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“Non-violence is not inaction. It is not discussion. It is not for the timid or the weak. Non-violence is hard work. It is the willingness to sacrifice. It is the patience to win.” ~ Cesar Chavez

Just because you’re disenfranchised doesn’t mean you’re dead. I mean this in the most serious way possible. Except for the few friends and family that I’ve managed to hold close over the years, I am alone in this world. Many of you probably feel the same way. You have a cadre of friends that you can count on, but you don’t have a real movement that can speak for you in times of injustice. We are the young, the old, the weak, the poor, the disassociated and the disenfranchised. It is easy for us to say that our vote doesn’t count. It is easy to say that the rich will always win. It is easy to say that the struggle is not ours. And it is easy to blame someone else.

All right. So blame me. It is my generation and the generations that came after that have let our country get away from us. We have grown obese and dependent. We have gotten away from home-cooked meals and real food. We guzzle fossil fuels like they are going out of style (I wish they were). We have become addicted to prescription drugs. We defer our payments until next year when we should be balancing our budget.

I’m not talking about the government. I’m talking about we the people. How many of you know someone who is taking ten, twelve, twenty prescription drugs per day? It could be mom or grandma, but I’m sure you know someone. How many of you know someone who has run up massive credit card debt or student loans? How many of you know someone who is unemployed or has filed bankruptcy? All of the wealth in this country is held by the banks, the insurance and pharmaceutical companies, and the top two percent of Americans. This is not by accident. This is by design. It is time for it to stop. I’m talking about an economic revolution.

I know what you’re thinking. It seems futile if you look at it from an individual standpoint. It’s like being outmanned in a playground basketball game. The other team keeps dunking on you and all you can think to do is take your ball and go home. But there is another way to look at it. If you bring twenty of your friends to the court, it is suddenly twenty on five and there is no way to cover all of you. If twenty is not enough then you bring forty, or one hundred, or one hundred million. There is a tipping point to be reached, but it can only happen if we heed Cesar Chavez’s words at the beginning of this chapter. It takes sacrifice. It takes perseverance. It takes patience. And it takes dedication.

You are probably scratching your head and saying, this guy is full of crap. Maybe I am. By the crap that’s been fed to me by the mainstream media for almost fifty years.  It took me that long to pull my head out of the sand and see what is happening. It is an audacious power grab. It is an attempt to subvert democracy. It is a foreclosure on the American dream. I may not have all of the answers but I have a good idea how to get started. It’s called banding together.

Think about your friends. Do you know someone who is truly rich. I’m not talking about someone who makes a couple of hundred thousand a year, because those people are just as close to economic disaster as you and me. I hear it all the time from them, the small business owners. They are not the enemy. They are actually being crushed between the rock, the really rich, and the hard place, the working poor. They’re battling to save that extra one percent in taxes that they might have to pay. The argument is that they are supporting the eighteen or twenty families that they employ. If they had a smaller tax burden, they might be able to support a few more. I get this argument. It’s just that I think it is a moot point without real reform.

The rich that I’m talking are the CEO rich, the captains of industry. These are the guys that are pulling down millions a year, but only if they can capture an increasing market share and pay back their investors. The banking and insurance CEO’s tried to game the system with elaborate shell games, trading their debt back and forth and charging for every transaction. It worked great until they got caught with their pants down and we had to bail them out with funny money. They lost a lot of our money and still managed to get paid. Now they are back to the same crap again. The only way we can change the paradigm is to hit these guys in their wallets and put economic pressure on them to reform their ways.

And then we have the captains of energy, the admirals of chemicals and the titans of pharmaceuticals. You’ve got companies like Exxon/Mobil and BP who are among the top four companies in the Fortune 500 and they are allowed to do business in America for free. The only time they have to pay anything is when they spill enough oil to make the evening news. And in the meantime they can hold us hostage for ever-increasing fees at the pumps. You’ve got companies like Monsanto who want to monopolize our food supply so that we have one brand of corn, one of beans, one of wheat, where we used to have hundreds of each. And we wonder why our health is going into the crapper. And then there is big Pharma. Our population is aging and they are taking advantage of it. They incentivize doctors to distribute their pills to the point of addiction and then keep the costs moving up. I hope that whomever it was that came up with lifetime treatment programs is burning in hell right now. I repeat, The only way we can change the paradigm is to hit these guys in their wallets and put economic pressure on them to reform their ways.

I’ve put the targets on their backs, so now I give you the next steps. One, pull all of your money out of the big banks. They do not have your best interests in mind. They are using your money to make profits for themselves. There are plenty of good local credit unions that will keep your money in the community and working for you.

Two, change your shopping habits. Your grocery store is poisoning you with processed foods. Stay out of the drive-thru line. Go to the farm stand. Go to the local market. Get some real, fresh, non-GMO food. Put a garden in your yard, or your windowsill. Join a community garden. Learn about edible plant-life.

Three, Question your doctor, your parent’s doctor and your grandma’s doctor. Talk to your parents about their ailments. Try to find alternatives to taking a pill for every symptom. Look into holistic cures, changing diets and herbal therapies. It is important to wean everyone off of the prescription addiction.

Four, and this is the big one, band together. Chase Bank is not suddenly going to change their ways just because you pull your money out. In fact, when I did it the guy was incredulous. “No one switches from Chase to a credit union. It’s always the other way around.” But imagine if twenty of your friends, the same twenty from that basketball game, all walked into Chase and pulled their money out. That will send a message. Giant Eagle is not going to stop giving money to politicians if you stop shopping there, but if you and twenty of your friends all stop shopping there, and you write a letter telling them why, it will make an impact. The list goes on and on. We must band together and coordinate to change the paradigm. This is the only way to make a difference.

We may be disenfranchised, but that doesn’t mean we are dead.

“The prayer of the monk is not perfect until he no longer recognizes himself or the fact that he is praying.”

~ St. Anthony[1]

When I look back on the first half of my life I can point to a few things that have short-circuited my growth into the man that I could have been. One thing that stands out is the complete lack of faith. I didn’t have faith in the people around me. I didn’t have faith in any religion. I didn’t have faith in myself. As I type these words I don’t know if I’ll have the wherewithal to finish this.

I was raised in a broken family. I could go into all the reasons why this screwed me up, but I am done placing blame on others for my shortcomings. I was confirmed into my church about a year before my parents split up. I stopped going to church shortly after confirmation and never looked back. I have always had my doubts about Christianity. It wasn’t that I doubted there was a God. I had my objections with the very institution of the church. I had a problem with the fact that churches sponsored wars and crusades. I had a problem with the fact that churches always seem to be in need of money, despite the huge cathedrals and the sleek Town Cars that the minister always seemed to ride around in. I had a problem with the hypocrisy of a church that would erect a pulpit in the bedrooms of the faithful, and then hide the fact that their forcefully celibate priesthood was prone to deviant and criminal acts. Indeed, the very rule of a celibate priesthood is unnatural and seems readymade for disaster.

Over the years that I was away from the church, I communed with God in times of trouble. God was kind of like the dentist. I only went for a visit in times of extreme trouble. I had my fair share of those times. In my later years my beliefs tended to look to the east. Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism seemed to have a truer ring than the monotheistic religions that sprang from the loins of Abraham. These religions are so close in doctrine that they could only speak of the same God, yet innumerable lives have been lost under the banners of cross, crescent and star. I cannot fathom a God that would encourage this. I know that this might make me your enemy. Just know that I will never reciprocate. Life is too short for such animosity.

Whenever the subject of religion came up, my answer usually defaulted to Taoism. I identify with the earth and the environment more than any set of manmade doctrines that are obviously designed to control the hearts, bodies and minds of the faithful. But I never really took it any further than that. Sure, I would quote Buddha, Lao Tzu, Rumi and the like, but my study was superficial at best. When I came to my tipping point last year, career switch, health problems, relationship imploded, it was time for me to reexamine all of the beliefs of my life.

I started reading all of the classics. I found a website that broke down one hundred of the greatest books of philosophy and psychology of the last 2500 years. I read about Buddha, the Bhagavad Gita, Rumi, Joseph Campbell, the Tao Te Ching, and many others. I took a long hard look at myself. With my eyes wide open, I decided that Buddhism most closely resembled the values that I hold closest to my heart. That done, I started to transform myself by doing the things that a good Buddhist does.

The great thing about Buddhism is that it is more of a philosophy and practice than an actual religion. There is no restriction on what you can believe or disbelieve. There are many Buddhists who believe in Christ, as well as Jewish Buddhists and many others. There are certain guiding precepts that are meant as suggestions on how to attain enlightenment. They resemble the Ten Commandments but they are not considered laws. Since there is no hell in Buddhism, then there is no palpable punishment for breaking them. That is the essence of Buddhism. You are only accountable to yourself, so you are the only yardstick to your success.

There are a lot of different forms of Buddhism. There are Buddhists like the Tibetans who believe in reincarnation. The 14^th Dalai Lama is believed to be the latest in a line dating all the way back to 1391. There is convincing evidence that these Lamas are an unbroken succession of reincarnates. I’m withholding my belief on that one. I believe only in the possibility. I fall into the Zen camp of Buddhism.

There are three main schools of Zen. The Rinzai school is known for its use of rigorous training methods and koans, riddles or mantras, to attain nirvana. Ōbaku Zen is a monastic sect follows the precepts much like Commandments, and has very strict rules governing its practice. The Sōtō sect is much more freeform, perfect for a slacker like me, and revolves around a practice called shikantaza, or “just sitting.” The goal is to meditate on the very essence of your being. The more that you mediate, the better you understand yourself. Eventually you break through the barrier that separates you from the universe. This is the Sōtō form of enlightenment. I have my doubts that I will ever show the discipline to make that happen. But that is not my goal.

My point in assuming this line of practice is that it closely resembles my personal values. I am a peacenik. I believe that there is no good reason to take another person’s life. In this week of the death of Osama bin Laden, my stance is a controversial one. Somehow I am less of a patriot because I can’t rejoice in the murder of a murderer. Alas, different strokes and all that jazz.

Above all the Buddha preached mindfulness. It is the ability to submerse yourself totally in the moment, whether you’re doing the dishes, taking a walk in the park, or making love to your darling darling. Use all five of your senses to be the moment. Taste the air, smell the grass, feel the texture of the ground underneath your feet, hear the wind whistling through the trees and see the vibrant colors of the vegetation and flora. A distracted moment is a moment you will never get back.

Another convention of Buddhists is vegetarianism. Once again, this is a suggestion and not a law. A lot of good Buddhists eat meat. I choose not to, both for common sense and health reasons. If I was going to live to be one hundred, I needed to change my eating habits and start exercising more.  So I got rid of the car, got the bike on the road, and started cooking my own meals. I finally broke through the Mendoza (waist) Line. I’m at two hundred pounds and dropping.

The first precept that Buddha gave his followers those many years ago was this: “I undertake to abstain from causing harm and taking life (both human and non-human.” I choose to follow this with open eyes. I am not an animal rights activist, but I do not support the mistreatment of animals to produce food. Factory farming has gotten out of hand. I will not contribute to it or two grocers who contribute to it. So I downsized. I shop local and independent every chance that I get.

Who am I to tell you what to believe in? All I ask is that you believe in something. Have faith in your God, your family or your country, or all of the above. But have faith. It’s entirely possible that I will go to hell when I die, but based on my Gandhi versus Manson rule, that might be where I belong. Even the various sects of Buddhism can’t agree on the right way to practice. The best thing that you can do is live in the moment. Be in touch with yourself and your environs every minute. Attack your practice with all of your being. Take a bite out of life before it takes a bite out of you.

“I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only.” – Henry David Thoreau, WALDEN

Thoreau went out to Walden Pond in the summer of 1845. It was his desire to live simply on the land in a cabin of his own construction, to be free from distraction for an extended period of time. He was there for more than two years, isolated, and he observed the natural rhythms of the land and within himself. As he looked deeper he found himself thinking in more intellectual and moral terms. It was a transcendent experience for him. Many lessons can be learned from WALDEN. Many more can be found by looking inside of ourselves.

I’m not suggesting that you move out to the hinterlands, build yourself a cabin and live off the land, though I do think the idea is appealing. I fight the urge to drop out on an almost daily basis. The appeal relates to the ability to totally lose myself in nature, much like Thoreau did. The anchor that keeps me attached to society is my newfound love of my community. So instead I lose myself in reading, writing and staring deeply into the abyss of my soul. I find that the longer I stare the more light that I see there, almost like fluorescent lichens living on the walls of a bottomless cave. So today I think about living in Concord and what that means to all of us.

Living in Concord is my witty attempt to play on with the word harmony, for which concord is a synonym. With a few simple changes in our lives we can all live in concordance with nature and lessen our physical and psychic effects on our community and world. This is more an outline than a blueprint. Many of my friends are farther along the path than I will ever be, so I hope that they will feel free to correct and expound upon my concepts.

First steps:

1. Conservation – We all have the ability to be more conscious in our consumption. The simple solution is to buy only what you need, share what you don’t use and recycle all of the rest. Reduce your carbon footprint by keeping the thermostat at the lowest tolerable temperature, turn the air conditioning off and rip off the knob, connect all your electronics (if you must have them) to power strips that can be turned off with the flick of a switch.
2. Nutrition – How often do you take a hard look at what you put into your body? Do you eat a lot of processed and fast foods? If so, do you notice where your energy levels are when you are done? I know I feel bogged down and lethargic? At least I did when I was still eating that stuff. Everyone is not inclined to be a vegetarian, but do you really have to eat meat at every meal. Do you restrict your portion sizes? Do you think about what goes into the making of your food? It takes roughly nine pounds of grains and one hundred fifty gallons of water to produce one pound of beef, four quarter pound burgers. I don’t know about you, but I can live for a long time on nine pounds of grain. Do you take notice of the packaging of your foods? Where they are made? Of who makes them? That leads us to:
3. Consumerism – Who made that product that you hold in your hand? Was it made in the USA? Is it local or multinational? How many miles did it travel to land in your hand? Is it fair trade? What do the dollars that you spend go to support? Is the company politically active? Do you ask yourself why they feel the need to be? I’m focused on hyper-localism. Since I ride a bike that makes it really easy. I have fired many former companies that I used to be loyal to, like Giant Eagle, AT&T, Chase Bank, and others, because of their business and political practices, and replaced them with local entities that funnel my dollars right back into my community. A dollar spent in a non-local company is an eighty cents that leaves your local economy (factoring the local labor).
4. Transportation – Ask yourself these questions. Have you arranged your life to harmonize with nature? Did you plan your home location around your work or vice versa? Do you get in the car and drive when you could just as easily walk or bike there? Do you need a car at all? Do four other people from your neighborhood all work at the same place and yet all drive separate? My goal is to reduce my transportation cost to zero. I’m close. I’ll update with my total at the end of the month.
5. Relationships – I am probably the last guy to be giving anyone relationship advice. I like to think that my ship has sailed and that I have wasted all of my wonderful opportunities. We’ll see. In the meantime, I will tell you what I have learned. Any good love match has to be a partnership. You can feel the attraction, maybe it’s physical or intellectual, but that is only the key that unlocks the door. To get fully immersed, you have to get away from the “what’s in this for me” mentality. I was that guy who was skeptical to the point of pushing people away, not allowing anyone inside my shield. But once I got the key in the door I gave one hundred percent of myself and expected the same, to the exclusion of all else. Invariably it was great for a while, but it devolved into hurt, jealousy and rage. I couldn’t see beyond my own needs. In order to live in harmony, both people have to go into it with open eyes, be completely honest and be willing to cooperate on all things. Sometimes that means giving your mate their space, other times it means letting her know that you need some to. No recriminations, no ulterior motives, just complete honesty and cooperation. If you are only in it for yourself, it will never be all that it could be.
6. Friendships – “You are the average of the five people who you spend the most time with.” ~ Jim Rohn Businessman and motivational speaker. If so, are any of the five dragging down your average with pessimism, negativity and the three poisons (greed, anger, ignorance)? If so, are they worth salvaging? I was that guy for a large portion of my life. I lost a lot of friends along the way because I couldn’t see past the poisons that made me toxic to my community. Fortunately there was at least one friend who thought that I was worth saving. Every time I started to float away into self-destruction, he reeled me back from the edge. To a certain extent, I owe him the life that I have now. With that being said, I think it’s counter-productive to try to save everyone that you meet. I was that guy too, the one that collected the misfits to my professional and personal detriment. Examine your relationships to see if they help or hinder your harmony.
7. Nature – As city-dwellers, we tend to discount nature. This is a shame. Nature is truly all around us. One of the coolest things that I’ve done over the last few weeks was to take a nature walk with a couple of guys who are well versed in urban foraging. We walked the alleys of Victorian Village and picked various “weeds” and sampled compared the flavors of the different plant families. Who knew? And why didn’t you tell me? I have been living within one hundred yards of the Olentangy River for four years. I had no idea of the cornucopia that is literally at my feet. This is because I didn’t take the time to look. As I dedicate myself to a simpler life, I notice the squirrels scampering, the birds swooping, the flowers blooming and the insects crawling. Life is booming all around me and I never noticed. When you dedicate yourself to conscious harmony, these things become abundant gifts in your life. I truly believe that all of the answers to all, of our problems are in view if we open our eyes. We can be powered by wind, sun and water. We can cure cancer and all of the other things that ail us with nature’s bounty. All we have to do is seek and we will find.
8. Activism is a big buzzword in these trying times that we are in. I probably use it too much myself, but activism takes on many forms. It can be as simple as telling your neighbor what your local representative voted for or warning your friend how many calories are in that value meal. As you become more in tune with what is going on around you, it is natural to want to pick up the trash that someone else dumped, to take your shopping dollar elsewhere when your merchant does wrong, to walk to that quarter-mile instead of driving and to purchase the organic version of that produce for a few extra pennies. Activism is inspiring your friends to do the same. Activism is speaking up when you see an injustice rather than going about your business. Activism is finding another job when you find out that your company is contributing to war, pollution or some other ideology that you don’t subscribe to. The Buddha spoke specifically on right profession. You should have a job that you can be proud of, that represents your values and that also operates in harmony with nature.

You don’t have to move out to the wilderness to live in Concord. All you have to do is open up your five senses and experience nature all around you. The ancients had it right. They followed the seasons. They took what they needed and left the rest for another time. They used every part of every plant and animal that they needed for survival. The only thing preventing us from doing the same is our dependence on convenience. It has made us fat and dumb. It is time to go back to the soil.

A lot of times we tend to compartmentalize our being. We have two feet, two hands, two eyes, two ears, one mind (or maybe two), one soul, one nose, ten fingers, ten toes, 206 bones, numerous muscles, billions of cells. In truth these individual components only exist as elements of the whole. Without the whole, they serve no purpose.

Should we lose one of these components, we still remain whole, and the ear, the eye, the litre of blood is returned to the earth to be broken down into its composite elements, which are then recycled into the building blocks for future life.

So while we like to think of ourselves as a whole, we are really just components of the world. Without us, the world lives on. Without the world, we serve no purpose. And when one of us dies, we are broken down into our composite elements, which are then recycled into the building blocks for future life.

Whether our intelligence lives on (or not) in some form or other, be it heaven, reincarnation or legacy, is the question that keeps us striving to do good, to build karma, to excel in our chosen field. With that said, what good can come from a book or a painting or a song, if none remain to enjoy it? When the world is gone, does the song still remain?

So Morpheus: “You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.

You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

Remember — all I am offering is the truth, nothing more.” THE MATRIX- 1999

I’m giving you the opportunity to take the blue pill. To walk away from this talk right now, forget that you ever heard of me, and go about your life in mindless bliss. No? Okay, let’s do this thing.

I’m going to talk to you today about the choices that you have in life as a sentient being and the possibilities for the future. Since we are all here today, I guess we have at least one thing in common. After the next ten minutes I hope that we will have a few more things to talk about. I’m working on a new book called Slacker Revolutionary. It’s the story of my conversion to slacker and skeptic to seeker and peacemaker. It all started about the time I was beginning what I like to call my last great flirtation. I want to share with you is some ideas that I have adapted in the process in hopes that you will not waste a bunch of years like I have.

Contingency: Random choice and contingency rule our life from the time before our conception is even dreamed of. You’ve all heard the phrase “before you were a twinkle in your daddy’s eye.” That is exactly the moment that I’m talking about. So many variables and choices have factored into your lives that it is incalculable. Your parents hooked up. Only they know how many other times they thought they met that special someone before they found each other. But they hooked up and at one very specific moment in time, they conceived you. It was contingency that formed you. Had you been conceived at any other moment in time, you would not be exactly the same you as you are now. Your mother’s diet, her prenatal care and how well she took care of her body were choices that she made to help you get to where you are now. Had you been born two weeks earlier or two weeks later, it is possible you wouldn’t be in this room right now.

Butterfly Effect: Just as your parents choices and timing effect the way you turned out, your own choices effect everything around you. In science it is called the butterfly effect. It is said that a butterfly flapping its wings in Colorado can cause a tornado in Kansas. I’m not sure if that is true, but I can tell you that your choices directly effect the environment around you. Just by walking into this room you changed the temperature, humidity and even the aura of the place. The first person to take a seat affects all of the other people who sit down after. The fact that even one person chose to walk in and sit down changed my level of happiness. I thank you for that.

Connectedness: We are all connected. You can see evidence of that everywhere you look in the big little city of ours. We talk about it all the time. There are maybe four of five interconnected circles spinning in this city. I feel safe to say that with just the few of us here in this room, we are only two or three degrees away from the million people within a ten mile radius. The same can be said about our world. I have dated girls from Japan, Ethiopia, Lebanon and my last girl from the Philippines. She is now living in Australia. So how many degrees do you think I am removed from the rest of the world? The choices that I have made have literally affected people on four continents, and that is just counting my dating pool.

Choice.:Think about the choices that you have made to get to this point in your life. How many colleges did you choose from when you were leaving high school? How close were you to going to another school? Once you got to college did you join a fraternity or sorority? Did you live at home or in the dorms? Did you stick with the same roommate or did you move rooms until you found a good match? Did you party too much, study all the time, or find a good balance? Did you take classes every quarter or did you take some time off? Each of these choices factor into why you are here today. If you did one thing differently, you probably wouldn’t be here right now. I’m glad you chose the way you did.

