Running for Your Life: On Vacation

M and I are long back from our annual vacation. We go the end of May, the first week in June, this year to southern Italy.

The goal, of course, after each trip aboard is to keep the above two words in mind. On vacation.  Maybe it helps that I’ve always felt in New York City as if I’ve come from away. It may sound like a line, but the phrase “boring routine” lands on my ear like an indecipherable phrase in a foreign language. It simply doesn’t pertain to my daily life.

Perhaps if I were in or near a place of my birth then that feeling would be known to me. But it’s not the path that I’m on so I can only surmise.

In Buddhism, the phrase that pays is the beginner’s mind. If you’re got that, you tap the child in yourself, the dog, all animals in fact. Seeing things as they are rather than as our experienced (jaded) eye sees them.

So do what you can to be “on vacation” every day. Put your mind to good use. It is something too beautiful to go to waste.

Next: Running for Your Life: Heel, Runner

Running for Your Life: Brief History of Tomorrow

So there’s this article in the London Review of Books (July 13) about the latest book by the Israeli historian Yuval Harari that carries the title above.

I underlined a few things that, well, appeared sound but utterly frightening, ie:

• Humanity’s future is in the hands of technical experts – in biotech, artificial intelligence, cognitive and computer science.

• Algorithms embedded in silicon and metal will replace algorithms embedded in flesh, and remember, we have no immortal soul; there is no essential human “self,” and our thoughts and emotions are the product of electrochemical impulses which can, in principle, be modeled by these formal problem-solving rules we call algorithms.

• In the argot of Silicon Valley, now-useless human beings are just “meat puppets.”

• Harari doesn’t go so far as to imagine the superhumans accepting the logic of the Final Solution. (But) what will (regular folks) do all day? Will they discover the joys of art? Probably not: it’s more likely that the “useless masses” will find whatever satisfaction they can in shopping, drugs, computer games and the thrill of virtual reality, which will “provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the drab reality outside.”

Man, this kind of outlook has me jonesing for the latest from the climate futurists …

Next: Running for Your Life: On Vacation

Running for Your Life: Schooling Trump

Looking for an angle on the best way of handling Trump? Look north. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s got the right idea.

Trudeau started by outmatching Trump during the president’s bully handshake encounter, then he played the pal card by giving him the tools to gracefully accept a change in a negotiating position.

That’s how you handle a bully, of course. You coax him, do your best Jiminy Cricket imitation, as in, “Here’s how you should think about this, sir” kinda thing, and then allow him (the bully) to take credit for the idea.

Here’s how Justin puts in a recent cover piece in Bloomberg Businessweek:

“I’ve learned that (Trump) listens. He is a little bit unlike many politicians. That might be enough. Leave that sentence right there. As politicians, we’re very, very much trained to say something and stick with it.

Whereas (Trump) has shown that if he says one thing and then actually hears good counterarguments or good reasons why he should shift his position, he will take a different position, if it’s a better one, if the arguments win him over.

There’s a challenge in that for electors. But there’s also an opportunity for people who engage with him to try and work to achieve a beneficial outcome.”

Here’s a suggested daily political diet for the rest of the summer.

Read two stories about Trump, then one story about Trudeau.

Next, get to the beach and read a novel.

Next: Running for Your Life: On Vacation

Running for Your Life: All About Ice

Writer David Bromwich is ripping up the London Review of Books with a Trump article. I don’t buy a lot of what he’s selling in THE AGE OF DETESTING TRUMP http://bit.ly/2tNAIv8, but I do want to make a point of stressing his conclusion, ie:  

“Trump is the name of a cause and not just a person, and you can only fight him with another cause. The name of it might be climate change.”

With that, I give you this:

http://nyp.st/2tQCUk0

and, in a bid to established my ice credentials, this:

http://amzn.to/2vhN3pm

Next: Running for Your Life: On Vacation

Running for Your Life: The TOM post

I live hundreds of miles away from Canoe Lake, but I am heeding its call this month.

Canoe Lake, in Algonquin Park, marked the watery grave of one Tom Thomson (pictured on Facebook and Twitter with his painting, West Wind), an incomparable artist who came of age in my hometown of Owen Sound. He went missing on July 8, 1917, and his body – bleeding from its right ear, fishing wire coiled around an ankle – was found on July 17.

His life and the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death have long been a passion of mine. I am now working on a book about TOM, all caps, as he is branded at the 50-year-old Tom Thomson Art Gallery in Owen Sound. The idea of writing a letter to my hometown hero-legend has grown, from one to another to another …

In Canada, TOM tributes are flowing, as are feature articles http://bit.ly/2tFfobc. But the mystery of his death remains. In my book, I touch on some questions that have gone unanswered, exactly one hundred years since his passing.

At times during the most intense of my writing sessions, I allow the hubris to think that the result will bring an especial quiet to Canoe Lake, allowing the spirit of an amazing artist and singular Canadian soul to finally come to rest.

Next: Running for Your Life: On Vacation