As many of you already know, one of the ways I support my travel addiction and vagabondish lifestyle is by developing iPhone applications. We all have to earn a living, and as far as it goes, iPhone development gives me the freedom and mobility I want in a job.

One project I’ve been working on since the beginning of the year and only just wrapped up in Charleston was called Big Sticky, which tells the story of a purple frog prince searching for his lost princess through a giant sentient castle. It was a blast to work on, and my artist partners at Big Bad Brush have the level of talent and dedication needed to make a great game.

As of today, Big Sticky is officially available for download, and is currently only $1.

With prices like that, you can’t resist. In addition, I get a percentage of that dollar. So when you’re thinking that a dollar is maybe too much to spend (*cough*tightwad*cough*), or you’re considering telling your friends about that new taco place instead of this awesome new game, just call to mind an image of me, shivering and cold in a ditch, because I can’t afford a warm place to sleep at night. Have a change of heart, buy, tell your friends, and you’ll keep me traveling and writing well into the future!

If you’re interested in hearing what it’s like to work regularly while on the road, stay tuned; I’ve been now a week and a half in Bruges, Belgium, working every day, and the main subject of my next post will be what the work environment is like for a digital nomad like myself.

Now, loyal readers, go forth into the world and spread the good news, because Big Sticky is here, and it’s here to stay.

Yesterday I sold my bed. Today, I sold my sofa, my keyboard and amp, and my kitchen chairs. At some point next week, I’ll be packaging up my books for storage and selling or giving away the rest of what I own.

I’ve always preferred and advocated a few-possession lifestyle. Even so, it’s amazing how much stuff can accumulate when you let it. I remember loading my car, back when I had a car, to make the drive here to Montana from the East Coast. It felt good that everything fit into one small vehicle, but it still felt like too much.

But you get used to it after a while. You get used to the idea that you can’t leave for too long, because you have to pay rent for your apartment, because your apartment is full of too many things to move easily, because what’s the use of an empty apartment? “Stuff” in general seems to exert a sort of gravitational force; the more you have, the more you get, often without even noticing.

That doesn’t mean I’m a complete ascetic. I like my gadgets as much as the next tech-savvy traveler, have a great backpack, and love my new Coat of Many Pockets. So what’s the deal? It’s easy enough to loudly criticize America’s rampant consumerist lifestyle (before our travels end and we succumb to it ourselves, at any rate), but why is having fewer possessions in any way better?

The answer, discussed at greater length on my other blog, is one of freedom, a.k.a. “utility.” You can love a brick as much as you want, but it will never be more than dead weight; a toolbox of the same size, however, expands the spectrum of your possible action. A sofa increases your ability to host guests, a work bench opens up a whole new range of things you can create; both decrease your ability to travel at will. A plasma screen TV is purely consumptive, while a shelf full of books contains power unheard of throughout most of human history.

So your possessions define the range of actions available to you. As most of the actions I prefer involve travel, most possessions aren’t, for me, very useful. Some are: my sleeping bag, for example, lets me sleep out in a field in Scotland if I feel like it, and save money that can instead be used on food and transportation. A light pack lets me cover further distances by foot, including, say, hiking a four-day chunk of the GR20 in Corsica. Carrying a laptop lets me work on the road, carrying a camera lets me better share my experience with you fine people, and carrying a notebook lets me sit down and write whenever I feel like it.

That, at least, is the rational explanation. All that explanation really is, though, is my attempt to explain the feeling I get from owning very little: lightness. Every piece of furniture, every valuable but bulky piece of electronics, every bundle of wires or set of dishes that leaves through my apartment door is like another anchor-line snapping, and every night I sleep a little easier.

Maybe I’m just young and naive, pushed by my biology to explore my environment before acquiring a mate and raising progeny.

Or maybe this nomadicism is simply how I was made to be.

It’s always easy to make fun of the tourists. You know who they are — those people in shorts and fanny packs, shifting near-sighted, slightly confused looks between guide books and famous landmarks, loudly reading descriptions verbatim from the book to bored-looking children and distracted spouses. Those people grinning and making strange shapes with their fingers (Jersey Shore? Isn’t that the documentary about the effects of alcohol on the cognitively disabled?), while a third person takes shaky, out-of-focus photos that show, for instance, the lower three feet of the coliseum as obscured by the lower eight inches of two tourists’ heads.

But rest peaceful, fellow xenophiles, in the knowledge that we, at least, are not like them. In fact, the difference between tourists and travelers is generally fairly distinctive, and yes, I’m talking about more than just the unmistakable olfactory perception that a person’s clothes have been washed in a sink for the last two months. Though we “serious” travelers presumably try to engage with local cultures more fully, to learn at least a few words in assorted languages, and to experience things tourists will never dream of, we have our own share of problems.

These are all problems I’ve noticed in myself, and which I want to change as I continue to travel and experience the world.

The Elitism of the Intentionally Deprived

I’ve always prided myself on being able to thrive in rough conditions, and quite a lot of other travelers do too. It’s even one of the many ways by which travelers meeting for the first time can establish a social hierarchy (along with “the most rustic form of transportation you’ve used” and “the strangest place you’ve had sex”): the guy who slept in a barn in Romania beats the chick who had the creepy hotel room in Prague, and both are trumped by the couple who got invited to stay with a young family in a traditional houseboat in Thailand.

