morality

February 15, 2026

A Few Added Words on the Subject of Living

For some, the Christian Bible is enough, or the Koran, or the Shreemad Bhagavad Gita. Include the Torah, the Talmud, and the Agamas. Perhaps all the guidance and wisdom in the world is to be found amid them and the other holy books.

But I suspect that the legendary philosophers of history might have a useful and additional word or two, men like Seneca, Socrates, and Spinoza. I would add several novelists, including British writers Julian Barnes and Virginia Wolff.

What is more, sometimes your mom or dad, or your third-grade teacher, offers enlightenment.

If truth is present in any of those possibilities, there also should be value in a few words not always or easily found among the sometimes contradictory messages that sacred books, among others, send our way.

Here are a few for you to accept or ignore.

Life is hard, but it offers a balm not found in a tube of calamine lotion at the pharmacy. It is discovering something or someone to love. The conventional wisdom suggests you must find a lover, but there are many others. A friend, a sibling, your parents, or a pet can offer affection and gratitude in receiving it.

More?

I have an old buddy who enjoys and even treasures his work and might win the Nobel Prize someday. I have cheered athletes who are in love with the game they play. I’ve also run into more than a few self-involved folks. On occasion, they are self-sufficient in the practice of their genius.

Think about writers, artists, sculptors, musicians, and composers. Add to the list, if you like, women and men who seek more than entertainment in the arts, entranced in discoveries of intensity, joy, and moments of ecstasy. If you’re lucky, you can find more than a single such passion.

The point is to be attached to, devoted to, involved in, and touched by what you love.

And, if you are thoughtful, you can return the endearment and the attention. You give back to the game, whether it’s a contest, a person, the adoration of Mozart, or the game of life.

Erin, of the Existential Ergonomics blog, wrote a wonderful post the other day that speaks to those who recognize that life and full reign over your existence are in opposition, much as we wish otherwise:

I am learning the difficult grace of release. I once believed I could map every turn of this story, determine when and how love would appear. But life, patient and persistent, keeps prying my fingers open.

Each time I loosen my hold—on plans, on control, on what I thought I needed—something softer finds its way in. I’m beginning to see that undoing isn’t failure; it’s invitation. It’s the space where breath returns, where grace has room to enter and rebuild.

My response to her statement was this:

Well said, wise, and beautifully expressed, Erin. We never have full control, but for seconds or days at a time, and even that is an illusion. These are the terms on a contract we never signed. Acceptance and managing the cracks that form in our painting is the art we must keep creating—to find love in the cracks.

I should have added more than shared adoration to what saves us, including whatever is useful and whatever can compensate for the blows of fate; if they can.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking feature of our lifelong but imperfect bargain is the loss of people. Then we learn to grieve and endure, cherishing their memory, and desiring a reunion in the afterlife. It is an outcome that is part inclination, belief, and hope, as well as a certainty in select minds and hearts.

A written guarantee? Hard to find on any day or on eBay, but hope often takes its place.

We live in a difficult time. Life moves faster and faster; lasting work is uncertain; residences double as offices where a screen and a phone substitute for a meeting place, a handshake, a kiss, and a hug. Meanwhile, skin hunger grows like ivy on the wall.

George Orwell, a visionary author, described our dilemma as he contemplated it more than 75 years ago:

All we have done is to advance to a point at which we could make a real change in human life, but we shall not do it without the recognition that common decency is necessary.

Surely decency is a step toward love. To love one’s neighbor and the stranger. To provide for the starving and homeless. To call the other by their name, with honor. To recognize our shared humanity.

And not to take arms, but to hold the other in our arms and let her know that she matters.

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The first image is Meanna. It is an album cover from Tales of Loneliness, sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Below it is An Elephant at Sunset in Amboseli, Kenya, 2024, by the superb photographer, Laura Hedien, presented with her kind permission: Laura Hedien Official Website.

February 1, 2026

Memories of a Grieving Spouse

What happens when things end, especially relationships? This usually refers to breakups that, by definition, shatter a once precious connection. Think of a chasm and a broken heart at its bottom.

Julian Barnes knows what loss feels like. His wife of 30 years, Pat Kavenaugh, died in 2008 from an aggressive form of brain cancer. There were 37 days between her diagnosis and her death.

The author found his wife’s approach to her demise both stoic and graceful, “never angry or cross.”

The writer described the depression that followed in a recent interview with Terry Gross on “Fresh Air.”

It was like being caught in an avelanch. Every day it became worse. It was the most appauling thing that happened in my life and the blackest, the thing that deprived you of hope and balance. It took me years to get over it.

