Notes From A Bear's Journey

A Path Appears    The words are part of a quote from the Chinese writer, Lu Xan: “Hope is a path on the mountainside. At first there is no path. But then there are people passing that way. And there is a path.”  The words are also the title of the book by husband-wife writing team, Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.  Worldwide correspondents, they have won multiple Pulitzers and witnessed many cultures, seeing both the good and the bad of each and watching how quickly little things can make a difference, especially when it comes to giving, not only monetarily but of oneself by advocating or mentoring.  The subtitle of the book is Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity .    Their book is a good reminder of what the holidays bring out in us, how we begin to feel for others again if only because we are made aware of just how fortunate we are.  Certainly the appeals that flood our inboxes and mail begin to overwhelm us, something the authors mention as to why they undertook th

No Fear    My nephew is young and athletic, a bodysurfer moving steadily up the ladder to bigger and bigger waves.  At least, he was.  The other week, a wave grabbed his fins and ripped them off, first one and then the other, leaving him without the propulsion needed to either keep him ahead of the breaker or give him enough of a boost to pull out.  Surprisingly, a more experienced bodysurfer was right there, getting him away just in time and giving him a second chance as he saw what was about to happen.  His fins were the price, his sacrifice to the ocean, washed out and gone, never to be found ashore, as if the ocean was winking, the master teaching the student.    This experience almost mirrored my dealings with the ocean, my cockiness of youth and immortality almost challenging in taking advantage of the ocean, that is until the waves decided to teach me a lesson as well, pinning me to the bottom, then picking me up and tossing me "over the falls" time and time again.

Discussion & Reviews    The other day, I was at a local bookstore pitching my game and having a good conversation with the staff, when the owner passed by to show how authors access his website;  he happened to mention to one of his clerks to simply type in a sample author's name, say, Anthony Doerr (an author I recognized due to his highly praised book, All the Light We Cannot See ).  When I asked what he thought of the book, he replied that he and his staff thought the book was fantastic, to which I politely replied that I had a bit of trouble totally agreeing with the rave reviews, having finished the book and finding it not quite as jaw-dropping as described.  And boom, the sale of my game was dead in the water.  The discussion, however politely phrased, had (at least to my thinking) come to an end (as an aside, here's the review I wrote for my library of Doerr's book:  Okay, some of my favorite authors (Abraham Verghese & J.R. Moehringer), not to mention many

Eulogies    At this point in our lives (at least for many of us) we have listened to or actually spoken at many eulogies, often for those close to us.  The word comes from the Greek word for "praise," and surprisingly, a eulogy can even be given for a birthday or a retirement.  Wikipedia adds this about the word:  Eulogies are usually delivered by a family member or a close family friend in the case of a dead person.  For a living eulogy given in such cases as a retirement, a senior colleague could perhaps deliver it.  On occasions, eulogies are given to those who are severely ill or elderly in order to express words of love and gratitude before they pass away.  Eulogies should not be confused with elegies, which are poems written in tribute to the dead; nor with obituaries, which are published biographies recounting the lives of those who have recently died; nor with obsequies, which refer generally to the rituals surrounding funerals. Catholic priests are prohibited b

Reading Type    We all have our own style of reading, some of us reading much more quickly than others.  Both my wife and my brother can plow through a book in 2-3 days, and do this day after day.  As for me, my pace is a bit slower, taking about 10 days or so, spending about 15 minutes each night before dozing off (the days are saved for magazine articles).  And of course, there is the great divide, fiction or non-fiction;  and while I prefer the latter, I find some fiction particularly interesting, able to capture my imagination and send me swirling into an entirely imaginary world, be it one of this life or one totally different in time or space (Donna Tart's Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Goldfinch , was one of these).  But overall, with my slower, savoring pace of reading (and sometimes such books take me much, much longer, because I really don't want them to end), I tend to gravitate away from reading so quickly, even as I acknowledge that the amount of well-written m

Fracking the Capitol    The news that mineral and other exploration would be allowed in the largest federal forest in the East, the George Washington National Forest, was a bit shocking.  And while it's intimidating to delve through over 500 pages of the Environmental Impact Study, one area highlighted was the possible introduction of fracking and oil exploration in the park.    Fracking is a complex and complicated issue, at once giving those of us in the United States a semblance of energy independence but also hiding exactly what is going on in the process. This exemption was lightly labeled the Halliburton Loophole , the resounding successful measure passed by former Halliburton executive and former vice-President of the U.S., Dick Cheney.  With this law, exploration companies are exempt from disclosing what's in their pressurized fluid but also from what may happen should something go wrong.  But I'm getting ahead of myself...    First off, a caveat...again, this

Polar...Bearly?    Yesterday's news that a segment of the polar bear population had declined almost came as no surprise.  One seems to regularly read of the ice melting at the poles, new shipping lanes opening (China has already moved a shipload of steel through one polar shipping lane, signalling the pattern of things to come), new requests for more drilling of oil.  For the polar bears, however, this simply means longer distances to swim between ice flows, as well as less prey to catch for survival.  In one study, of 80 polar bear cubs born from 2004 to 2007, only 2 have survived.     Some of this is also being blamed on climate change.  Said Margaret Williams,  Managing Director of WWF’s Arctic Program , “Here are concrete numbers to show us that the impacts of climate change are happening now. We need to change course if we want to stop further habitat loss and ensure resilient wildlife populations, both in the Arctic and around the world.”    What's also adding

Passion and Purpose    Find your passion.  Find your purpose.  Those words, passion and purpose, seem to be appearing everywhere, as if soon the mega-corporations will pick them up and make them as insincere and meaningless as their letters to employees that usually ended with, "Thank you for all that you do," words that were marketed as the buzz words of the past years or so.  But today, there may be blossoming  a difference as people are finding their passion.  A quick survey among those with MBAs found that the percentage of people skipping the corporate route to found their own venture had jumped to nearly 10%, about a third higher than the numbers from the last decade.    Passion was the lead story in this month's Fast Company (the article was actually titled, Find Your Mission ) as well as in this month's More and Inc.  People who had decided to break off and do what they loved (and were succeeding) were featured and indeed, they were inspiring, giving th

Solid As A Rock?    Solid as a rock, yet often ignored.  The pillar of strength, yet often stepped on.  Made of earth from which it came, yet usually covered.  As ancient as Rome, yet still waiting to be fully discovered.  One speaks, of course, of concrete, something that has fascinated me since 1980 when I first began keeping notes on it, watching it evolve and being discovered in its different forms.  And admittedly, something I knew little about, despite it being almost everywhere.    Concrete is now so prevalent that it we have entire bridges made of it, bridges with spans taller than the Eiffel Tower (concrete is now used for more bridge building than any other material ), and is classically remembered as the material for the largest unreinforced dome in the world, now two thousand years old, the Pantheon in Rome.  Which is not so ironic since Rome led so many nations in innovation (one burial site uncovered by archeologists digging in Scotland found not gold but a Roman hoar

Our Beginnings...On A Comet?    Today marked something historic, something never accomplished, and something that may reveal how we all, including our planet earth, came to be.  Today, a probe landed on a comet.  Ten years in the making, eight years actively transmitting and two years staying in hibernation, this mission by the European Space Agency was summed up in one quick two-minute video (there are several videos but scroll down and watch the first two minutes of this particular webcast: First Go/NoGo 20:30 CET ).     Now one might think that this wasn't that spectacular an accomplishment, after all, we've regularly sent missions to the moon, docked with the International Space Station and even landed a probe on Mars.  But here's what the engineers that calculated this mission faced...get to a small ice ball (the comet is small, only about the size of Manhattan at a little over two miles in length), one irregularly shaped (looks almost like an old dumbbell with a