And honestly, pride at at minimal needs is quite justifiable. Need less, use less, be happier; it really can be that simple. The problem, though, is when we stop trying to trim down our own needs and start projecting our first-world guilt on our first-world fellow citizens. It’s easy, while sleeping in a tent in the jungle, to feel critical, even resentful, hateful, of the theoretical rich-person-in-the-huge-carbon-factory-mansion-with-the-private-jet-and-SUV-limo. It’s easy to then walk into an internet cafe and fire off a blog post or a Facebook status update containing a self-righteous (but pithy) comment along those lines.

But really, who are we to feel such superiority? We aren’t poor, in the sense of “find work or starve” poverty. We aren’t particularly light on resources, given the thousands of miles we tend to traverse in pursuit of our next travel fix. And most of us don’t really contribute much to our societies beyond some pretty pictures and diverting stories.

What we can do, though, is raise awareness. We can photograph environmental damage, publicize interesting ecological and sociological innovations. We can talk with people, real people, affected both by environmental change and poverty. We can try to describe things as they are, and not as we think they should be. Above all, we can be humble. Without humility, the best we can hope for is to be correct douchebags.

Condescension to the Locals

What!? every self-respecting traveler in my audience immediately replies. We don’t do that! Tourists do that!

Well, yes. But we do it too. We just do it a little more subtly. As I said above, travelers compete in all sorts of categories, like languages and transportation and sex and food. Another one of these categories is “Staying with Local People.”

As you change from tourist to traveler, other travelers will increasingly be the target for your boasting. To the guy who’s lived in your home town for his entire life, there’s really not much difference between you staying in a five-star hotel or a ditch in the road — you’re on the other side of the world. To another traveler, though, the details are vital.

So: how often have you found yourself thinking, while enjoying local hospitality, “this is going to make for an awesome story”? I have, fairly often. But that shouldn’t be the focus, should it? When you’re a guest in someone’s home, you’re with people, to whom you represent other travelers, and with whom your differences can be extremely educational. Instead of daydreaming about how you’ll frame this story in order to impress the pretty backpacker at your next hostel, get involved. Learn. Contribute. Make your hosts glad they took you in, and give them a few stories of their own.

Condescension toward the Folks at Home

Put a group of travelers at a table somewhere “exotic,” say, at a rooftop taverna in view of the Acropolis or a smoky little Parisian bar, and you’ll get an exchange of stories and experiences, advice and recommendations, contacts and tidbits of information. This is one of my favorite parts of traveling: there’s a certain camaraderie between travelers that, as a chronic nomad, you’re unlikely to find anywhere else. Travelers are often interesting, intelligent, well-informed, and experienced, and mutual respect and admiration develops easily.

Contrast this with the return home. All of a sudden, you’re back with the “locals,” the people with whom you grew up and from whom you may even now be trying to distance yourself. Because you know them so well, you respect them less, even as you gush about the “simplicity” and “hospitality” of, say, the Bedouin.

The key here is, as usual, to shift your focus from yourself to others. So you’ve been off seeing the world; your hometown hasn’t exactly been in a stasis state. While you were gone, unconnected, drifting, your friends at home were falling in love, having kids, starting businesses, and finding new ways of looking at familiar country. Don’t look down on them, and whatever you do, don’t “pity” them, as if you were somehow perched in some elevated way of being. Learn from them. Enjoy being with them. Hometown folks aren’t often travelers, but don’t “lower” your expectations; broaden them. Be yourself, be curious, and forget about trying to prove something. And when you are in that exotic little bar on the other side of the world, represent them, and brag about their good sides to your traveler companions.

Checklisting

Of all the ways travelers have of comparing levels of experience, “the number of countries you’ve been to” has to be one of the most common. The proper response when asked about this by another traveler is to look thoughtful, as if you haven’t repeatedly tallied your score at every border crossing, and pretend to work it out in your head before finally giving in and telling them. “Only sixty-three,” you’ll say, modestly, “seventy-one if you count airports.”

This one was inspired by a travel blog, which shall remain unnamed, which I read recently. The goal of said blogger was to visit every country in the world — which isn’t a bad goal in itself. The problem with it is that it allows for technical victories. Spend six hours between flights wandering around a big city and, with a stroke of your pen, you can cross that nation off your list. You work out squiggle-like itineraries on every trip you go on — cross this corner here, you think, and you’re done with Croatia.

As good as this is for bragging rights, it’s really not that interesting, and just a little deceptive. For instance, I spent a day in Germany on my way back from my 2009 trip, so I can technically claim that I’ve “been to” Germany (and I usually do, when reciting my own checklist). But have I really seen Germany? No. I spent a week in Paris, but does that entitle me to say I’ve “seen” France? Maybe in conversation, but I can’t say that to myself. I’ve lived in the United States for the most of my life, and I still haven’t seen a Louisiana bayou or a Texas cattle ranch or an Alaskan grizzly or a Florida beach party. Have I seen Germany? I’ve barely even seen my homeland.

The desire to checklist, to “do” a country, to hit all of the top ten sights of a city, to eat the five main foods or take the top eight train journeys, distracts from the real process of travel itself. Constantly thinking about the future, about your  bragging rights, your place in the traveler hierarchy, keeps you from thinking about where you are, what you’re seeing now, what you’re smelling, hearing, feeling.

So: I’ll pledge this to you now, in preparation for my next adventure. I’m not going to checklist, if I can help it. I’m not going to track the number of countries I visit or cities I explore or foods I try. I’m just going to go with the flow, take what comes, and write about it as best I can.

That, after all, is the only real way to travel.

My first international solo trip lasted for three months. Even with that much time, I still often found myself rushed, trying to make it to the next city or country before the inevitable turnaround and flight home. I passed up natural wonders in Scotland, everything outside Paris in France, and small towns all over Italy. I found myself spending a mere few hours in Belgrade, between trains, and with only half a day to explore Thessaloniki. Almost every step along that journey opened new doors, new possibilities, which I found myself having to ignore due to time constraints. I was offered lodging and pay as a diver repairing the ancient underwater harbor walls on Rhodes; my schedule only allowed two days there, and so I declined.

This time, I intend to do things differently. Granted, there will be some time constraints, when I’m headed across countries to meet someone, but none so absolute or final as a flight home. If I lack the time to explore Berlin on my first arrival in Germany, I can always come back after Kurdistan and Georgia. If I find an apartment I like in Marrakesh, I can stay and work for a few months. If I want to see Iceland by ferry, I can do so.

That’s the key to slow travel, sans airports and reservations and itineraries: the freedom to sink into a place, to get to its marrow. Travel is a rich feast of new sights and new experiences, and like all such feasts, it is best enjoyed slowly. It’s also more rewarding, simply because it’s not as easy. To experience this effect for yourself, try taking a weekend sometime to walk the length of your daily commute. I guarantee you you’ll find it to be a new experience, regardless of the number of times you’ve driven the same route.

Air travel is the height of easy travel. Flying from Chicago to Paris is like magic: you walk through a metal door, sit down for ten hours or so, stand up, and walk out, and you are in a different place.

This is the second reason for slow travel. When I travel by ship from New York to Bremerhaven, Germany, I won’t be seeing anything but ocean for nine days. There is no culture in the middle of the Atlantic, no history (at the surface, anyway), and little in the way of scenery. The reason the experience is still valuable is that it gives you an understanding of the real distances involved, of the energy it takes to get from point A to point B.

Slow travel, then, can be thought of a way of returning to the much larger world of just a century ago. The travel world is like a network of urban points connected by airports, and going “around the world” means skipping across the surface of the world from Miami to Barcelona to Istanbul to Beijing to Tokyo to Los Angeles. Slow travel, on the other hand, makes a slower way, passing through all of the villages and industrial towns and plains and forests that lie between those points. Once reliance on that fast-travel network of airports has been severed, our perception of the world expands to fill the size of the planet we are moving so slowly across.

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
~ T. S. Eliot

I have many friends who would be philosophers, and most of them are of a decidedly pre-modern bent. Philosophy has often been at odds with the idea of ‘knowledge,’ of hard empirical facts, as it were.  Many western philosophers once claimed that knowledge of reality was secondary to the overarching structures of philosophy, which could only be arrived at by pure reason and/or the special revelation of the Creator, while many eastern philosophers claimed that everything we see as “reality” is only an illusion over the surface of the ineffable Real behind it.

This question is often confused by the fact that the terms ‘knowledge’ and ‘wisdom’ are often vague at best. Today, dear readers, I’m going to try to clarify them.

I’m going to approach the issue from a purely pragmatic standpoint. My reasons for adopting pragmatism as a philosophy are not the subject of this essay; I’ll clarify them in a later post. I will, however, say a little more about what I mean by the term. In my view, reality is a dynamic system constructed of an almost infinite number of parts, each of which can be broken down into a further system in itself. Every part influences every other part, and the workings of the tiniest details influence the system as a whole in the same way the rules of the overall system control the workings of its smallest component.

However, at the human level of experience, that system is not chaotic; while it is a pretty idea to think that a drunkard flapping his lips in China might start a vast political storm in the United States, this is rarely the case. And, if it is, a line of cause and effect is present and (theoretically, at least) knowable. So, actions can be taken with effects that follow. Give a starving poor man a loaf of bread and he’ll survive a bit longer; shoot a well-fattened rich man through the heart and he will die regardless of the caloric bounty available to him.

Though there are many useful ways to think about the human mind, the most valuable one to the present question is the model proposed by Richard Dawkins and since expanded on by other thinkers in the fields of neurology and philosophy alike. That is, the human mind functions as a simulator in order to aid our survival–in other words, we have the ability to predict the effect of our actions, and the actions of others, on the world. The effects of this range from the simple–a mother telling a child not to play near the street, because her mind-simulator can forecast possible outcomes of that action, to the profound–Albert Einstein having a radical shift in his perspective towards space-time and gravitational acceleration and forming, seemingly ex nihilo to we mortals, his theory of relativity: a case of mental simulation on an unprecedented scale.

So, how does this concept of the mind as simulator tie in with the philosopher’s ideas of wisdom and knowledge?

Inaccurate mental simulation is at best useless and at worst lethal. Timothy Treadwell, a would-be conservationist who made the news a few years back, provides an example of the effects of inaccurate simulation. His experiences with well-fed and unthreatened grizzly bears in the wild led him to believe that all grizzlies were harmless if treated right. All it took was one bear with a differing characteristic (hunger, or temperament) to fail his simulation. The result, as might be expected, was not pretty.

Mental simulation works by constructing a model of reality inside the mind and then ‘running’ possible actions or environmental changes through it in order to predict results. Note that the model is certainly not to scale–indeed, it is almost absurdly lopsided, focusing the great majority of its resources on our own personal surroundings, environment, and social interactions. We are by our nature extremely egotistical, for if our mental simulations were more “fair,” we would have died out as a species a long time ago while wondering how the mastodons felt about our eating them.

Wisdom is the ability to use these simulations not only to choose those actions which best lead to our long term goals, but also to measure the effects of those goals themselves. Wisdom, in that sense, is power: the power to run an accurate simulation well into the future, in those fields which are central to our lives. “Central” is an important modifier here, because accurate simulation in non-central areas is not generally considered wisdom. An engineer designing the effect of airflow over a wing is not demonstrating wisdom; an elder determining how to preserve a family’s peaceful coherence is. Both are demonstrating sophisticated simulation through complex models of reality, but the life of the family to the elder is central to his immediate community’s life, while the effect of the air on the wing to the engineer is not.

Many reading this will have picked up on the name “Dawkins” several paragraphs ago and have already dismissed the mind-simulation concept as a strictly secular interpretation. This isn’t necessarily so: whether it evolved or was designed, simulation and prediction are inarguably key aspects of the human mind and central to the process of interacting with the world. Wisdom without interaction is nothing, for it has no effect outside the mind of its possessor (apologies to my Taoist friends).

So if wisdom is the ability to accurately predict the outcomes of given causes in meaningful contexts (almost always social), what is knowledge?

This is where the division happens. When we think of knowledge, we think of facts, of floating bits of unconnected detritus that accumulate in the mind and serve primarily to impress people at cocktail parties. Note the similarity to the common conception of history as merely the studies of dates and names.

Eliot’s quote at the beginning of this essay refers to that fragmented type of knowledge, or “information.” This is the same reason many philosophical theorists sneer at statistics, for indeed, what meaning can there be in a list of numbers?

In itself, there can be none. A single packet of information without connection or context is, by definition, trivia. It is like learning one phrase in a foreign language and is often used by the same types of people in the same ways: to convince others that they possess the language as a whole. While it may be impressive to rattle off the date of Constantine’s emigration to the Anatolian peninsula, or a fluent-sounding bit of French, it is useless without the key to wisdom: integration.

Think again of the mind as simulation through model of reality. In order to work accurately, that model has to be constructed on propositions that more or less match aspects of the real world. Those propositions are knowledge after integration. Integration is the process of taking a new fact and connecting it into the mental model so that it can be used. This is like learning the meanings and usages of a word in a foreign language. It is the conversion of a context-less piece of information and converting it to a structural node in a working model of the universe.

Knowledge, then, is necessary for wisdom, but only through the process of integration. This is the difference between a hobbyist and a scientist, and, some might argue, between a bad psychologist and a wise human being. In both cases the first has access to a plethora of information–speed of light, gravitational equations, mental disorders, insecurities–but, without connection, that knowledge is static. In the second cases, the scientist and the wise one have access to the same facts but have integrated them into working reality models, and can then use them to accurately predict and control reality, and to further expand the reaches of their mental models. This is what Arthur Conan Doyle referred to through the mouth of his great fictional detective, Sherlock Homes: there is a difference between seeing and observing. Seeing is merely recording, while observing is putting a thing into its context and connecting it.

Surely this isn’t always so, some will say, I’ve known many people wo were very wise but lacked knowledge. Again, this is due to a misconception as to the nature of knowledge. Remember that we only tend to call wise those simulations which apply to the central, meaningful areas of our life. As it happens, those areas are precisely the ones where knowledge is gained by observation of other human beings and oneself–no formal education required. Indeed, it is often the greatest hardships that produce the most useful observances of “meaningful” knowledge (which lead to wisdom if integrated), while the relative ease and detachment of higher education just as often removes those hardships, robbing the “educated” of what might have been data necessary for what we think of as wisdom.

So, as is so often the case, both sides of a would-be duality are necessary to a successful life. Wisdom is impossible without knowledge, and knowledge is useless without wisdom. The lessons I can see from this are two: first, never dismiss a thing as “mere information,” and second, never assume that possessing that information will be valuable in itself.

The Devil goes by many names. Lucifer, Shaitan, the Evil One: these are a few of his Christian and Judaic names. He is called Adversary, the Liar, Old Scratch, the man downstairs. He is called Antichrist, Blasphemer, Heretic. He answers to Illumaniti, Knights Templar, Papism, the Bourgeoisie, the Communist Threat, Anti-Patriotism; in the east he goes by West, and in the west, East. He is called America, he is called Arabia, he is called China, he is called Russia. He is, to put it simply, Evil.

We humans are programmed by millennia upon millennia of scrabbling for survival to think in twos, to make split-second decisions on abstractions of available data. When there is an immediate threat, that response keeps us alive: fight or flight, eat or spit out, kill or capture, attack or negotiate.