Barnes recalled that he considered killing himself if the grief didn’t stop. A few weeks after his wife’s passing, he found himself thinking of taking his life as he walked on a familiar path home.

I looked across the curb on the other side of the road … and I thought I can kill myself … that’s permissible. It’s not unforgiveble in my morality. I’m extremely unhappy, I’m bereft, though I have many friends. And I think I said, or a friend said to me: give it two years and, ok, I’ll give it two years.

But before that two year period elapsed I discovered why I couldn’t kill myself: I wasn’t allowed to kill myself. And that’s because I was the best rememberer of my wife. I knew her and I had celebrated her in all her forms and all her nature, and I had loved her deeply. And I had realized that if I had killed myself then, in a way, I’d be killing her, too.

I’d be killing the best memories of her, they would disappear from the world, and I wouldn’t allow myself to do that. And at that point (my thought of killing myself) just turned on its head and I knew I would have to live with the grief a long, long time, but I didn’t think an answer to the grief was killing myself.

The writer has never believed in God, nor does he hold the idea of being reunited with his wife in heaven. His view of human existence is that “life is not a short walk across an open field. There is always something waiting for you, coming out of a hedgerow at you.” His writing has long dealt with endings.

Mr. Barnes continues to write and is a much-celebrated, award-winning, prolific author.

Six years ago, however, he was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer. It is treatable and, with continued daily medication, he is not likely to die from this condition.

His continuation of life, as he describes it, is a form of responsibility. He did not want the thoughts and stories and fullness of his wife to vanish because of his own suicide. Nor, it seems, to dispense with his meaningful affection for her and remembrance of her.

Were we to follow his example, we would all keep photos and movies, enjoy mentioning the departed with those we know, and share our memories. I have friends who have written their own biographies using StoryWorth to leave an account of their lives for those who care about them.

Indeed, I have completed such a memoir myself, including advice that it will be more than proper for them to laugh about me once I am gone.

We don’t want to be forgotten, do we?

But while we live, we should “live” with all the strength, joy, and kindness we can muster, as demonstrated by Julian Barnes getting married again a few months ago, 17 years after his loss of Pat Kavanaugh.

What a marvelous thing it must have been for him to marry again, at 80.

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The first photo is of Julian Barnes at Headred, 2018, Estonia. It was sourced from Wikimedia Commons and is the work of WanderingTrad. Next comes a picture of Pat Kavanagh, an image from the Evening Standard. Finally, Barnes, with his second wife, Rachel Cugnoni, sourced from the Telegraph.

December 14, 2025

Thinking About Indifference

At times, I am at a loss for words. Yesterday, listening to a speech about indifference, for example.

We live in a complicated world. We are all alone in the sense that neither we nor anyone else can get inside the mind and emotions of our companions, parents, strangers, or children. Indeed, one of the first impossibly puzzling thoughts I had in my childhood years was this:

Why am I me?

I recognized that my consciousness was accessible only to myself. Moreover, I wondered why my private ideas and overall awareness were planted solely in my brain and body. Why not in someone else’s being, I asked.

My question for today is different but related. Our separateness guarantees an imperfect grasp of others and the impossibility of being as easily touched by their sufferings as we are by our own. Of course, exceptions exist, as when our children are in pain, but it is not hard for some to look away from others. Indeed, it can be automatic, a defense mechanism that makes the world tolerable.

To look, to see, to recognize leads to searching one’s conscience and a question. Do I have a responsibility to help?

I met only one person in my long clinical practice who lacked the capacity for indifference to others’ distress. She was a bright, young teenage woman whose parents brought her to my office.

This girl could not watch television news without being tormented by human tragedy. It was unbearable, and her heartbreak was beyond her mother and father’s understanding and my own.

The most worthwhile discussion of indifference I have ever encountered was not offered by another mental health professional, but someone who had experienced it. Here is an excerpt from a speech he gave on April 12, 1999. A video of the speech prompted this essay:

What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means “no difference.” A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil. What are its courses and inescapable consequences? Is it a philosophy? Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one’s sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals?

Of course, indifference can be tempting (and) more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor is of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the Other to an abstraction.

In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can, at times, be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony. One does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred, at times, may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it.

Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor —never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees — not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own.

Thank you if you are still with me, reading this, pondering, and feeling this. If you live in the United States, I am sure you are aware of the magnetic pull of indifference, the offer of escape from the endless news stories about poverty, cruelty, and unfairness.

I am sure you are aware of people taken into custody on the street, the reported lack of due process, and the 60,000 to 65,000 people said to be in ICE detention.