I have made seemingly all the wrong choices. I have squandered lots of cash. I have screwed up many relationships with beautiful women. I have gone from job to job like George of the Jungle swinging through trees. I blew off college not once but three times. I should have died more than a few times along the way. I have done it all wrong, and yet I sit here right now feeling as good about life as I ever have. I feel like I have taken the red pill. At this late date I have awoken from a lifelong slumber and I’m itching to live.

But I don’t suggest that you try the Terry Way to find you happiness. Best to find you own way. I think you’ll get there a lot quicker. Here’s a place to start.

Mindfulness: Be mindful in how you spend your money. Think about where it is going. Think about the companies that produce the stuff that you consume. Do they share your values. Do they invest your money back into the things that you support, like your community? Every dollar that leaves your community is a dollar that benefits someone else.

Be mindful of what you put in your body. All you have to do is watch “Super Size Me” to know what I am talking about. I’m not say that you have to go vegetarian like me, or stop drinking and smoking. Just choose moderation, the middle way, and you won’t have to worry about short-term or long-term consequences.

Be mindful in choosing your friends. They say that you are the average of the five people that you spend the most time with. Are you friends lifting you up or dragging you down? Are they positive or negative? Do they do things that you are sometimes reluctant to do? It is your mindful decision whether or not to participate.

Be mindful in choosing your mate. I am the wrong person to ask for relationship advice, but I can tell you one thing. It is the easiest thing in the world to get laid. Sex feels good. Sex with the right person feels great. In my opinion, your body is the most precious thing that you can share with someone. Sex with the wrong person is a waste of time or worse, it can send your life spinning in the wrong direction. Not only can it knock your life out of kilter, but it impacts the other person and people in both of your networks. We are all connected.

Impact: Once we realize that we are all connected and that everything that we do has an effect all other beings, we begin to make mindful choices that have a positive impact on our community, city, nation and world. I want you to take a second and think of the one thing that you would change in this world if you dug up the genie in the bottle. I will give you the blueprint. It is up for you to apply it. If I dug up the genie in the bottle, I would ask for world peace. I don’t think that this is unrealistic in the least. So how do I accomplish this when at any given time there are thirty or forty conflicts going on in the world? The first step is to have peace in your heart. I am talking about inner peace, freedom from the little wars that try to invade your psyche every day.

Buzzy Bees and Fishy Hooks: You have a supercomputer residing inside your skull. There are millions of electrical connections inside that computer. Most of the time the firing these synapses is orderly, much like docile bees flying quietly over a field of clover pollinating ideas and storing knowledge. This is what Marcus Aurelius called equanimity. As you go about your daily life there are million little fishy hooks waiting for you along the way. They hide in plain sight waiting to spoil your equanimity. It could be as simple as running late for work or missing a traffic light, or as difficult as having the transmission go out on your car or having an illness in the family. Your docile pollinating bees begin to loudly buzz and attack with their stingers. You are thrown off balance. Or you can choose the middle way.

The Middle Way: The only thing that you can control is this very moment in time. There is nothing that you can do change the past. You can try to shape the future, but you cannot control it. The middle way tells us to be the very best we can in the present, and the future will take care of itself. You have the ability to control how you react to those fishy hooks. If you accept them as life little contingencies, you can use mindful solutions to move past them and maintain your equanimity. Your inner peace.

Practice: Once you begin to see life’s obstacles for what they are, the natural :low of things, you can begin the process of mindfully dealing with them. This is what Marcus Aurelius called this the equanimity game. Any time he felt himself falling out of balance, he stopped and righted the ship immediately. Think of it like the washing machine that is loaded out of balance. It spins wildly and makes a lot of noise. You might have to reload it a few times to get it right, but you learn not to overload it, to spread out the clothes evenly, and eventually you will never make that same mistake again. It is possible through practice to never lose your equanimity again. Or at the very least to lessen the effects.

Inner Peace: So you have your balance. You take compassion in your heart and you apply it to every interaction that you have. You accept that some people are going to do hurtful things and those things have nothing to do with you. You accept that life will throw you an occasional curveball and you resolve it with a smile. You realize that anger will take you to no good place, but that it can take you to many awful ones. You eliminate the negative Nancys from your life and surround yourself with people who embrace the same inner peace. And you inspire others to do the same. We build our peaceful network and help others to find the middle way. Soon we are the buzzy bees that pollinate a peaceful earth.

Grassroots Activism: Once you have started your personal peace movement, you can go out and cultivate your network, make honey like the good bee that you are. We’ve learned from my example that the good bee is the one that stays on task, not the angry one that demands attention. You will attract more supporters by talking calmly and rationally than by shouting. Soon the wave of peaceful people will begin to influence the equanimity of the world. There are forces out there that attempt to create chaos in order to further their agendas. Nothing is more effective against chaos than rational thought.

Next Steps: Search for your mindfulness. Focus on this very moment and take in all of the sensations around you. Thrill in the sights and tastes and smells of NOW. And then repeat. Practice this until you can repeat it over and over and over again. Look inside your closet to where the angry bees and fishy hooks and negative Nancys reside. Begin your spring cleaning. Then help your friends do the same. And repeat. Thank you for listening.

The end of my affair with Makeda was another version of my own personal groundhog day. I tend to follow the same path every time that I fall in love. I am a hopeless romantic. I am forever looking for Ms. Right when I am single (which is ninety-nine percent of the time). I am totally monogamous (even though I have my doubts that monogamy is a natural human state). I will do anything and everything for the one that I love. And just when I think that happily ever after is imminent, I somehow manage to crash and burn. And when I say crash, I mean explode, implode and all of the other plodes. I am rendered down into a puddle of pathetic goo.

I have long been convinced that I have bi-polar issues. Anyone who has ever worked with me can tell you that I have a very short fuse. When I implode it’s like a whole different man (or demon) tries to force his way out of my psyche. The implosion almost always directed towards myself, but it is scary to watch and embarrassing when it happens. It might last fifteen seconds or five minutes, but it always leaves debilitating scars in its wake. I am happy to report that it’s been a long time since I’ve had a melt down. It coincides with my stepping away from my career as a restaurant manager.

Some people are natural leaders. I used to think I was a natural leader, but I have crashed that boat against the rocks one too many times to believe it any more. Since my Marine Corps days, every job that I have ever had has involved leading and/or training people. My tendency is to throw my entire being into a job and wind it around myself like a length of copper wire. As my competency grows, the copper wire turns into barbed wire. The insatiable perfectionist in me refuses to harmonize with the imperfect world. Every little mistake is like a cut to my ego. Soon I am drowning in my imperfection.

I have an addictive personality. I’ve been known to drink to excess. I have a tendency to overeat in times of stress. I am fueled by caffeine. I am starved for affection, so when I get the slightest bit it makes me manic with happiness. I am a workaholic. I read books by the hundred. I have three to five writing projects going at any given time. I give up on things quickly, especially if I am not an immediate success. Around two years ago, when I finally escaped the restaurant business, I started turning the corner. I packed away the stress and the meltdowns. I started finding some balance in my life.

I was in the midst of getting fired from my last restaurant job for “performance issues.” I was a train wreck of a man by this time. My last five weeks on the job I averaged over sixty-five hours. Being on salary, the middle management form of slavery, I was not being compensated for my time or my stress. I was told that I didn’t care about the job. It was laughable. This was the impetus I needed to get myself together. I worked out a deal to take a step down instead and get my head on straight. I cut my work hours almost in half and the money was still reasonable. It was the perfect fix.

This period in my life coincided with what I will call “my last great flirtation.” I gave up on love a long time ago. My dream of being a father has withered and died. It is not worth wasting my time to chase a relationship that will end like all of the others. The gods (and my irresponsible actions) have condemned me to solitude. So be it. No sense losing any sleep over it. Then lightning struck again, this time from ten thousand miles away.

I’ll call her Maggie (maganda means beautiful in Tagalog, the language of the Philippines). I met her about eight years ago on a blogging site where we both did a little writing. She was located in Manila. I saw her name referenced on another blog and looked at her picture. She was cute and funny, so I started to comment on her blogs. She started commenting back. Our online personalities complimented each other. We were both jaded and sarcastic. I loved her irreverence. Somewhere along the way we lost each other, but I never forgot her. We exchanged greetings every year on New Years.

Around the same time that I was escaping my soul-killing job, she was escaping an abusive relationship. It seemed she was uninterested in her countrymen, and tended towards men of other nationalities. We started chatting, something that I’d always ridiculed others for. Chatting led to phoning, which led to Skype, which intensified our like for each other. We talked about hopes and dreams and fears. We talked about the future. We were both afraid to end up alone.

Maggie was the antithesis of me. She was a professional CPA. She was a thinker, a planner and a saver. Whereas I was just a squanderer. She saved every penny for over three years to make her dream of leaving the Philippines a reality, all the while taking care of her parents and brothers. As we talked and dreamed together, she was moving forward. I thought that I was too, but I was just spinning my tires (as usual). Part of her dream came true, she got a permanent visa to emigrate to Australia as part of their worker exchange program. For my part, my paternal instincts went into overdrive. Here was a young lady of twenty-nine, aching to have children, and falling in love with me. All I had to do was get my sh*t together and meet her in Australia. Piece of cake, right?

At the same time that we were intensifying our relationship, I was also intensifying my search for the antidote to my rage and anger. I found an unlikely source of serenity on the Internet in the form of Brian Johnson’s “A Philosopher’s Notes.” Brian’s zest for finding his bliss and sharing it with others inspired me to start delving into spirituality, positive psychology and balance. He introduced me to such luminaries as Joseph Campbell, Martin Seligman, Abraham Maslow and Marcus Aurelius. I should have known that we were going to have a problem when Maggie started complaining that “no one can be as happy as you are all the time.” But it was true. “A Philosopher’s Notes” saved my life. But another problem was looming on the horizon.

I let it go on for way too long. We were four months into the process when reality started staring me in the face. All of my bad decisions over the years reared up and smacked me in the face. When I finally told her of my life of a financial misfit it was like crashing the ship into the rocks with the harbor in sight. She was out of my life faster than it takes for a wad of happiness to swirl the bottom of the bowl.

The sad part is that I never went looking for love. Especially one that was halfway around the world. I would have been perfectly happy to spend the rest of my life as her crazy American friend on the Internet. But I had to get her hopes up, get my hopes up, and then drive us straight into the rocks. I still love you as the friend that you always were, Sweet Maggie. I hope you find everything you’re looking for in your new home country. I’ll miss you.

I was sitting at a traffic light back in 1997 contemplating my future. I’d been working for CompuServe, a company that just a few years early was the only commercial online service. Shortly before I started the job, the company was bought by the tax firm H&R Block. I worked there for two years and as time went on the company message went from hubris and holier than thou to save money, cut costs at all expense. It seems that H&R Block never really wanted to be in the Internet business. Hindsight is 20/20, but how dumb is that? They never spent the money to keep up with the infrastructure. Eventually they parceled us off to AOL and WorldCom. A once proud company and brand died without a whimper.

Now this is another tale of my poor decision-making. But it comes with a (somewhat) happy ending. For my entire adult life, my career choices have been all over the board. One might say that rather than climbing the ladder, I tend to jump from ladder to ladder, climb up the sheer face of a cliff only to jump off, or swim in a fast-moving stream only to navigate into the ocean. I make dumb moves. Sometimes they pay off, other times they don’t. Around the same time that H&R Block was deciding that they didn’t want to be in the restaurant business, I was deciding the same thing. Hindsight is 20/20, but how dumb is that? Instead of going through the rigmarole of interviewing with AOL or WorldCom, I decided to jump off the cliff and go to bartending school. The only good decision I might in this comedy of errors was to stick around until the final day to maximize my severance pay. Keep in mind that I was still sowing my wild oats and not doing a good job of controlling myself.

So I was sitting at that light and trying to figure out what to do. I had just graduated bartending school and I was weighing two job possibilities that my teacher had offered up. One was a job at an upscale Chinese restaurant and the other was a job at a fun casual joint in the Columbus Airport called Max & Erma’s. I mentally flipped the quarter into the air and it landed on heads (I think) and I turned to the left and headed towards the airport. It was a random move based on the eternal question, “Do you really want to bartend in a Chinese restaurant?” Thirty minutes later I interviewed and thirty minutes after that I had the job. The dream shift of every bartender, 5:30-11:00 AM, the breakfast shift. Not so much. Now airport bars are a different animal from all the other gin joints and honky-tonks out there. I had a steady stream of vacationing Vegas-goers who had to get hammered before they got on the plane. I was making $100 cash a day in no time and I had the afternoons to play. What a life.

Around the time I started there, I noticed a pretty girl who was working in some management position. She was exotic. In my limited world view of the time, I had her pegged as Southeast Asian or Indian. She was obviously way younger than me and way out of my league. Or so I thought.

Now, I’m the type of guy who can fall in love in an instant, but I always temper it with reality, as in, there is no way that this girl will every go out with me. I think that every time without fail. Ninety-nine percent of the time that is a true belief. But that one percent of the time, about once every ten years, lightning strikes and I get swept off to never-never land.

Part of the condition of my working at Max & Erma’s was that I work shifts in the other little bars where the lonesome travelers belly up and wait for delays or missed connections. I hated working those shifts, but they were a means to an end. I would sit in some forgotten corner of the airport and wait for a person to sidle up. That person was invariably stressed out, scared or pissed off. I would offer them one of my poor selection of beers, a roller hotdog or a bag of chips, and try to de-stress them with a little of my patented song and dance. It was boring and not very lucrative. The only upside was that every once in a while a famous person would walk up to the bar and share a few minutes with me. I tried not to be star-struck. I was glad I only had to do it one day a week.

The bar that I was working was a temporary thing on wheels. It had an antiquated old register that looked like it was taken from an old west saloon. There was a lot of construction going on and new restaurants were being built, and the area behind me was sectioned off for the building of what would one day be my first General Manager position. It was a mundane middle-of-the-week shift at the crap bar in the C Concourse. It was very hard to take the whole thing seriously when I might sell $200 worth of beer and make twenty or thirty bucks in tips. By the time my relief arrived I was a zombie. I packed up my till and went up to the cash room to settle up. I knocked on the door and when it opened, the pretty girl was there to greet me.

I have always been nervous around pretty girls. I think it stems from the fact that I have always had a poor body image. I know this seems ludicrous, since I grew up playing all manner of sports at a fairly high level and then spent my early adulthood as a Marine, but I have always considered myself fat and slothful. I spent my twenties drinking enough beer to keep the third shift running at Anheiser Busch, so I probably was a little doughy at the time this took place. But I was uncomfortable in a small enclosed space with this girl, who I will call Makeda (beautiful in Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia). Yes, she was Ethiopian, although I didn’t realize it at the time.

Makeda emptied out my till and started counting my money as I sat by sweating through my white dress shirt and ridiculous vest festooned with the liquor bottles. She was a natural with money. Her fingers ruffled through the bills like lightning and she tallied everything up. She frowned and started over and I started sweating even more profusely. My heart sank when she started over a third time.

“Is something wrong?”

“You are short.” She said it in her lilting accent that was just as appealing as her looks.

“How much short?”

“One hundred forty dollars.”

“What!? I only sold maybe twenty beers all day long. This is impossible.”

“I have counted three times.”

“Let me see my report.” I took the register tape and immediately saw what I had done. I held my thumb under the line in question. “Here. I rang in forty beers instead of four.”

“Why did you do that?”

How do I answer that? Shall I tell the truth, that I was too lazy to ring in the four beers one-at-a-time like I was supposed to? Instead of hitting four I hit forty and cashed it out without looking at the total. “It was a mistake.” By this time I was bright red with embarrassment. If you know me, you have seen this face many times before.

“That wasn’t very smart. I don’t know if I can accept this explanation.” Her voice was school-teacher stern.

“Come on. We can go down and count the inventory right now.” I hate it when I start begging. My voice got really high-pitched and I was getting pissed.  She stared at me for what seemed like an eternity. I could feel my blood starting to boil. I knew that I was going to get fired from the job. Worse yet, I would never see this angel again. Suddenly she beamed at me and giggled.

“I am just joking with you. Of course we can fix this.”

I finally breathed.

I came to look forward to my shifts at the crappy bar and even started volunteering for more of them. I knew Makeda’s schedule and tried to work whenever she was there. I looked forward to my five minutes with her in the cash room. She started stopping by the bar to see if I needed any change or anything like that. She was a natural-born tease. I watched her with the other male workers and I saw how she would push it as far as possible to make the uncomfortable. Of course I was jealous. I’ve gone through life envying other people’s happiness instead of doing something about my own.

One night, it was probably a few weeks after the night of my “shortage,” Makeda and I happened to be waiting for the airport shuttle at the same time. We were laughing and joking and of course she was playing the vamp. I was taking everything that she said with a grain of salt. This girl was world-class gorgeous and I was a fat pasty white boy with a beer gut. I also had her by ten years. We got off the bus and said our goodnight.

“Do you want to talk?” Do I want to talk? Of course I want to talk.

“Sure.” So we hopped in my pickup truck and she started to talk. And talk. And talk. Makeda told me all about her family and her life before we met. Her family had won the “lottery” in Ethiopia to come to America. In order to get everyone into the country, they fudged the birth dates of all of the girls to make them minors. So while Makeda was really twenty-four, her passport said that she was sixteen. She told me about some other aspects of her life that tied the strings together. She was living with a very strict uncle who followed her around because she was “wild.” What she wanted most was to be free of her family and to live the life of an American. We talked for a long time. And then she kissed me. I was a goner.

Makeda and I “dated” for four months. We couldn’t really go out, because of the uncle and because of her passport age. I was running the risk of statutory rape among other things. The uncle caught wind of us and started following me around as well. Fortunately, he owned some cabs and he was usually driving one of them, so I knew he was there. He called me on the phone, threatened my job, and wanted to beat me up. Makeda and I stole a few precious moments, talked about love and marriage and babies, made out a lot. I was in heaven. I always wanted to have a child. I had a near miss when I was younger. We’ll talk about that a little later. I don’t know if the forbidden aspect made it even more exciting, but I was ready to die for this woman. I made the mistake of giving up my bartending job to become a manager. In a sense, I became her de facto boss. This escalated our problems with the family and added a level of stress that wasn’t there in the past. Things were starting to spin out of control.

Up until this point everything had been pretty much hunky dory with my boss. I was doing a good job, I wasn’t doing as much boozing as I had in the past, and I was relatively even keel. Makeda’s uncle changed all that. He called our office and said that I was violating his young niece. He wanted me fired. My boss sat me down and told me the facts of life. He had to take threats like this seriously for the good of the company. We both knew the facts about Makeda, but that didn’t change the reality that she was officially underage in this country.

I’ve always been stubborn. It is usually to my own detriment. There was no way that I was going to quit my job over this. A series of dark thoughts crossed through my head. We could move in together. I could go to immigration, but this would be bad for her entire family, maybe even get them deported. We could run off and get married. All of these ideas had a lot of downside. I was starting to spiral. I was getting desperate. And then she broke up with me. Her family won and I lost.

I should have been expecting this outcome the entire time. I don’t know why I didn’t. My reaction was to befriend her. Of course I wanted to hold her, love her, possess her, marry her. I was fooling no one but myself. For her part, Makeda started doing all the things that she knew would annoy me. She started smoking because she knew that I hated it. She flirted openly with other people in front of me. She was trying to get me to walk away for good. It was the only rational thing for me to do.

This went on for a couple of months. Makeda went to Dallas for the annual Ethiopian soccer tournament. When she returned, the rumors came with her. She had a new boyfriend. I was livid. I had been holding out hope of a miracle reunion. I was in the darkest place that I have ever been. There was a blackness in my soul that I didn’t know how to get rid of. I don’t think that I smiled for a month. The usual jovial Brother T had disappeared off the face of the earth. More rumors surfaced, she was moving to Los Angeles.

“So, I hear you are moving to LA.”

“Yes, Terry. I am moving to LA. I can’t stand to keep breaking your heart day after day.”

I boiled over. I don’t remember what I said to her that day. But I’m sure it wasn’t pretty. A week later she was gone. I never saw her again. But I still never gave up on her.

We are all interconnected. I have always believed this. In my long career of brief relationships, I average one love per decade, I have loved women from four continents. The only differences between the girl next door and the girl of twelve time zones away involve upbringing, cultural conventions, and values. The flesh and the bones, the brain and the heart are all the same. We all have emotions. With an open mind, we can make a connection with any other person in the world. It gets tricky once the connection is made, and that’s where negotiation and cooperation come into play. Anyone who has ever been in a committed relationship for a long period of time will tell you that negotiation and cooperation are just as important as love and emotion in their partnership. This is true whether they are committed to the girl next door or the girl from twelve time zones away. There are many times when I identify with the people of other countries when the people of a great country live right outside my front door.

I was fortunate enough in my first year of the Marine Corps to serve in Iwakuni, Japan, a tiny fishing village that also served as host to a Marine Air Base. It was on the mainland, but far enough from Tokyo that I never made the trip. I experienced in Iwakuni people who had forgiven the excess of multiple nuclear attacks and embraced us as fellow human beings. Sure, there were protestors who resisted our very presence on their island, but the nice people who welcomed us into their homes were numerous and hospitable. It was here that I started my path to believing that we are all connected. I embraced the idea that we are all connected and that our different cultures are all just branched of our collective family tree.

I can remember my first trip to New York City. My friend Pete and I were overwhelmed by the people when we got off the subway on Canal Street in lower Manhattan. It was 1996 and the City was still a devil’s playground where anything and everything was available if you were in the right place at the right time. We roamed the night in search of debauchery. I can vividly remember walked down a street being buffeted by a gauntlet of diverse people and thinking, “I wish I had my own language too.” I think that I might have even mentioned that to Pete. I immediately felt kinship with the various Africans, Asians, and South Americans on the street. I wanted to go up and hug each one of them and welcome them to America. My country. The land of the free and the home of the brave. Because what is more brave than uprooting yourself from whatever corner of the world you come from and planting yourself in the hub of the wheel of the world? New York City chews up and spits out millionaires on a daily basis, yet people from all over the world go there with little but the clothes on their back and manage to survive and thrive.