The problem is that our species is moving into deeper and murkier waters. These days, thanks to the wonders of civilization, that split-second judgment is only rarely necessary.

And yet we make it anyway. Guilty or innocent, right or wrong, good or evil, for us or against us. Men and women claiming to be leaders shout from pulpits and election stands that there are no shades of gray, and that we will never compromise: as if the only possible response two being faced with two choices is something in the middle and less, and not a third choice and more.

Satan, of course, is behind it all. He’s been behind it from the beginning; can’t you smell the sulfur? The evil in the world is Satan’s doing, and the good is God’s, and us, well, we’re just here for the ride. The only choice we have, the shouters say, is black or white: we will follow God’s plan, or Satan’s.

As you may have guessed from the introduction, Satan isn’t just the Adversary of the Christian church. Satan, or what passes for him, shows his ugly face as the “Enemy” most of our species’ great movements fought against. In any war, he is behind the actions of the opposing force, just as surely as God is behind ours. In any religion, he is behind every belief that is contrary to ours. In any political or philosophical revolution, he is behind the old order of things, while God (or ‘Right’) is behind the new.

The Adversary’s role is to make our decision simple. We are either for him, or against him. Black and white. Pick a side, and remain loyal to it to the end. Obedience without complaint; faith without question; sacrifice without hesitation. It was Satan in the German armies advancing across Poland, whispering in soldier’s ear that maybe the Fuhrer wasn’t as right as he claimed. It was Satan in Luther’s study, arguing that the Catholic church didn’t have a monopoly on truth. It was Satan on Mount Moriah, telling Abraham: forget God, and let your son Isaac live.

This simple interpretation of reality is incredibly attractive. The idea that powers far greater than any of us are warring along clearly drawn lines removes us of any responsibility or need for deliberation. We follow orders, and write off our failings as personal inability to obey. It’s the same idea that draws us to works of fantasy like Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings; the villains are evil, the heros are good, and there is no mistaking the difference. It allows us to simply align our beliefs according to a preset pattern, where every statement can be declared simply ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ and every action placed into boxes of ‘good’ and ‘evil.’

But perhaps most importantly, it gives us a peace otherwise impossible to find. When an earthquake strikes and hundreds die, we can rest in the knowledge that it’s somehow part of the Plan, or perhaps the work of the Adversary; either way, it’s a strategem in a war far above us, and therefore is not our responsibility. We can even sooth our guilt at our inaction through prayer, or whatever passes for prayer in the atheistic manifestations of the War.

The Devil has many names, but he also has a secret. He, like the Power on our side, has no power beyond our belief in him. He exists simply as a thing to blame for all that is not good in the world. The Devil has many names, and the oldest is Scapegoat.

There is no grand master plan. There is no War. We are not pawns. We are not even pieces. We are tiny, fragile creatures in a vast and strange universe, who, incredibly, have begun to think. We are afraid of the darkness of ignorance, so, like children, we squeeze our eyes shut and pretend we have the light of knowledge. We look at the complex intertwinings of pain and love and hate and joy and sorrow that is our world, and, because we cannot imagine how to navigate it, we shut our eyes and pretend that from any given point there are only two paths. We invent demons that cause pain because real pain is much harder to kill. We invent angels that heal, because all too often healing is out of our grasp, and we are creatures that thrive on hope. We invent Gods and Satans because wars are much easier to wage when you’re Right.

We do these things not because we are evil, or because we are sheep, or because we are ‘fallen’ from some past greatness. We do them because we are in the infancy of our sentience, and we are terrified of what the future will bring. So: will we live in peace with our eyes closed and our decisions simple, or will we face our fears with our eyes open and seeking wisdom? Real moral choices do have value–nihilism never gave the world much–but they are never simple questions of black and white. They aren’t even gray. In real life, there are no villains, and very few saints. There are no ten-step-paths, rituals, purifications, payments, or incantations to cosmic success. There is no Right side and no Wrong side; there are no sides at all.

There is no us and them. There is only us.

Sit down sometime, and watch a child playing. Assuming the child’s innate creativity hasn’t been burnt out of it by the drugs and television prescribed by our modern seers, you’ll notice something interesting. The child’s imaginary world is very different than the one he actually lives in. In the imaginary world, animals talk, kings and queens live in high castles, cars and trucks move at his command, and, of course, dinosaurs rule the Earth.

Adults do this too, though perhaps not so consciously. We, too old for playing with plastic dinosaurs (or so we think), enter the imaginary worlds of others: we are riding through an unspoiled and expansive Old West desert; we are normal-seeming citizens with great hidden powers; we are lone survivors struggling heroically against a dangerous and visceral world; we are kissing in the rain; we are Jack’s burning rage against the system. Why are the Harry Potter books so popular among adults if not to let us think that just on the other side of a mundane normalcy is a world full of magic, strange creatures, and life-and-death battles? What are our design mock-ups and finance reports, after all, when compared to War with Evil?

On a more practical level, those imaginary worlds also cause us to make changes in the real world. The imaginations of an ordinary mind, of a bigger paycheck or a new romance, might lead us to apply for a job or talk to a woman. The imaginations of a great mind can and do change the world.

