a particular facet of one of the things I needed to do. One particular moment of note here was when I was summoned to the international student office to provide visa papers to confirm that I could legally study in the United Kingdom well after I’d started my coursework. Something got lost in the shuffle, but it was serious enough to scare me a little. When I moved to Binghamton, I had similar bureaucratic problems from issues getting my New York residency owing to my Missouri driver’s license having cracked in two, to a year later having big issues proving my residency to my university because I forgot to cross a t somewhere on a form.

Again, I choose how I react, and in the years since I’ve learned to take little things in stride and think of them in the broader context in which they exist. I believe doing the little things can show fidelity to a greater cause because it shows that I’m there for the long run, not just in the good moments. That’s something I learned from Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting, one of the finest movies I’ve ever seen. I think perhaps the best metaphor to explain what I’m trying to say to you, dear Reader, is that we should approach the things in life like we approach cooking. Recipes break down the task of cooking into smaller pieces that are more easily attainable. In May I made an Easter roast for some of my best friends that comprised several recipes I’d never tried before that day, and I truly didn’t know if it had worked until I finally sat down and took a bite of it. The roasted lamb shanks were perfect, as were the mashed potatoes, and the flourless chocolate cake that I rounded things out with was excellent and just as good the following day. In each recipe, I not only took things one at a time but even experimented a bit here or there based on my own experience from cooking similar things. For one, I had to quickly rethink how I was going to cook the lamb shanks because they were larger than nearly all of the pans I had. For another, I realized later than I wanted that in melting the chocolate chips for the cake I should’ve encouraged the process along with a spatula here and there. Each of these little things rounded out with a fine Tempranillo wine from Rioja to make one of the best dinners I’ve yet cooked.

I have a lot to do right now, and in every respect I’m on course to complete the things I have in my docket. The work would be overwhelming if I looked at it as a great mass, yet it is far easier to approach in small bites. That’s the big reason why I’m ending the Wednesday Blog one month from this week on 15 October. I’ve said what I wanted to say, and looking ahead I can use the time that I devote to writing this blog and recording the podcast working on other things great and small that need my attention. This publication is made up of a great many little things, small ideas that flower with their peers and culminate in an essay each week that I usually feel proud of writing. Little things make the lives we live.

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A view from behind a church on the Greek island of Santorini.

On Simplicity

On Simplicity – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how the greatest wisdom is simple in nature.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Sources:Photo by Elizabeth Duke.[1] Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek: The Saint’s Life of Alexis Zorba, trans. Peter Bien, (Simon and Schuster, 1946, 2014), 81.[2] “Elephant Tails,” Wednesday Blog 5.24.[3] “Asking the Computer,” Wednesday Blog 5.26.[4] “On Political Violence,” Wednesday Blog 5.17.
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This week, how the greatest wisdom is simple in nature.

Over the last several weeks I’ve written about forms of knowledge and knowledge collecting. Knowledge is easier to identify, as it is empirical in its core. Yet on a scale even beyond knowledge lies wisdom, the cumulative sum of humanity’s understanding of the underlying character of human nature. It’s very easy for me to get bogged down in words, words, words and tie myself in knots which I find nigh unbreakable and even more undecipherable. Yet amid all those layers of paint there are often gems which merely need good editing to illuminate. This is what fills my days today, a big edit which I hope will signal the beginning of the end of my years of doctoral study.

In these years, while I’ve devoted my days to reading histories of the Renaissance intersections between the Americas and France, I’ve made a point of reading for fun all the same. I need to read things not related to my research for the escape they provide. At times these fun readings have been more thoroughly connected to my research, as in my recent choice of Jason Roberts’s Every Living Thing, yet in Binghamton I spent many happy evening hours reading Star Trek anthologies and novels while returning to my vocation each day. Of the stories that I’m drawn to, I enjoy reading books and watching films with characters that embody a certain lived experience that begats wisdom. Recently, this desire for such a character led me to read Peter Bien’s new translation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek: The Saint’s Life of Alexis Zorba. This is phronesis. Zorba’s wisdom is one that’s been gathered over the sixty years of his life and funneled toward living a good life as he sees fit. His is a simple wisdom which recognizes the physical limitations of the body in opposition to the limitless potential of the soul. I loved the first dance scene in Zorba the Greek in which the old miner erupted upward from his dinner and began to leap about. Kazantzakis describes it as though his soul could not be contained by his body and that it was that spiritual essence which spoke so fervently and wordlessly of its own joy. Kazantzakis can make even the simplest of scenes appear elegant and luminous. His description of the passage of time on the Mediterranean reaching up from Africa to the southern shore of Crete is one of my favorites. Here, I quote from Bien’s translation with the affection that beautiful prose deserves:

“The immense sea reached African shores. Every so often a warm southwest wind blew from distant red-hot deserts. In the morning the sea smelled like watermelons; at midday it vented haze, surged upward discharging miniature unripe breasts; in the evening, rose pink, wine red, eggplant mauve, dark blue, it kept continuously sighing.”[1]

The wisdom inherent in Kazantzakis’s prose lies in his ability to evoke the variable texture of nature, the changing face of it with the passage of the day. I remember once in Binghamton I have the idea to take a selfie once an hour throughout the day to see how my face, hair, stubble, and what not changed as the hours passed. I know for instance that if I want to have a lower register in my recordings of this Wednesday Blog that I need to record first thing in the morning when my tenor is closer to a baritone. This week, owing to a general sense of exhaustion, I haven’t gotten around to writing this essay until nearly 90 minutes before when the podcast normally publishes. Rather than force myself to write something earlier in the day I waited and gave myself the time to think of something good.

Wisdom is knowing that worrying won’t get you anywhere; it lies in the peace of mind and heart that keeps us happy and healthy. This evening, while I was having dinner with one of my best friends and his wife and young son, I brought up my particular conundrum of the day. Jokingly, the suggestion that I write about simplicity was made. I shrugged, thinking of William of Ockham, one of Bill Nye’s favorite history of science examples to use, and decided to run with it. After all, often the wisest people that I’ve met are the ones who embrace the simplicity of living a life embracing their own nature. The wise know that they are going to grow old and die and don’t worry about it. I find myself thinking of this as I watch without much resource as my hair recedes. I’ve joked that my particularly follicly impaired genes may require an eventual investment in a variety of hairpieces for different degrees of formality. I’ve grown in my own comfort with taking care of myself, applying sunscreen before going out on walks around the neighborhood now to mitigate the inevitable that comes from having largely Irish genes and living in the far sunnier Midwestern climate than my ancestors’ rain soaked home soil in Mayo. In his Saint’s Life, Alexis Zorba often doesn’t worry about these things and expresses frustration and even anger when the narrator, his boss, frets about the things he cannot control. I’m better at this than I have been, which is reassuring in some ways of looking at things, yet I still have room to grow.

Wisdom is trusting the people around you to do what they feel is best. If the simplest solution is often the best, then why aim to make things overly complex? Complexity requires forethought, or sometimes is the result of a lack of forethought. Last summer I delighted in writing several essays for the Wednesday Blog attempting to adapt chaos theory to explain human behavior.[2] We need both complexity and simplicity to understand ourselves and the world in which we live. Think about it: we cannot narrow things down to binary options. More often, the binary is one of a series of binaries which together form a logical thought or series. I marvel at the fact that computers most fundamentally work in the binary language of 1s and 0s, and that in this manner language and thought are boiled down to so rudimentary an interpretation. It’s for this reason that while I’m concerned by the rise and development of artificial intelligence and its misuse, I feel a sense of assurance that it is still limited by its basic functions and limited by the abilities of its artifice.[3] The human brain is a wonderous and ever complicated organ which evolved to fulfill its own very particular needs. On the simplest level the brain thinks, it sends directions to the rest of the body to keep the body operating. In a theological framework, I’ve argued that the brain may be the seat of the soul, the consciousness that is at the core of our thought. My earliest memory that I’ve written about here was the first time I recognized that particular voice of my own consciousness, which occurred sometime when I was 3 years old.[4]

Wisdom is intangible, it’s something that you have to learn to recognize. This is perhaps the most complex tenant that represents something simple. In order to truly become wise, one must understand that wisdom isn’t something you can buy off the shelf or write your way into. For all the words which Zorba’s boss writes, allowing them to consume him, he remains feeling unfulfilled in life. It’s why the narrator of the novel struck out from his books and sought to live among ordinary people, buying a stake in a lignite mine on the southern shore of Crete. On his way there in the Piraeus he met Zorba, the man who within a few pages became his foreman and the one who’d realize his idea of finding wisdom in the living world. The simplest explanations are often best. Zorba lives to enjoy the life he has, and when things go wrong––as they often do––he finds something to build upon and start over again.

A couple of months from now I’m going to be contributing my own experiences to a tacit knowledge panel at the History of Science Society’s conference in New Orleans about how I’ve been able to maintain a full research load and writing all year round with hardly any funding at all. I recognize that the circumstances of these past few years have been marked by my own poor decisions and mistakes that I’ve made along the way. Yet in spite of those, and bad luck in many respects, I’ve been able to continue with my work and to produce historical studies that are beginning to make a decent contribution to the history of science in the Renaissance and specifically to the history of animals in that same period. I’m looking forward to that panel, and to the two papers I’m presenting during the same weekend. Maybe, like Zorba, when things feel like they are about to go well I’ll feel the need to rise to my feet and leap into the air as though my soul were attempting to escape from my body. Simply put, for all the trouble that life has brought, joy is overpowering when pure.

[1] Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek: The Saint’s Life of Alexis Zorba, trans. Peter Bien, (Simon and Schuster, 1946, 2014), 81.

[2] “Elephant Tails,” Wednesday Blog 5.24.

[3] “Asking the Computer,” Wednesday Blog 5.26.

[4] “On Political Violence,” Wednesday Blog 5.17.

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A macaw

On Skepticism

On Skepticism – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I express my dismay at how fast time seems to be moving for me of late and how it reflects the existence of various sources of knowledge in our world.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Sources:%5B1%5D Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, (University of Chicago Press, 2025), 603.[2] If this word epistemology leaves you confused, have no fear, for my own benefit as well I wrote a blog post explaining this word alongside two of its compatriots. “Three Ologies,” Wednesday Blog 6.6 (podcast 5.6).
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This week, I express my dismay at how fast time seems to be moving for me of late and how it reflects the existence of various sources of knowledge in our world.

I first noticed the passage of time on my tenth birthday, that is to say I remember remarking on how from that day on for the rest of my life, I would no longer be counting my years in single digits. I remember distinctly the feeling of surprise at this, a sense that I could never go back to my earliest years. That was especially poignant for me as those first six years lived in the Chicago suburbs held a nostalgic glow in my memory then as they do now. In those early years I felt that time moved slowly; I remember once as a kid I fretted over a 3 minute cooking timer, worrying that I would be unable to stand there and watch the flame over which I was cooking eggs for a full 3 minutes. Today that sounds silly, yet I believe it is vital to remember how I felt all those years ago lest I lose my empathy with my past self or anyone else I may encounter with similar concerns over things I see as minute.

Soon after my tenth birthday, I found a new method of getting through things that I found tedious or even odious to endure. I realized that if I tricked myself into enjoying the moment that the tedium would pass by quicker than if I wallowed in my annoyance and misery. Perhaps there was a degree of pessimism in this realization: that the good moments don’t seem to last as long as the bad ones in my recollection of things, or that it’s in fact easier to remember the bad more than the good. This is something I’ve been struggling with lately, that when I find my thoughts sinking to these depths of my greatest uncertainty and grief that I need to remind myself of all the good in my life. Time seems to move faster today than it did before. The days fly by more than linger, and there’s always something new or old that I need to do. I’ve long thrived on work, a trait I inherited from my parents. Often my happiest days are those spent dedicated to a specific task; those days are made happy by my sense of accomplishment once the task has progressed or even is done. I’ve learned to accept that good things won’t often be finished in a day. I’ll push myself instead to do as much as I feel I can do in the span of a day and see where that leaves me when I go to bed at night. With the new introduction to my dissertation this meant that it took me 9 days to write all 105 pages of it. This is one of those times where I feel that I’m on a roll and in my writer’s paradise when I can write and write and write and not run out of ideas to commit to paper.

Yet I worry about that quicker passage of time because I feel that there are less things that I’m able to do in a given day than I would like. I sacrifice rest sometimes in order to see a project to completion, or I choose to try and find a balance between my work and the rest of my life only to see one side, or another overwhelm its counterpart leaving me feeling unfulfilled when I retire for the night. I do worry that the time I’m afforded is limited, and that I’m not going to do everything I want to undertake. There are plenty of things I want to write, so much I want to say, yet so little time in a given day to say it. I’m still young, just a few weeks over halfway to my 33rd birthday. I have this lingering feeling that there’s so much that I want to do with the life I have and an indeterminate amount of time with which to do those things. Am I content with what I’ve done with my life so far? Yes. Is there so much more I want to do? Absolutely.

I suspect this shock at time moving faster is my own realization of my mortality. Everything has a beginning and an end, the mystery lies in not knowing either terminus directly. How many of us can remember our own birth? I certainly can’t. By the same token we can’t necessarily interview the dead after they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil because, in the words of Dr. McCoy, they’re dead. Thus, we remain doubters of our own mortality, our limits. I often hear older friends talk about how the young feel invincible and immortal and make mistakes which reinforce that sentiment of invincibility all while, if they’re particularly bold or just unlucky, asserting their mortality with a sudden abandon. Our doubts are aimed at established sources of knowledge, authorities to whom we feel no particular duty to abide even if we begrudgingly accept their precepts out of bare necessity. I see enough people every day ignore pedestrian crossing lights even though they are there on the city’s authority to protect us pedestrians when crossing the streets that we’ve abdicated to vehicles. It usually leaves me at least frustrated at the ignorance of the driver, at most even angry when I’ve gotten close to being hit by such an ignoramus.

Skepticism is a significant marker in Renaissance studies as a transitional element from the classically inspired scholarship of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries into the empirical knowledge-making that traditionally we’ve said was emblematic of the Scientific Revolution. I have many colleagues who are working now on disproving the existence of that Scientific Revolution; I admire that cause and yearn to read what they’re writing even though one of my stock courses to teach is called “the Scientific Revolution: 1500-1800.” Ada Palmer calls Michel de Montaigne, in some ways the inspiration for my Wednesday Blog, “the avatar of this moment” when skepticism became a driving force in Renaissance thought.[1] I argue in my dissertation that the American experience drove the course of skeptical thought in the Renaissance; all the things which André Thevet called singular in the Americas represented a dramatic break from classical standards of knowledge which required a new epistemology to explain them.[2] The key here is that we should never be complacent that our current knowledge is all there is to know, after all a well-lived life is a life spent learning. I’m skeptical about many things and have a drive to continue learning, to continue exploring. Curiosity hasn’t killed this cat yet.[3]I find then that my time is best spent in pursuit of this knowledge, and as much as one can learn alone in the solitude of their study reading and thinking quietly to oneself like a monk, it is far better to learn in communion with others. Since the pandemic began, I’ve grown particularly fond of Zoom lectures, webinars, and workshops as much for the expertise on show as for the community they build. Even if we only communicate through these digital media I still look forward to seeing these people, to experiencing that one part of life with them. We learn so that we might have richer experiences of our own lives, so that we might find comfort in our knowledge, so that we might, in Bill Nye’s words, “change the world.” In the time that I have afforded to me I want to learn more than anything else, to learn about the people around me, about our common heritage, about what our future may hold, and about myself. If I can do that, then when I am “no more, cease to be, expired and gone to meet my maker, become a stiff, bereft of life and resting in peace” I’ll be content in my leave-taking. Hopefully unlike the dead parrot they won’t nail me to my perch like Bentham’s auto-icon which greets knowledge-seekers in the South Cloisters of University College London, though that could be a rather humorous way to go.

[1] Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, (University of Chicago Press, 2025), 603.

[2] If this word epistemology leaves you confused, have no fear, for my own benefit as well I wrote a blog post explaining this word alongside two of its compatriots. “Three Ologies,” Wednesday Blog 6.6.

[3] Meow.

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On Universals

On Universals – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I discuss some of the things which are common to all of us, problems we all share, and why I think we ought to look at solving those problems.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, I discuss some of the things which are common to all of us, problems we all share, and why I think we ought to look at solving those problems.

I don’t rest much these days, there’s so much I have on my mind from my work to my hopes for my life to the state of our world boiling in tumult around us. I sleep, yet I rarely feel rested when I awaken. I suspect it’s worse on those mornings when I’m pulled awake from the middle of a dream, that is from REM sleep into my waking reality. Perhaps this is the same for you if you’ve noticed it. This morning was one such occurrence and I’ve been tired throughout the day, even drifting off to sleep midday while watching the Cubs game and later riding in the backseat of my family’s car to an event. These days, I have a lot on my plate, and as one of my best friends pointed out to me recently, I’m probably due for a vacation of at least a week in length. When I have the time and the money to do so I’ll probably slip away somewhere as suggested.

I’ve always thought that the more technologically advanced our society becomes the better life will be for we humans who crafted these machines and machine intelligences which are the hallmarks of our civilization today. I suspect many, if not all, of you would both agree and disagree on some level with this statement. Life is easier on some counts, yet we still haven’t found a way to relieve the burden of human labor through invention. This is one of many universals we all have in common, one of many things we can look to and nod at as signs of our humanity. We all struggle in our own way, and we all have things we love and fear. I think at the core of our problems today is the desire to divide us into camps armed to the teeth to defend their own circle from the other circles out there in the fog of doubt. How often I’ve worried about nothing when someone doesn’t respond to a message, email, or letter when the person on the other end was simply busy! We all dream, don’t we? In our waking moments as well as in our sleep we dream about the life we want to have in our future. There does lie a difference between those who see those dreams as blueprints for what they can create and those who merely see these dreams as figments of an overactive imagination. Yet that difference can be overcome with enough courage and determination to see a better tomorrow.

I do believe that we all want to be happy, the question lies in what we each believe on our own terms will make us happy. In America, a country with capitalism so deeply baked into our collective consciousness, happiness is often quantifiable in dollars and cents. I went to college with a lot of people who chose their majors out of a conviction that their happiness would come if they became rich. I also know other people who are happy with quiet, unassuming lives. In my case I know I am capable of doing great things, of making an impact on our society, and I want to do all that. Yet as I’ve grown, I’ve found that what makes me happiest is being comfortable in my living, having choice in what I do and who I live my days with, and always seeking new knowledge and even wisdom from time to time. I know I need to earn my keep to do these things, something I’m presently not doing, yet as I often say when I’m feeling especially dour about the current state of my life at 32: I have many long years ahead of me, let’s take one step after another to get to that point of comfort that I seek.

Another universal emotion for humanity is fear; in fact, it’s one of the most powerful emotions we can feel. I know fear well, as Captain Kathryn Janeway of the Starship Voyager said to an embodiment of Fear in one of the finest episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, “I’ve known fear, it’s a very healthy thing most of the time. You warn us of danger, remind us of our limits, protect us from carelessness. I’ve learned to trust fear.” Fear is a seed of knowledge, yet hope is the fertilizer needed for wisdom to flower. We’ve been fed so much fear by one camp of  all others that it is nearly all we hear today. Yet that fear lacks the depth which is needed for true societal growth to occur. The power of the fearmongers will remain brittle and fragile until at long last it crumbles again as it always does.

So, let me ask you this: what would it be like if we let our guard down even for a few moments and talked with one another about the things we have in common? What if we lowered our banners proudly proclaiming our camps and sought out the universal ground upon which we all stand? At the end of this time of change, whenever whatever is coming next is settled, we’re going to have to do just this. We will need to talk with one another and recognize our common humanity. What’s more, we will have to learn not only to talk with one another but listen to one another again. I’ve been in meetings in the last few months where I certainly could’ve contributed my own thoughts about the state of things, yet I’ve found it far better to be attentive to the people there with me and hear what they have to say. Often, we have similar concerns and similar hopes in kind. To do any of this takes a tremendous amount of courage but not anymore than we’ve mustered in the past. I’ve seen it after big storms when people help dig each other out of the damage. You may ask, “Why would we care about our neighbors if we don’t even know them well?” That question is simple: you do it because it’s the right thing to do.

There was a series of television commercials several years ago which purported to show a potentiality where it was normal to prefer pain or trouble over pleasure and comfort. I wonder if we aren’t in fact living in that world where we accept the pain and trouble because we can’t work up the courage to face that pain and trouble and find solutions to remedy it? Take for instance the trouble we go to in the United States to travel between our cities: we put up with uncomfortable day or multiday long road trips or quick yet rickety short-haul regional flights because we’ve dismissed the potential of trains to connect our smaller and larger cities together. Last month, I drove up to Chicago in the backseat of my Dad’s small pickup truck and returned home in a sleeper class roomette on Amtrak’s Southwest Chief. I appreciate the ride back to the city of my birth, yet the benefits of having more legroom, being able to walk about the train, lounge access in Chicago, and complimentary service in the dining car can only be outweighed by the convenience of being able to choose when I want to leave my origin and arrive at my destination by car, especially when as of now there’s only one direct train per day in each direction between Chicago and Kansas City.

We can use particular answers to solve universal problems, if only we have the courage to consider those particularities. I worry today that we may be short on the courage to solve our most universal of problems, the rot at the heart of our civilization that we’ve too long ignored until it’s oozing there right before our eyes. A house with rot in its foundation will eventually fall and crumble into ruin. Can we face our own rotting foundations before we lose what is most universal, what we most love and appreciate about our lives? Or can we do what we know to be right, what we know we must, and begin the process of rebuilding to craft a better version of the old edifice of our civilization, a more equitable edifice indeed, for our posterity to enjoy?I’ll leave you with those questions, because often the best conclusion to any essay ought to be the provocation of more queries rather than definitive answers.

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