It is enough to cause some who are not victims to throw away their cell phones, computers, TV sets, and radios.

It is enough to enter a fantasy world of everyday life, or refuse to discuss anything political, day or night.

The man who wrote the words quoted above was Elie Wiesel, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. His entire speech is below. He hoped his audience would reflect on a topic called “The Perils of Indifference.”

The last word he utters is “hope.”

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The top photograph is called “Smokey World,” a 1959 work by Fan Ho. Next comes his “Triple Play.” The final image is “As Evening Hurries ” from 1955.

May 18, 2025

Why the Young Dismiss the Old

I am a Boomer born at the front end of the post-war population explosion. My mom, Jeanette, was delighted that Milt Stein returned alive from the killing fields of Europe, crossing the ocean to create me–the soon-to-bloom child they would plant in the world.

Dad was overjoyed to reunite with the beauty he married in 1940, and proud of his newborn son. I’m told it was a joyous scene, and the photos agree.

In the past, old age, which I have acquired by accepting the honesty of the clocks, calendars, and mirrors, required formal respect. The Ten Commandments insist on honoring your father and mother.

Something has changed.

Setting aside the mess Boomers handed humanity, I’d like to answer a critical question: What else accounts for the tendency to dismiss the accumulated experience, knowledge, and guidance of many of the “ancient ones” still around?

Let’s consider six causes of the dismissal of oldster members of the psychedelic era and eight reasons why paying attention to those oldies might be helpful.

1. It is difficult, if not impossible, for a vigorous and vital human of recent vintage to think he will achieve decrepitude. I recall my mother, looking into the mirror in midlife, saying out loud, “When did this happen?” The shape of those who resemble creatures from another planet contributes to believing their opinions pertain to life on Mars.

2. The unfashionable dress, forgotten hairstyles, and limited movement of the now-aged “peace and love” crowd don’t fit well in a world spinning like a top. Since some of us care less about technological trends than is customary, our disinterest reinforces the notion that we are missing the point. Nor do the still-breathing antiques sport earbuds, a practice that will enrich audiologists for years to come.

We are perceived as creatures from outer space or as being born before smart phones, passenger jet planes, computer games, AI, and super cool sneakers.

Yup.

3. We lived before the words “authenticity” and “my truth,” as well as freedom from pretense became mandatory. Indeed, pretense and opportunity were most of what we had going for us. We tried to “fake it to make it.” A student named Jack Weinberg at the University of California, Berkeley, coined the phrase “Don’t trust anyone over 30” during the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s. The sixties generation was a skeptical bunch, except when getting high.

4. Relative youth (let’s say before 40) brings a robust and necessary sense of competence and flexibility. Work now demands more time and expects more self-created ways to make money.

By contrast, the retired crowd lived a slower and less demanding life, and some had lifelong employment in the same place. The University of Illinois, my state college, charged about $100 per quarter. Yes, we emerged in a better moment, but only if our color was white.

5. At a young age, people tend to think they are smart enough to avoid the mistakes made by their elders. Older adults have erred and have the memories to prove it. Their juniors believe they are smarter and claim Elvis is dead to persuade the disbelievers.

Hmm.

The whippersnappers do not think our accumulated knowledge fits the current century. They might be right.

6. My generation includes several blowhards I could name. They never listen but talk from atop a pedestal made for a king.

Now for the rebuttal. Here are eight reasons to listen to what a thoughtful older individual might say:

1. The wise of any age realize that much of life’s significance is a permanent part of the human condition, rather than true of one epoch or another. Think of the need to survive, the pursuit of status, the wish for happiness, the advantage of developing courage, the desire for love, the emptiness of greed, the danger of moral compromise, and the inevitability of aging, loss, change, and death.

Many things cannot be learned without living them. Still, those who survived the ladder up offer awareness of the trip to those who find themselves a few rungs down.

2. Much of what passes for essential reading these days focuses on advancing oneself in the vocational sector, finding love, or psychological self-healing. Ancient philosophers and writers of classic literature can assist those imprisoned by the algorithm-driven, simple answers a newsfeed offers.

With the decline of the humanities in some of the finest universities, the young have missed studying what many of history’s towering and most admired figures learned from such sources. Homer, Immanuel Kant, Plato, and George Eliot (a woman) live in books one does well to discover.

3. Hearing about your parents’ lives is essential to understanding them. What did they live through? They won’t always be around to tell you.

4. A wise person past his prime will listen and ask questions to help you find your answers. A talented therapist does this. And yes, I have revealed some self-flattery here, and some truth.

5. You will live several lives. If you grow, your perspective on yourself, the world, relationships, youth, love, age, money, values, and more will shift by age 50. What is in store for you is the domain of those ahead of you in this process.