Giving...giving well    The holiday season is around the corner (gasp, I'm getting worse than Costco and the stores...whatever happened to Thanksgiving?  Today's stores seem to jump from summer to a quick blip to Halloween and then bam, the Christmas push, in September no less!) and with the holidays come the spirit of giving, not only gifts to friends and relatives but to those we don't even know.  And of course, the surge of mail coming from so many charities that want and likely need your donations...but how to sort through them all?     One option worth considering is a site called GiveWell .  Type in your charity and you'll likely be disappointed.  And you might feel just as Tom Rutledge did when he wrote a post on giving :  Before GiveWell, I had accumulated a lot of bad feelings related to giving.  My charitable activities had consisted of the usual, in the usual categories: alumni funds, causes that friends solicited for, affinity groups I was somehow par

Walls Up, Walls Down     Time seems to move by so quickly.  Three years ago came the nuclear disaster at Fukushima (Japan just announced that it will reopen 2 reactors in the southern part of the country); and today marks the 25th anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall.  Memory plays tricks on us, our memories vivid with watching the jubilant people with hammers and bars, reaching out to the hands of those in the eastern side, then big chunks of the wall actually crumbling down.  A quarter of a century melting into a time not long ago.     We, as humans, have a long history with walls, some built to keep people out, some built to keep people in.  Hadrian's wall, the Great Wall of China, the walls bordering Mexico, the walls separating the West Bank in Israel (that particular wall just passed its 12th anniversary)...each marking our efforts to build homes, forts and prisons.  In Bill Bryson's book Home , he talks of the first wall in a home being the one that sep

A Coming Divide?    It is a bit ironic that in a nation that practices and tries to spread democracy throughout the world, the United States once again had one of the lowest voter turnouts on record (in some states such as Nevada, it was the lowest in its history)...just over 30% of its citizens voted.  And while political pundits cheered and moaned on both sides, the domination of Congress by one party was merely history repeating its usual pattern of the final years of a two-term president.  Republican or Democrat, the Congress in the U.S. seems to regularly fall to the opposing party in the sixth year.    What was ironic in the election were the issues that consistently faired poorly when introduced at the federal level, passed on the state level.  Minimum wage increases , a ban on wolf eradication/hunting, stopping Monsanto from introducing GMO products , stopping fracking permits ...all passed on different state ballots.  This was a mixed message for the newly elected leaders

Emotional Highs...and Lows    The article began by telling about Staten Island in New York, its high prescription drug use among its young, its relatively easy access to pills and heroin (New York itself is the heroin capital of the U.S.), its high rate of overdoses and with it, its high rate of overdose deaths.  Then the entry of another opioid, an antagonistic one and so labeled, a "narcotic antagonist" called Narcan .    Now available in a nasal spray, Narcan can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose, and does so almost instantly.  Here's one description from the article in The New Yorker, a former "junkie" who overdosed telling about her treatment with naloxone (the opioid part of Narcan):  ...all I remember is waking up and feeling so horrible that I thought the people I was with were being mean to me.  I didn't thank anybody for saving me--I was only angry and upset that they had made me feel like this.  The withdrawal came on immediately and i

Good and Bad    Last night, watching the BBC drama Silk , I was reminded of the almost daily choices we face when traveling through life.  The shows deals with one legal firm and its issuing of cases to its barristers; sometimes this means taking on cases of being defender or prosecutor or sometimes both, all within its offices.  For the lead character, Martha, this doesn't sit well for while she is good at her job (and usually prevails), her conscience is right...but wrong, if that makes sense.  She'll defend the law and do so accurately; but as she finds out, that sometimes means hurting the innocent party and letting the guilty party go.    So often, this scenario can follow us into the real world.  Something as simple as being undercharged for an item or nicking the car next to you when your door swings open;  do you return or leave a note to correct the mistake?  Or is it "small enough" to justify simply leaving?  And if so, at what point do you return or le