But with that power of imagination comes a near-universal inability to accept the world we actually have. It can’t have always been this way, we think; even if the grass isn’t greener in our neighbor’s yard, surely it was in his grandfather’s. America, say the old, was better off sixty years ago when people still had morals and young people respected their elders. America, say the young, was better off six hundred years ago, when white people were still stuck in Europe and the Native American lived at one with nature, likely spontaneously bursting into song when confronted with fluffy woodland creatures.

And at the dawn of time, Eden. Perfection, or so the Christians tell us. Man without sin, without want, at peace and innocent. In that garden there was only one rule: to not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eve, being somewhat naive (not outright rebellious like her predecessor), believed Satan’s claim that the knowledge would make her like God, and ate. Adam, being a good husband, did what his wife told him too and ate likewise and, rather than becoming gods, the couple was cast out of Eden and cursed to mortality and the working of the ground.

Compare this to another creation myth: that of Prometheus and Pandora. In the Greek version, Prometheus gives humanity the gift of fire. Their eyes follow the smoke from the ground up toward the stars, and they become separate from the animals; they are mortal, but possess the fire of the gods. Zeus punishes Prometheus for his gift, and to punish the humans, he sends them Pandora: a woman, like Eve, who touches something she shouldn’t and thus brings evil, pain, and torment to the entire future of the human race.

At the beginning of both of these myths, humanity exists in a state of the innocence. Like the animals, they lack knowledge, and thus can only act according to their nature; the only sin they can commit is to seek to become like gods. In Eden, humans are immortal within the garden; in the Greek myths, humans are eternally cyclical, as there can be no names, stories, or remembrance of death.

But then the humans reach out and take something forbidden: the knowledge of the gods. With that knowledge, they become self-aware, symbolized in the Greek myth by looking at the stars, and in the Eden myth by the realization of nakedness. To be like the gods, though, is not free. In both cases, the knowledge grants to humans the ability to choose, a free will that can knowingly take a good path or an evil one. This awareness of self, perhaps brought on in actual history by the development of language, gave humans a concept of evil and good, and the awareness through experience that one day they would surely die.

With knowledge came the potential for evil. Sin enters into the Christian’s world, Pandora opens her box, and, (lament the storytellers) man is doomed to a life of work, a struggle towards an impossible perfection, and responsibility for his actions. An angel is set at the gates of Eden, and Prometheus is chained to a rock for the rest of eternity.

The Greek empire and its accompanying mythos are now long since gone, but the concept of Eden and the fall of man is still very present in the western world. We yearn for lost perfection, for peace, for security, for the assurance that we will never die. We are like infants newly born, bawling for the comfort of the womb.

But let us ask ourselves: is the fire of the gods worth the evils of Pandora’s box? It is interesting to note that the name “Pandora” in the Greek means “all-giving”, and that the forbidden fruit contained the knowledge of good as well as of evil. Prometheus and Eden are not stories of the birth of evil; they are stories of the birth of self-awareness and the responsibility that comes with it.

We cry out for Eden because we can’t see past the blisters on our hands and the gravestones at the end of our lives. Like little children with bruised knees, we run to the divine, crying for safety, for perfection, for a world where everything will be all right, where daddy will take care of everything.

Enough childishness. Bruised knees and blisters are part of growth. Sooner or later we have to dry our tears, grit our teeth, and shoulder the responsibility we have been given. And, as we sweat out our Earthly toil, we may begin to realize the gifts we have been given. There is no value in accomplishment without struggle, no value in possession without sacrifice, no value in love without loss, and no value in good without evil. Our metaphorical exile from Eden was no more a curse than the a young bird’s first push from its nest.

We have wept for far too long. It’s time to grow up.

There is a certain mode of thought that considers a good sort of life to be a stable one, where you own your own piece of land, cultivate your own garden, and live as best you can off of what you yourself can produce. You will have a front porch with rocking chairs for conversations on warm summer nights, a fireplace or wood stove for conversations on cold winter nights, and your nearest neighbor will be a pipe’s-smoke walk away. This idyllic view of community with a sense of place has a lot of attraction for me, and I’ll probably attempt it myself in a few decades when (if) I’m finally ready to settle down. It strikes me as a good way to retire, after I’ve finished raising whatever children I may have, and am ready to sit down and simply write for whatever days still remain to me.

Fairly often, proponents of the front-porch-and-pipe-smoke mentality go one step further in their reasoning, and say that such a life is the only way to experience true community. Such arguments are generally critical of the “modern lifestyle:” namely, the suburban, technological, fragmented state of affairs common to most of the American middle class. I agree with many of these criticisms: I’ve seen cities, farms, and wild mountains that I’ve loved, but have never yet seen a cookie-cutter two story I wouldn’t have liked better razed. The same goes for the stock attacks against consumerism and materialism (see the works of the philosopher Tyler Durden). The internet, of course, comes under regular heavy fire, ranging from the quaint complaints of  the uninformed elderly to well-thought out pieces like David Carver’s recent article over on Drunken Koudou (nostalgia about the internet–come on, David, I’m too young to feel old).

What’s generally lacking is any kind of alternative to the land-owning, gold-hoarding, gun-toting cabin owner sort of existence.  Here, then, is my two cents: don’t spend them all in one place.

To find my kind of alternative, go back to the good old days. No, not the good old days where everybody lived in a cabin  in the woods. I mean back to the days when cabins were unheard of, and we humans ranged the earth with everything we owned on our backs and horses, and the natural world was still a dangerous place. In other words, when our sense of community and place was not defined by a physical location (cabin or otherwise), but rather by those we were with and the contributions we ourselves could make to the group. It’s hard to make a mansion from a tent, so one’s “place” in a community was defined by merit: the greatest hunter, the wisest woman, and the oldest members of the tribe, in a time when old age was only possible with wisdom, talent, and strength.

Those were difficult and violent times: don’t mistake me for some kind of noble savage idealist. Unless you’re reading this from a yurt in Mongolia (if so, congratulations on your technological determination) you probably weren’t raised in a nomadic society, and won’t ever really be able to immerse yourself into any of the traditional ones. Don’t lose hope. Societies always change, and in this world cultures of every kind are constantly evaporating and condensing. So where are the nomad communities of the modern age? To answer that, one only has to spend the night in a hostel in New York or London, or look for the faces that stand out on a crowded bus in the Balkans.

That’s right. It is possible to find real community even in an internet-addled age, and of the oldest sort: the kind built of a common state of transience.  In my first real foray into the traveling life (the summer of 09) I made friendships that, while brief, were and are still stronger than those I had with many of the people I saw every day for three years in college. In some ways, those friendships were made easier because the sort of people who participate in long-term travel (not week-long-vacation tourists or spring break kids, in other words) generally share many of my interests and are fairly laid-back. You have to be to really travel–depend too much on hard schedules and set itineraries and you’ll eventually just lose it when that Turkish bus driver hands you off to yet another non-English-speaking friend/relative to get you where you’re going.

Really, though, I think the strength of these communities–brief and transient as they tend to be–lies in their shared experiences. In eastern Europe, for instance, I traveled for about a week with a couple of blokes called Alex and Kiril, and experienced stronger friendship in that week than I have with many I’ve known for years. There is the storytelling side of such experiences, of course–the broken train in Bosnia, the double night border crossings on the trip from  Sarajevo to Belgrade, and camping out in the woods next to Pula, Croatia, are stories we will no doubt all continue to tell, and which we will reminisce about should we ever meet again.

Another part of that strength comes from the tests shared experiences bring. You can know someone at work or next door for years, and never really know them, simply because you’ve never seen them react to real difficulty, and never had to rely on them. The shared experiences of travel, especially when you leave the beaten bath, tend to be challenging and difficult. You have to rely on others, and to be reliable yourself. It becomes apparent very quickly when someone can’t handle the stress of travel, or can’t contribute to the group, and I suppose that happens often enough. But when it doesn’t–when you experience and overcome difficult challenges standing side by side with fellow travelers and come out still standing–that’s when real friendships are made, and real community is formed.

So, I say, don’t worry so much about what the internet is doing to your social life. Don’t worry so much about owning a house rather than renting. Don’t worry so much about trying to conform to the standards of your geographical “community.” If you want to experience what real community is, do something hard, and do it somewhere outside of your comfort zone. That could be anything–hiking in the mountains, building a house, learning how to fight. If you’d like my personal recommendation, I’d suggest buying a one way ticket to anywhere, walking out on the road, and sticking a thumb out. The rest will come in time.

It’s that time of year again. Quite possibly the best holiday ever invented, Thanksgiving is a holiday dedicated to eating, and eating, and eating, with a cool-down period of weeks of turkey sandwiches and chilled leftover pie. But wait! say alert readers: Thanksgiving isn’t just about food! It’s about friends, family, community, and, well, giving thanks. And so it should be, as much as our consumption-oriented culture would have us believe otherwise.

But what does it mean, really, to give thanks? What does it mean to be grateful? Be grateful, say parents across the country to stubborn children seated before plates of green beans. There are children all over the world who would love to have what you have. Be grateful, say employers to employees taking pay cuts. In this economy, you’re lucky to have a job. Be grateful, we say: at least you’re not like them.

And I am grateful. I’m grateful for a loving family that supports me in what is rapidly becoming a very unorthodox life. I’m grateful for thoughtful words from friends. I’m grateful for meaningful actions and useful gifts, books read and passed on, and songs recommended.

Today is Thanksgiving. In a few hours my house and I will begin preparing a feast designed to induce good conversation and, after that, a long and heavy food coma. We’re going to do so in a warm house, with good company. And I ask myself: am I grateful?

Today, Americans across the country will be thanking someone or something for the blessings we have. We’re grateful, we’ll say, that we have food on the table. We’re grateful for warm beds and safe streets. We’re grateful for our freedoms. And, God help us, we’re grateful for our big screen TVs, environmentally friendly hybrids, SUVs, guns, flowers, fat turkeys, and fat vegan-soy-turkey-alternatives. We’re grateful for these things because there are millions of people around the world who don’t have them. We’re only grateful for our jobs when the economy’s down, only grateful for our food when we see those who starve, only grateful for our lives when we are confronted with death. No one is more grateful for oxygen than a man who escapes a drowning.

We tend to think of these things as gifts, from God, from chance, from fate, but a gift is something given with no expectation of repayment, as an expression of love. That necklace, that book, yes, even that tie is a gift. A beautiful sunrise, the song of a bird, and the way the air smells after it rains, those are gifts.

So we are grateful; but let us be careful in our gratefulness., for these things you are giving thanks for today are not all gifts. Your social position, your prosperity, your talents, and even your life itself, are not gifts. They are responsibilities. So, when you gather around your feast this afternoon, give thanks for these things, but remember that they’re not free. All of us have a responsibility to act in this world and act well. Whether that means feeding the homeless next thanksgiving, or volunteering for a charity, or even just creating a beautiful piece of music, is up to you.

Being a child is about learning to give thanks; being an adult is about learning to give back.

Things are not always as they seem, and the world is full of shadows. What few lights we have are weak and flickering, and our eyes will always strain to make out what is in front of us.

Two things are clear: one cannot know everything, and one cannot know anything for certain. Truisms are only true within themselves. One and one is two for certain within mathematics, it can never be more than an approximation of reality.

And yet we must choose a path, for life always goes forward. But how can we choose, when we have only limited information?

Our minds work in paradigms, or models of what we perceive reality to be. These paradigms determine how we act: a man whose paradigm describes his life as an individualistic struggle against overwhelming odds will act differently from one whose paradigm describes a world ordained by the total providence of God, and differently from one whose paradigm describes a world that is illusion concealing an underlying oneness.

Because these paradigms are the basis for how we act, it is important that we choose them carefully, and change cautiously. Most humans simply accept the paradigm they are given in childhood. Others change their paradigms based on a single emotional experience. Some are based on the closest thing we have to truth: our physical senses, our communications with other thinking beings, and the ineffable inspirations of human souls.

These conduits to truth introduce experiences into our minds. The existence of ourselves, of others, and of the physical world are experiences. So are experiments which demonstrate how closely the language of mathematics can describe those parts of reality which seem to operate according to uniform laws: physics, chemistry, electronics, medicine. So are the perceptions that occur when we hear a beautiful piece of music or read a beautiful work of literature. The look in a lover’s eyes when she trusts you is an experience. The shattering of your heart when a lover betrays you is also an experience.

Paradigms arise to contain and give structure to experiences, in order to make them useful for action. A woman betrayed often by men may form a paradigm wherein men are pigs, and act accordingly. A man for whom women fall easily may form a paradigm wherein women are whores, and act accordingly. A brilliant man like Einstein accumulates a vast array of seemingly unrelated experiences, both his own and those related to him by others, and form a paradigm that changes the world: relativity. A great man like Christ may take experiences of action and consequences, and form a paradigm to give men peace: Christianity. A corrupt man may take experiences of control and material gain by the belief of others, and form a paradigm to wage war in a peaceful savior’s name: religion.

So how may we best choose our paradigms? The easiest way is to simply accept one given you. To accept whole the stories told you by your government, by your pastor, by your employer, is easy, and may result in a sort of peace. For you, peace will be easiest if you are ignorant, for education introduces new experiences which may not be compatible with your current paradigms. If you are clever, you may be able to stretch your paradigm to accept the facts. If your desire for your paradigm is strong enough, you may be able to rewrite your experiences in your own mind, the way a doting wife might willfully ignore the scent of a different perfume on her husband’s dinner jacket.

These are easy. These are safe. These will make you a willing sheep for whichever shepherd you choose to follow, and it cannot be denied that most sheep are at least content.

Reality–the Truth–is infinitely larger and more complex than we will ever understand. Our paradigms will never be more than crude diagrams, and no matter how hard we try, most of them will be wrong. Insisting on forming these paradigms for yourself will result in a life of constant struggle, constant doubt, and little peace of mind. As a certain book says, the way is narrow, and there are few who follow it. So don’t bother–learn little, think little, and whatever it is you believe, believe it with all your heart. Do not question authority, and you will find your place in life as another gear in a great and ponderous machine.

But of course, you are still reading. You are still reading because you know, from the part of your mind that is deeper than words can reach, that it’s the narrow path that’s worth walking on, as steep and long as it may be. It will be lonely: every journey on it will be different, and at its heart, everyone must travel it alone. Take some comfort in the fact that your fellow travelers will make for interesting company.

There is no sign pointing to this path. Here is how you will find it. Question everything.  Question authority, question common sense, question the first glance and the first impression, and most importantly, question yourself. The first step is yours; understand yourself, or you will understand nothing. Always learn, always seek new experience, always seek, always struggle. Pay the most attention to those experiences which conflict with your paradigm; either your paradigm is false, or the experience is. Always look at both sides of an argument, and realize that there are never only two. Always be willing to change, but change carefully–the way is as rocky as it is narrow, and flightiness is the surest way to stumble.

Above all, realize that this is your path. Walking here was your choice. Your mistakes are your responsibility, as are your successes, and only your successes. On this path, you have no right to blame your upbringing for your beliefs, to blame your neighbors for the state of your own home, or to blame the social structures for your own condition. You have declared yourself to be yourself, and personal responsibility is the consequence of your declaration. And if you succeed in your path, try not to let it go for your head; earnest inquiry in any direction will reveal that this universe, this reality, is a far bigger place than any of us could possibly imagine.

You stand now at a crossroads in the dark. Don’t follow the hoof prints and the sound of bleating. Stand straight, breathe deep, and look carefully. What you choose will influence the rest of your life.

Walk well, and keep the wind at your back.

-
Image credit: LostMyHeadache