In my experience, the difference between the poor people of the rest of the world and the poor of the United States is the culture of upbringing. I have had the pleasure and honor of working with a succession of immigrants to the United States from various parts of the world in my various careers. Among the first jobs that I took after my stint in the Marine Corps was a supervisory position a plastics company in Columbus in 1986. My work force was a crew of Cambodians, the very same legendary “boat people.” I encountered a group that was very family oriented, highly loyal, very talented and teachable. My crew covered all of the generations, from the grandfather type of seventy down to the teenagers barely old enough to qualify for a job. Grandfather was an accountant back in Cambodia before the country went to hell and Pol Pot took over. And then they were fleeing for their lives. It is impossible to quantify the stress and the grief that they went through to come to America, and yet they were happy-go-lucky and playful. Imagine working the graveyard shift with a seventy year-old and a seventeen year old! It was free of conflict, everyone helped each other and we were highly productive.

Here in the United States we have devolved into a cultural caste system of the haves and the have-nots. The ruling class encompasses perhaps the richest two percent of the population. The illusion of democracy is what keeps the other ninety-eight percent in check. Most of us believe that our vote counts just as much as the vote of Paul in San Jose or Linda in Bangor or Keith in Upper Arlington. Which is true to a certain extent. The whole electoral system of elections is a vehicle to ensure that individual votes mean nothing in the face of the collective vote. Whether or not this leads to election fraud is a conversation for another day.

Our cultural caste system is driving a wedge into the very heart of the most prosperous, productive and innovative country in the history of the world. Multiple wedges. We see conflict along racial lines. We have clashes of liberal and conservative ideologies concerning topics as varied as abortion, gay marriage and gun control. We see religions, all God-fearing and espousing to the same basic concepts, in conflict with each other to the point of hatred and calls for eradication. All of these conflicts have one thing in common. They take our eyes of the big picture, the real story. They distract us from the fact that the rich still get richer and the poor still get poorer. Even this is all just an illusion.

We have poverty here in the United States because the system is rigged against us. We spend more than half of the budget of our nation on programs dealing with health, aging and unemployment. Even the poverty line in the US is an illusion. The poorest people in the US would be some of the most affluent in other countries. The poverty line in the United States has been set at a level of roughly $22,000 US per year for a family of four. In the meantime, there are 1.7 billion people throughout the world who subsist on an average budget of $1 US per day. Our spending is so far out of control that the average household in the US has a credit card debt of almost $15,000 US. Roughly calculated, a person living in poverty in India or Africa could subsist for 40 years on what one US family owes to the credit card companies.

So how did we rack up all of our debt here in the US? Mine went toward computers and electronics, food and beverage, and a few medical bills. Others have racked up debts with multiple cars, houses, student loans and travel. We are the very essence of a consumer society. We are obsessed with consumables. How many of us take out a loan to buy new furniture when the old is fully functional? How many lease a new car every two to three years? How many have to have the latest greatest computer or television, knowing that it is obsolete before we pull it out of the box? We go out to expensive restaurants, run up extravagant bar tabs, take the kids to Six Flags, all on the credit card dime. Big deal. We’ll pay that off next month. Or next year. After all, there are no payments until 2012.

We have grown fat here in the US, both in the literal and figurative sense. We are an addictive society. Our expanding waistlines have come from the advent of easily accessible processed foods with little nutritional value. Our food companies go out of their way to provide cheap empty calories that taste so good that they are addictive. Little things like high fructose corn syrup and MSG go straight to our thighs. We puff away at our cancer sticks, consume gallons of adult beverages and stop by the drive thru for our 1,000 calorie appetizer. We’re in between our two jobs. Of course we eat it in the car.

There comes a time when any rational human being has to say enough is enough. There are common sense solutions to the majority of our worldly needs. The ancients harnessed the natural elements of our world to take care of their basic needs. Earth, water, wind and fire were enough for them to get by. The hunters and gatherers of old knew how to manage their resources to get the most out of them. The founders of agrarian farms knew they had to stay mobile and manage the land. They migrated to keep the fields fertile and livestock healthy. They didn’t subsist on just one crop or one meat. They were lean, healthy and athletic by necessity. Sure, they were short-lived. Back in those days a badly broken leg or minor ailment could be the death of a person. But I like to think that their simple lives served them well throughout their days.

Today we live in a world of tumult. With seven billion people in the world it is not realistic to go back to migratory tribes or hunter-gatherers. But by the same token, it is not feasible to go on planting the majority of our arable land with corn and wheat. It has been proven that cultures who dine on the indigenous plants and animals of their locality have a lower instance of obesity and heart disease. They also have a tendency to eat a more varied and seasonal diet. It makes no sense to grow only one variety of a crop when there are hundreds available. Naturally and organically grown crops are better for the land, conserve more water, and require no chemical fertilizers that end up polluting our soil and water. It makes no sense to grow our animals on steroids at factory farms when there are proven healthier ways to go about it. In short, our current business model for farming only works for those multinational companies who use it to print money like they are playing Monopoly. Which is exactly what they do.

I said earlier that there are haves and have-nots. The wonderful about us human beings is that we have a highly developed power of cognition. When forced to make decisions we have the ability to do so. I believe that we have come to a time when we are forced to make decisions. It is time for us to choose how the world moves forward. It is time for us to choose whether we burn out our planet or we grow it anew. Those of us who have the ability to make informed choices with our remaining pennies can help decide which way the world turns. It is the least that we can do for our 1.7 billion cousins out there who are looking for that $1 it takes to survive for one more day.

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” – The Buddha

Belief. I think it’s fair to assume that the vast majority of us here today believe that there should be no war. It is because we have searched within ourselves and found that peace is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all. So why is it that we spend nearly a trillion dollars a year on wars, occupations and national defense? Defense against what? In a nutshell, it boils down to defense of our ideology.

It is conventional wisdom in our country to call acts like 9/11 and Pearl Harbor unprovoked attacks. But were they really? It is documented that there was prior knowledge of both of these dark days, yet no action was taken to prevent them. The reason they both occurred was because of our creeping American Imperialism. Our hubris in thinking that we are the Deciders, the Lone Ranger to the world with Britain as our Tonto, roaming the wide-open spaces of the third world, enforcing our brand of justice (democracy) with both barrels blazing (propping up any strongman who gives us the best the deal). Why can’t we save ourselves from ourselves? The simple answer is that the majority of Americans are too apathetic and ignorant to know any better.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my country. I am proud to be an American. I spent my early adult years, some might dispute that I was really an adult, as a US Marine. I was trained in the art of killing folks and also in the art of covering my ass. I was much better at covering my ass. Fortunately I never had to use the killing part. I was a poor excuse for a Marine, but I served out my tour and moved on to the role of loose cannon. I wasted the next twenty-odd years. Once I was able to emerge from my self-medicated fog, I dedicated my self to the cause of Global Peace.

A true global Peace Movement has to start on a grassroots level. When we deconstruct a field of grass we find a billion seeds planted in a fecund topsoil. Those seeds represent a feeling of surety that lives within our hearts, your hearts. I believe, you believe, that their should be no wars. We believe that there is no justifiable reason to kill another human being. None. Zero. We all have the same family tree. We are all cousins. Our blood is interchangeable. We are one under the sun.

So the seed of this awareness sprouts in our hearts and begins to grow. As we become more committed to our belief, we acquire an emotional stake in our cause. This is like a buzzy bee, a constant reminder of what we know is good and beneficial to all. The next step is to activate that buzzy bee to pollinate our neighbors and friends and create more sprouts of grass. When placed in the right context, our stance becomes their stance and they pass the buzzy bees down the line. More grass begins to sprout and soon we have an entire field of grass and an active hive of buzzy bees. This is grassroots activism.

