How kindness relates to saving the earth.

Saving the earth.

OK, let's agree the earth is heating up and it's making all sorts of changes throughout the world. Even now, some Pacific islanders are looking for a new place to call home. Refugees suffer, and the more refugees, the rate of suffering increases exponentially as countries' ability to manage the situation is strained to their limits. Conditions around the world right now with immigration are obviously strained (the US just halved it's annual cap of refugees). The faster the climate changes, the faster people will have to adjust to the new conditions, and again, the more people who have to remake their lives in less time, the more pain. Have you ever been forced out of your house because of flooding or fire? Yeah. Major suffering.

As a participant in the modern carbon-intensive lifestyle, every contribution I make to the tonnage of carbon dioxide we add to the atmosphere adds the future suffering of humanity. Kindness demands an effort to reduce my contribution to the future suffering of humanity. Even if I can prevent just a few families from having to endure the excruciating undertaking of uprooting and finding somewhere else in the world that might take me in, my efforts will provide some succor.  Once I know this, inaction is turning my back on the welfare of my fellow human. 

If You're Depressed and Want To Be Better...

If you're honestly interested in mental health and you're suffering, you owe it to yourself to get settled first:

1. Eliminate processed food, extra sugar, excess nicotine/ caffiene, alcohol. Eat more real food: fruit and cream for your sweet tooth, your favorite veggies, cutting down on meat but enjoying your food. You can indulge on occasion, but you know that healthy diets can have a great effect on brain chemistry.

2. Exercise regularly and rigorously. Start by walking, dancing, a little tennis. Mix it up. Yoga, Zumba, whatever. Social activities are even better, but sometimes just out on your own, and being in nature is a proven mood lifter for many.  Some regular exercise is better than none, but if you can bring yourself to greater than a half hour 4 or more times per week, the effects really start to make a difference.

3. Regular and healthy sleep. Eliminate electronics in the bedroom, keep a regular routine, make your bedroom a healthy sanctuary reserved for sleep. Reading, TV and internet in the other room.

4. Gardening, tending plants, being out there working with your hands. If that doesn't work with your housing situation, a neighborhood garden or even terrariums or a fish tank can provide one more thing to center your soul for just a minute.

5. Other handwork done deliberately and with a meditative spirit also has positive effects. Making music, listening to positive music (not necessarily high tempo or motivating, but any music that just makes you feel good is fine).

6. Socializing with people and keeping the conversation on topics of interest, ask about THEM, let them talk about themselves, care about them and listen like a friend. Share positive events. Talk about things you're doing to improve your mood. Do things that get you out of your normal zone, geographically and mentally. Go somewhere, see something, experience different things (movies, museums, concerts, parks, etc.)

6. a. Volunteering in a forum that allows you to directly help others. Being part of making the world a better place is often very affirming and brings deep, personal satisfaction. The collateral benefit is you're being a ray of light for someone so who cares how you feel anyway. The world and even your life is bigger than you. Get over it.

7. Meditation itself can be a powerful mental exercise for several reasons. First, it calms your mind during the act. Second, it increases your ability to bring your mind to a calm state when you get stressed, anxious, stressed.

7. b. Spiritual enrichment, whether in community or personal study or prayer, can connect you to ideas bigger than you and provide a bedrock of comfort that other things sometimes can't.

8. Professional therapy: The above may be enough collectively to turn things around. All of them take sustained practice and someone in a sever depressive state may be unable to motivate themselves enough to start or sustain any of them at all. But with the help of a professional depression therapist, your odds are much better as they learn the dynamics of your individual complexes contributing to your condition.  

9.  If you've done all the above, medication or other medical processes/ procedures (like electro/magnetic brain stimulation) may very well be your best course of action. There are some very promising treatments like low dose MDMA or LSD that my provide a much better prognosis and fewer side effects than the current norms of SSRIs.

Of course if that sounds like too much, do a few of them. You never know which one will help you past a tipping point. And of course, if you're already married to your identity as a depressed person, than you'll find an excuse to sabotage or avoid any real effort anyway. I hope you can last long enough to get over that particular hump.

Economic Election Predictions

I'm going to go out on a limb and make some predictions about the next election. Trump will do his best to manipulate his treatment of China, Mexico & Canada, and Europe and Japan (all out big trading partners) to provide economic relief leading up to the 2020 election. He will keep things suppressed using various tariffs, agreements, etc. as he's doing now. And then in measured intervals as the presidential election begins his crescendo, he will suddenly disclose some detail that makes him remove some tariffs here and there, to finalize an agreement, a precision tweet about how the Fed is coming around and praise their latest public statements or action, tweak the latest adjustments to taxes (based on the economic demography of some targeted electoral district)... I'm sure you can imagine 10 clever machinations he could implement in time for the next election. And the markets will respond as you'd expect. And his supporters will extol his genius. But just like North Korea -- when you create a false crisis and then "fix it" -- you can't legitimately take credit for being awesome. But legitimate is not something Trump has ever really been concerned with. I mean, really. Who's to say what legitimate even means? Right?

Service

tl;dr

I didn't join out of altruism. I didn't sign up to feel patriotic or fulfill my sense of obligation or duty to my country. I did it so I would have something to write about, writing being my aspiration at the time. What better to experience than being an astronaut. Had I stayed the course (and succeeded), I'd be one now, training for an ISS mission or some future mission to Mars and, with a little more luck, be a veteran of space.

Around the end of flight school, it was clear that the complete dedication and self discipline I would need to have a chance at astronaut wasn't a part of my repertoire. I was too hooked on books, crossword puzzles, and other of life's shiny baubles. Being in the Navy was fun and satisfying, though. I liked being part of the machine, being at the tip of the sword, and I loved flying. and seeing the world on my bike when we'd hit some exotic port. But I also loved my family, and had I wanted to stay in another 10 years to retire, I would have had to miss even more of my kids' life,. Oh, and keeping the marriage together was hard enough without the 6-month separations. If I'd tried to stay competitive in as a Navy pilot, I would have had to continue to take more arduous assignments away from home, and with the Clinton military roll-backs, a generous early-out bonus helped make the decision. Plus, by that time, I'd already decided what I wanted to work on for the next phase of life. 

It was Reagan's Secretary of Education who wrote convincingly that education mattered, and I agreed. And with all the alarmist rhetoric about the critical state of education in America, I thought I could bring my organizational management and leadership skills to contribute.  I let the Navy help pay for my masters in Ed. Admin and jumped ship to civilian life. The original plan was to spend 5 years in the corporate world, learn what they knew about educating people, build up a little cash, and then become an educator. It started out great working with CSC (now merged with HP's Enterprise division to become DXC Technology) for a couple years until 9/11 caused a couple rounds of layoffs in which my division was eventually cut. I could have stayed in the industry but due to a nice series of unlikely events, I used that opportunity to take the plunge into education.