sentience as burden....i see it as relative to responsibility, in that we can choose to remain dumb, rejecting mental effort, eschewing challenge, and slip-slide along in a sort of falsely merry mediocrity, not asking ourselves hard questions, because we sense that the answers may cause us to face the consequences of our actions without the comforting embrace of oh-so-cozy denial we have to wrap ourselves in, in order to stave off...

the breakdown of the very premises we've built our houses of cards on...

or...

perhaps you can find joy through appropriate responsibility, and most importantly perhaps, by listening to yourself, as others hear you, but also to the quietest voice, the one that whispers deep in the nights' silences, when all the others have faded away.

and if that listening makes you take a road where your actions are more-of-a-piece with your beliefs, then there's a humble joy in that, being part of some positive change, starting small, and then scaling up to test the principles at higher levels.

gradually learning to believe your own senses, to reclaim them from bondage, (no, not that kind!), trusting your intuition in matters of small consequence, then upping the ante till whatever model you're developing reveals its flaws, and you can hone and tweak it some more, before signing up for the next chunk.

baby steps, frequently backwards when necessary, keep you on firmer ground than seven-league strides off the abyss.

into the breach, my friends!

little things can have huge effects, cumulatively, and trying to affect reality more than you have the experience to dare to, is hubris...

if there's anything millenial we coulf afford to learn from our transitory little blip inhabiting this planetary crust, it's surely to distrust grandiosity, the root precursor of all evil...

to nip that in the bud, children need to see plenty of unaffected, pleasureable, positive communication between adults in a relatively stable environment.

not surprising there are so many damaged souls, then, huh?

we start pumping kids' egos, to compensate for our own sense of failure, so early. it's primal, and i've seen it in many cultures foreign to home, wherever that was!

i think it starts with finding something transcendent in the tawdry, and working that groove, till it spreads.

if you keep referring to source as you know it, it helps keep on course, though with time that original philosophy might mutate, the fact that you took the time and trouble to establish that lifeline, somehow gives you backbone to carry more weight, and if you keep rejecting the seductions of people who enjoy to see if they can knock you off purpose, nothing personal, just to see if they can, you can learn a lot about patterns of human psychology, the dynamics of cause and effect...

it keeps coming back to the miracle of birth...how we come in so fresh and clean and beautiful, vessels that are then filled with local versions of the zeitgeist, seeds of love and hate that sprout 30 years later, decades-old strife that has bloodily riven tribes for vendetta'd generations patiently intoned to the sleeping child, old superstitions chanted in 'good faith', before the family meal, to be like talismans, st. christopher medallions to help across the river.

identity recapitulating, stuck in a time-eddy.

late night rambling, sorry, beside the builders are showing up in 5 hours.

ET gets more addictive, but the good news is that...ET gets better, so forswearing it for chores gives more of a virtuous glow.

must. sleeeep.

what hast thou wrought here jerome?

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty