SERIOUS GRAVITY (A SANITY PRIMER)

"How do things go wrong? How do calamities arise? ...And disasters... accidents...  common everyday mishaps...plans going off course... increasing of our human misery... there's a real level of stress - uncertainty - even terror involved...It is the terror of not knowing you see, what will happen next...b/c at any moment anything is possible... The pace of life nowadays - even in a backwater "bubble" such as this - traffic racing... kids riding faster on their bikes...The rush of deadlines... leading us on toward unexpected reversals of fortune...and like that - bam - a crash, an earthquake, an inferno... So what am I getting at you ask? Well - it's simple...We need a plan - a corollary to our intelligence quotient... something to carry with us, "something" to help us get by...There must be something to fall back upon...a sense of what is possible or impossible or most likely to happen or what we must do to avoid this consequence...So with our typical p

  Q was taking one of his walks with Dr. Heinrich... and Nurse Amanda was there as well - seemingly appearing and disappearing at random intervals. He was trying to his latest theory about the sources of anxiety - and how "anything was possible at any time"...even in a placid backwater college town such as this one... we live with the dread and uncertainty of these infinite possibilities... You really think an earthquake could strike us, a volcano, a tsunami - aren't we safe from that sort of thing?" Nurse Amanda couldn't resist playing devil's advocate..."I don't just refer to the stress caused by one's current location - but the fact that earth as a whole is so vulnerable is still a stress factor....  Dr. Heinrich was overjoyed by the philosophical bent of the conversation. You're rehabilitation is proceeding splendidly ... you are a fine specimen. What an odd thing to say - Dr. H. was known for these little eccentric utterances that made h

 Q had always said to himself - " You cannot find Enlightenment in a backwater. .." - but what place wasn't that - even within the college town of B_____  in which he had floundered for so many years... It's because in "backwaters" (towns, villages, suburbs - even large metropoles) so to speak everyone's concerns were so eminently distractible, time-bound, self-referential, fleeting, impermanent, driven by habit. In such places, there was no erstwhile mountaintop to climb, no desert to cross, no golden, mystical, oceanic shoreline to trek along - which is not to say that such exotic excursions were guaranteed to have the desired effect either.  Q had no intentions of making a long pilgrimage anywhere such as to Canterbury or a Buddhist  monastery in Nepal.  This town was filled with smart-enough folks no doubt, some even with a hint of spiritual knowledge -  experts resting on their little perches and pinnacles who made Q nervous and a good deal resentfu