6. A lucky soul does not encounter Fate’s hand early in life and believes he is the captain of his unsinkable ship: self-made and invulnerable.

Scholars once spoke, wrote, and thought of destiny as something outside themselves. They believed Fate and the gods had control they lacked, permitting man only the necessity of adapting to it.

Older individuals sustained encounters between themselves and overwhelming, inexplicable forces. There is value in talking to those who have battled such powers.

7. Most of us, of whatever age, live without realizing “The roof that keeps out the rain also blocks out the sun.”* A man is well-served the sooner he grapples with the tendency to avert his eyes from what is uncomfortable to ponder. This, too, reveals itself in uncovering the choices made in a well-lived and long life.

8. Recognizing the speed of time and feeling (not just knowing) one’s mortal condition will enable you to use your time better. The old have lost friends and loved ones, and cannot deny the acceleration of these blows.

If you doubt you are in transit, peer at the old. They hear the clock, but also remember the early, quieter, more patient procession of the hours. Their awareness has increased, and some will tell you they have regrets you would do well to avoid.

You can take the last section as depressing or recognize its truth and the opportunity it offers to help one lead the fullest, most satisfying life possible. 

Here’s hoping you do. Here’s hoping we all do.

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The top image is Marina Karaevangelou’s Megabalanus Coccopoma, the titan acorn barnacle, a tropical species first described by Charles Darwin in 1854. It is followed by the Dalai Lama, as photographed by Christopher in 2010. Finally, Oedipus Questioning the Seer Tiresias, the 1580 painting of Alexander Allori. All of these are sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

*The quotation is from André Gide’s Paludes.

January 5, 2025

Well-lived Words in a Time of Uncertainty

A man you have never heard of should be heard about. His name was William Sloane Coffin, Jr.  (1924 — 2006), longtime Chaplain at Yale University. He also lived in a time of uncertainty and did his part to create “good trouble,” as Congressman John Lewis called his own effort to improve the world.

You needn’t be religious to appreciate either man, though they both were devout.

Coffin’s many words demonstrate the scope of his thought and commitment to justice. Coffin’s dedication to living out his credo might well rank him among the few of us who are both great and good.

Those words touch on truth, love, taking a stand, intimacy, race, war, justice, poverty, faith, anger, fear, homophobia, forgiveness, and hope. I have selected 33 quotations below, along with three brief videos.

You can find his impressive Wikipedia biography here. Keep in mind that he died almost three years before Barack Obama became President.

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  • The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.
  • Diversity may be the hardest thing for a society to live with, and perhaps the most dangerous thing for a society to be without.
  • Anybody who takes a stand is going to be wrong sometimes, but he who never takes a stand is always wrong.
  • Prophets from Amos and Isaiah to Gandhi and King have shown how frequently compassion demands confrontation. Love without criticism is a kind of betrayal. Lying is done with silence as well as with words.
  • I am reminded of all the undergraduates I knew and loved, many now crowding sixty, even seventy. Some of them have aged like vintage wine, heeding Albert Camus’s wisdom: ‘To grow old is to pass from passion to compassion.’
  • A few of them, however, looking back on the springtime of their lives, say, ‘Ah, those were the days!’ — and the worst of it is, they’re right! It was not the days, I suspect, but they who used to be better!
  • Fear destroys intimacy. It distances us from each other; or makes us cling to each other, which is the death of freedom…. Only love can create intimacy, and freedom too, for when all hearts are one, nothing else has to be one–neither clothes nor age; neither sex nor sexual preference; race nor mind-set.
  • Love is to make us more human, and that demands that we care so much for each other that we have not to be nice but to be honest. We have to be honest, for most real faults are hidden and therefore demand an outside revealer.
  • The consequences of the past are always with us, and half the hostilities tearing the world apart could be resolved today were we to allow the forgiveness of sins to alter these consequences…. if we were to say of ourselves, ‘The hostility stops here.’
  • No sermon on love can fail to mention love’s most difficult problem in our time–how to find effective ways to alleviate the massive suffering of humanity at home and abroad. What we need to realize is that to love effectively we must act collectively…
  • There are two ways to be powerful. One is to seek and acquire power, the other is not to need it. There are also two ways to be rich. One is to gain riches, and the other is not to need them.
  • Remember, young people, even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.

And more …

  • The banality of guilt is that it is such a convenient substitute for responsibility. It’s so much easier to beat your breast than to stick your neck out.
  • Socrates had it wrong: it is not the unexamined (life) but finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living.
  • You have to unlearn as well as learn, to clear away the weeds and thickets in order to see more clearly the various paths ahead.
  • Over the years I have been convinced that the more important question is not who believes in God, but in whom does God believe? Rather than claim God for our side, it’s better to wonder whether we are on God’s side. Faith is being grasped by the power of love, and there are many atheists with ‘believing’ hearts — the part of us that should be religious if you can offer only one.
  • Hope is a state of mind independent of the state of the world. If you heart’s full of hope, you can be presistent when you can’t be optimistic. You can keep the faith despite the evidence, knowing that only in so doing has the evidence any chance of changing. So while I am not optimistic, I’m always very hopeful.
  • Christians have to listen to the world as well as to the Word – to science, to history, to which reason and our own experience tell us. We do not honor the higher truth we find in Christ by ignoring truths found elsewhere.
  • For example, I don’t see how we can proclaim allegiance to the Risen Lord and remain indifferent to our government’s [and the world’s] intention not to abolish nuclear weapons. Or how can we think that the Risen Lord would applaud an economic system that reverses the priorities of Mary’s Magnificat – filling the rich with good things and sending the poor away empty? (Almost one American child in four lives below the poverty line, and one in three children of the world exist in terribly horrible poverty.)
  • To show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving.
  • Few of us are truly evil; the trouble is, most of us mean well — feebly. We are just not serious. We carry around justice, love, and peace in our shopping carts, but along with a lot of other things that make for injustice, hatred, and war. Churches in our day are a bit like families: they tend to be havens in a heartless world, but they reinforce that world by caring more for its victims than by challenging its assumptions.
  • Love measures our stature: the more we love, the bigger we are. There is no smaller package in all the world than that of a man all wrapped up in himself.
  • In reality, there are no biblical literalists, only selective literalists. By abolishing slavery and ordaining women, millions of Protestants have gone far beyond biblical literalism. It’s time we did the same for homophobia.

And the last group …

  • Every time people see the innocent suffering, and lift their eyes to heaven and say, ‘God, how could you let this happen?’ it’s well to remember that exactly at that moment God is asking exactly the same question of us:  ‘How could you let this happen?’
  • People in high places make me really angry — the way that (some) corporations are now behaving, the way the United States government is behaving. What makes me angry is that they are so callous, really callous. When you see uncaring people in high places, everybody should be mad as hell.
  • Self-righteousness destroys our capacity for self-criticism. It makes it very hard to be humble, and it destroys the sense of oneness all human beings should have, one with another.
  • My understanding of Christianity is that it underlies all progressive moves to implement more justice, to get a higher degree of peace in the world. The impulse to love God and neighbor, that impulse is at the heart of Judaism, Islam, Christianity (and the other religions of the world). God is not confined to Christians.
  • I am not a pacifist. About the use of force I think we should be ambivalent — the dilemmas are real. All we can say for sure is that while force may be necessary, what is wrong — always wrong — is the desire to use it. It is hard to get even with violent people (especially terrorists). What is easy is to get more and more like them. ‘The warhorse is a vain hope for victory, and by its great might it cannot save.’ (Psalm 33) War is a coward’s escape from the problems of peace.
  • President Bush rightly spoke of an ‘axis of evil’ but it is not Iran, Iraq and North Korea. A far more dangerous trio would be: environmental degradation, pandemic poverty, and a world awash with weapons. Far beyond individuals, communities and nations, the world itself is on the brink of destruction. If we were serious, with the other nations, to engage the war on poverty around the world, that would stem the flow of recruits to the ranks of terrorists.
  • Every nation makes decisions based on self-interest and defends them on the basis of morality. In our time all it takes for evil to flourish is for a few good men to be a little wrong and have a great deal of power and for the vast majority of their fellow citizens to remain indifferent. The danger today is that we might become more concerned with defense than with (being a country) worth defending.
  • (We) can either follow (our) fears or be led by (our) values and (our) passions. All of this fear-mongering today (of immigrants, homosexuals, crime, and terrorists), I’m afraid, is quite deliberate because the more you can make people fear, the more a government can control you. The American people don’t feel a sense of personal accountability for what the nation should stand for. No one need be afraid of fear; only afraid that fear will stop him or her from doing what’s right.
  • (Yet, in the face of this), I remain hopeful. Hope needs to be understood as a reflection of the state of your soul, not as reflection of the circumstances that surround your days. Hope is not the equivalent of optimism. The opposite of hope is not pessimism, but despair. Hope is about keeping the faith despite the evidence so that the evidence has a chance of changing.
  • There never was a night or a problem that could defeat sunrise or hope!