America has pushed it’s ideology to the point where we are no longer the big brother of the world, but rather the bully on the corner that takes the little kids lunch money if they look at us wrong. We impose our will on every other country that refuses to stand up for itself. We shame countries with our inference that it has to be our way or the highway. We discount the cultures of our cousins around the world. We pride ourselves that we are a melting pot, yet we constantly look at other Americans with distrust and suspicion. We discriminate, we profile and we live in fear. Why is this? Our city is a microcosm of America. We think ourselves enlightened and progressive. But are we really?

War is all around us. War takes place on our streets with gun battles every night. A class war is going on in our state, part of the reason that we gather today. Our country is dived by an ideological war between the right and the left. We see it all on the news. Yet all we do is sit back and complain about it. The world is ripe for a peaceful revolution. Yet we sit back and complain.

War is within us. We are at war with ourselves on a daily basis. We fight with our spouses, our children, our bosses and coworkers. We judge reckless drivers, inattentive service workers, rude people on the street, and even the talking heads and opposing politicians on our television sets. We pass through their lives in microseconds, so fast that we sometimes don’t even spark a blip on their radar screens. And yet we allow them to irritate and confound us. Our road rage is not a reflection on them but a reflection on ourselves. When we ask to speak to their supervisor it is because we can’t control our reaction to the situation. When we rail against a politician we do nothing to solve the problem. We allow our emotions to spill outside of our comfort zone. We lose our balance.

If we are ever to achieve world peace it has to start within one heart just like that seed of grass. We must first commit to have peace in our hearts. Then we commit to sharing it with others. We can reclaim our comfort zone. Then we reclaim our street. Then we reclaim our state. Then comes the country, and then the world.

We all hold within us the greatest computer ever built, the human brain. We degrade its efficiency with pain and emotion, abuse and dependency, self-medication and delusion. If our collective species were to find its balance, imagine the things that we can do, the solutions we can come up with. Cancer gone! AIDS gone! Energy crisis gone! World hunger gone! Climate change gone! Unemployment gone! War gone!

War gone? If we cooperate to solve the world’s problems what would we have to fight about? Cooperation is the key. The problem is, big business doesn’t want to cooperate. It is not in their best interests to do so. They make too much money with their obsolete technologies, their ineffective drugs, and their engineered crops, that they will spend millions to keep the solutions suppressed. It is up to us to make a stand. To boycott those who hold back our solutions. To vote out those who refuse to represent us. To make sure that our majority isn’t marginalized again.

It is up to us to observe and analyze. To deduce what is good and beneficial for all. To sprout that little grass seed in our hearts. To let our emotions become the buzzy bees who pollinate the seeds of others. To start a movement that becomes a huge grassy field. This is grassroots activism. Joy to Power!

If you study evolution there is compelling evidence that all creatures originated in the sea. Over half of our body is water. As a fetus grows inside the womb, she starts out resembling a tadpole and gradually develops into a perfect little human being. This is achieved through breathing in nourishing amniotic fluid and digesting it much as a fish in water. For nine months the fetus is dependant upon the nutrients and building blocks contained in this fluid. When the baby finally makes her grand entrance into the world, she has to quickly adapt to breathing oxygen. It is the first of a million adaptations that she will make in her life.

For the first few years of her life, our child, let’s call her Lucy, is totally dependant on her parents and extended family. She needs help with feeding, her diapers need changed and she even needs to be placed in her cribs just so to avoid dying in her sleep. As she grows, little Lucy will learn how to roll over, sit up,  get onto her hands and knees. She will go from her mother’s milk, to formula or baby food, to solids. She will learn to crawl and to walk. She will learn to make sounds, recognize words, form them with her mouth and vocal cords, and finally make sentences. With every one of these incremental little adaptations, Lucy is going to find joy, her parents are going to find bliss, and her extended family is going to find pride.

Lucy will find children her own age, maybe at the day care or out in the yard at the village. She will learn to socialize by trial and error. She will learn about right and wrong and which one works for her. She will learn about like and dislike, love and hate and personal preference. She will go to school and learn about the world around her. As she navigates through school, Lucy will have to dodge a series of obstacles, some by design, others by chance, that will make her question her very existence and the meaning of her life. She will run into speed bumps in the most importune places. She will be betrayed by the people that she loves and pleasantly surprised by the people that she doesn’t. She will run the gamut of emotions. How she handles each of them will determine her relative success in life.

As sure as the sun comes up each day, we all face challenges in our life. Whether you have a final exam in your microbiology class or you face a 10-hour shift at the Citgo station, you will have a challenge today. Sometimes the challenge is just getting out of bed. Sometimes the challenge is dealing with that one extra beer that you shouldn’t have last night. Sometimes the challenge is paying that electric bill when there’s no money left in the checking account. It might be running out of toothpaste. It is not the challenge that matters, it is how you deal with it. You will face the gamut of emotions. No matter how much planning you do, your life will be contingent on a plethora of other factors.

I like to think of contingency like a million little fishy hooks. Every waking minute of every day, life dangles a fishhook in front of you. It might be the temptation to eat that extra cookie or drink that extra beer. It might be that girl who lives upstairs that you know you shouldn’t make a move on. But what if you should? It might be that guy at work who annoys you. Should you give him a piece of your mind? It might be road rage.  It might be that guy on the corner with the cool looking fake Rolexes. It might be the temptation not to wear a condom. I could fill up a James Michener sized book with the contingencies that we face in our everyday lives.

With contingency comes choice and opportunity. If the stoplight turns yellow in front of you, do you stop, plow through it, or dive into the right turn on red lane to save that few seconds? If your favorite bartender winks at you, do you assume that she wants you or realize that she’s just being playful? If you encounter an end cap full of buy-one-get-one ice cream at the grocery, do you walk right past, grab two cartons, or go get another cart and fill it up? Each one of the choices could change the course of your life in a second.

With contingency comes emotion. I’ve come to think of emotions as buzzy bees zipping around in my mind. When we are calm and composed, our emotions are like docile bees going around and pollinating the synapses in our brain. They are omnipresent, ready to strike at any given moment. When we are focused, the bees keep their place and do their job making honey. When we lose focus, obsess on this or that, it is like grabbing the hive and giving it a big shake. The bees become excited and angry. The buzz becomes so loud in our brain that we can think of little else. We become so obsessed with swatting that bee, beating that stoplight, sleeping with that bartender, telling off that coworker, eating that ice cream, that everything else becomes secondary to that emotion. We lose our momentum and it changes the course of our lives.

But what if we deal with those bees in a different way? What if we teach Lucy how to deal with her emotions from a very early age? What if we could do this will all of our children? A large portion of a child’s schooling is made up of math, science and language. Our children are drilled in these subjects through rote memorization. We teach them for The Test. When they pass that test, we teach them for The Next Test. And so on, and so on. In the mean time, a large part of their emotional development is carried on in their interactions with other children. If they are too large or too small, too short or too tall, too light or too dark, talk too funny or look too funny, they get left behind. Right or wrong, this is human nature.

I would suggest that our emotional development needs to start much earlier and more targeted towards acceptance. Kids are resilient, but only if you get to them early enough. The child of the new millennium grows in a melting pot environment. America is not homogenous. Everywhere you look there are beautiful people of all shapes, sizes and hues. Understanding that our differences are what makes us beautiful is the key to growing up whole and loving. Rather than leaving kids to discover their differences on their own, why not place an emphasis on it from preschool and beyond. Why not build a psychology of acceptance into our curriculum. It’s the key to avoiding those fishy hooks. It’s the key to the right kind of buzzy bees. The will always be bullies, bigots and haters. But your kid doesn’t have to be one of them.