Notes to Self -- 2025

    "Our personalities are made up of what we learned how to do well early to get us out of trouble and we’re now afraid to give up. "—Michael Silverstone 7/22/23 This month (July 2023) I have had two very large chunks of experience that did a number on my personality--I think in a good way. Because they showed me new alternatives to what I learned to do to get out of overwhelming trouble as a child.  For two weeks, and after 5 years of apprenticeship, I found myself Helping Facilitate Adult Learners in Becoming Montessori Teachers -- a role that required me to be be much more grown-up, responsible, resourceful, reliable and stable than I've probably ever been previously been able to manage in anything else until now.  Sandwiched in between those two weeks was a trip to Cleveland to help my mom get knee replacement surgery, and be the person to help her in the hospital and be go between between her and her doctor, the various nurses, case manager, her friends and al...

      When I was a boy reading speculative fiction and predictions in newspapers and seeing depictions of World's Fairs and Disneyland exhibits, I used to think about a time called The Future--a time that wasn't here but would be. . .maybe. I always lived with both a pleasant and a fearful anticipation of it--an attitude which continues to this day as we watch the race between the fulfillment of the human potential to intensify its capacity for cosmic intelligence/Love, and contemporaneous habit of being led by the dominance of the heartless, but impressively adept Lizard-mind. Until very recently, it was easy to think The Future was coming way later, or never. The relative stability of life in the 20th Century (to someone born in it) was too convincing. As was true 100 years earlier, Ford continues to make cars with rubber tires and windshields; the New York Daily News continues to publish paper editions that are read and disposed of daily in trash bins; a postal deliver...