A Moment in Time

Zooey helps me harvest in the garden for the evening's scalloped potatoes.

Sometimes it's nicer to be alone, though, in a secluded spot.

Later, homemade corn tortillas for fish tacos, in the tortilla warmer.

On Worry

Back in the day when this blog wasn't this blog and I was doing a lot more bitching than anything else, I used to quote the Hagakure a lot more than I do now, because it is a source of comfort.  I've realized that it is still so, now, even though I don't need comfort as much as I did then.  So I suppose I'll take that back up again (reading the Hagakure, not the bitching).  For even if all is well, we can all use some words to hold on to, and to ponder.  So here is one of my old favorites from the Hagakure.

"Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige's wall there was this one: ''Matters of great concern should be treated lightly.''  Master Ittei commented, ''Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.''  Among one's affairs there should not be more than two or three matters of what one could call great concern.  If these are deliberated upon in ordinary times, they can be understood.  Thinking about things previously and then handling them lightly when the time comes is what this is all about.  To face an event and solve it lightly is difficult if you are not resolved beforehand, and there will always be uncertainty in hitting your mark.  However, if the foundation is laid previously, you can think of the saying, "Matters of great concern should be treated lightly,'' as your own basis for action.

Epistemic Failure

Second crop of arugula getting bigger, 2/10/10

I just spent nine hours up to my armpits in the guts of SNMP agent code, which if you recognize what that is, means that you know the stench inside of my brain at the moment. Consider yourself a blessed child of the universe if that makes no sense.

To get the foul brain stench out, I spent a couple of hours ripping up my lawn. Yup, ripping that sucker right out. For some reason, the landscapers who put it in back when my home decided that a quarter inch of topsoil on top of this pacific northwest clay was just fine, lawnwise. Turns out, not so much. Turns out, rain on grass on a quarter inch of soil on top of clay just kind of pools up, pretty quicklike, and the moss and weeds move in. So I'm ripping that crap out, working ten yards of compost back into the clay, and then I'll put some native grasses on top. Seriously, Kentucky Bluegrass on clay in western Washington? Dare I call those landscapers morons?

So that is what it has come down to: me versus a lawn. And versus Finn, who seems to think that gardens are not for veggies, but rather for pooping. Everywhere. Three and a half years ago I helped forge a new route up one of the tallest peaks in the Andes, and today I'm digging up lawns in the rain and trying to catch our cat pooping in my tomatoes. Methinks I need to get a porch rocker, a knife, and some spare time to whittle.

But seriously, I'm enjoying the hell out of myself. One of my former associates, a woman who is somewhat well known for some solo first ascents up big wall routes ("big" meaning "you sleep on the wall for a few days since it takes that long to climb") and who was a technical assistant on some films in pakistan, climbing routes to run lines and support the camera crews as they hung suspended over voids, is one of my more frequent facebook commenters. About adventures? No. Climbing? No. Mountains? No. Naw, we chat back and forth about the best way to protect tomato plants from wind and cold, how to amend soil, etc. A little while ago, she gave birth to her first child, a little girl who today walked for the first time; no mention of future climbs in her happy announcement. And I was hilling up soil around my rampant potato plants when I took a break from work today, while Finn hunted mice twenty feet away.

I think that I'm beginning to sound somewhat repetitious. At this point, even I get it: yeah, it's nice to have a garden to hang out with, and no, I don't seem to do a whole lot of crazy adventures anymore.

I suppose that I keep coming back to it because I need to understand. This kind of life that I've got going here is not something that I would have pursued not too long ago, nor was it something that I thought I wanted. It's like how we keep dreaming the same dream, over and over, when something is bothering us. And so here I am, feeling pretty good about things overall, and wondering why that is.

I never used to wonder about things when I felt crappy. Seemed like that was status quo.

Yeah, I got my ass kicked by Topology. Yes I did.

This post at Futility Closet caught my eye:

Here is a book lying on a table. Open it. Look at the first page. Measure its thickness. It is very thick indeed for a single sheet of paper — one half inch thick. Now turn to the second page of the book. How thick is this second sheet of paper? One fourth inch thick. And the third page of the book, how thick is this third sheet of paper? One eighth inch thick, etc. ad infinitum. We are to posit not only that each page of the book is followed by an immediate successor the thickness of which is one half that of the immediately preceding page but also (and this is not unimportant) that each page is separated from page 1 by a finite number of pages. These two conditions are logically compatible: there is no certifiable contradiction in their joint assertion. But they mutually entail that there is no last page in the book. Close the book. Turn it over so that the front cover of the book is now lying face down upon the table. Now, slowly lift the back cover of the book with the aim of exposing to view the stack of pages lying beneath it. There is nothing to see. For there is no last page in the book to meet our gaze.

An interesting (and very cool) twist on the nature of infinity. Or, should I say, infinities, for there is not just one.

There are a lot of curious things about allowing the existence of infinite things, which is one of the primary reasons why I do the kind of work that I do. I was fascinated by the notions that crop up. Like the fact that once you formalize the concept of a "problem" that can be solved and go on to formalize its difficulty, then in very short order you come to realize how tiny our intellect is. (Viz., as I have said too often, there are not only infinitely more problems that we cannot solve, there are infinitely many that we can't even adequately describe. This is very easy to prove, definitively, with easy math.)

But infinities have been bugging people for ages. Aristotle, that most famous of misguided philosophers, once wrote a version of Zeno's Paradox thusly: "In a race, the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead."

Obviously untrue, yes? Put in more familiar terms, you can never leave the room that you're in because you must first walk half the distance to the door. And then half again, and so on. But half of a finite quantity is always another finite quantity. Nevertheless, I still somehow manage to walk from my office to the coffee maker every morning, and the Boston Marathon is still run every year despite the algebraic obviousness that it can't actually happen at all.

Things like this have confounded scientists for centuries. There was a time when nobody could comprehend the idea of empty space, since they already knew of radio waves. As a result, they tried to prove (without success) of the existence of a material "ether" that transmitted the wave effects. And when confronted with proof that light is neither wave nor particle, but rather both, their minds rebelled.

And yet today, we're comfortable with the dual nature of matter (both waves as well as particles), and given proof that the ether cannot exist we now simply accept the fact that electromagnetic radiation propogates through empty space without any other medium, and the mathematical notion of limits has long since dispensed with any curiosity about the answer to Zeno.

Dare I say that there is an element of faith involved here?

Snapoutofit

It has been something of a rough weekend and a rough start of a week for me. Some things that are pretty important to me and my own sense of self-worth kind of imploded, and I've been thoughtful ever since.

I'm reminded of a quote by Joseph Campbell:

Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.

That is, where we fail is where we have the chance to learn what our shortcomings are and eventually succeed in overcoming them. Without the knowledge of what we lack, we can't become better. I get that, and I'm trying to put it into action.

It's just that the colossal failure in the first place is a serious bummer.

And now a followup video that never fails to make me smile no matter how bummed out I get:

Big Ideas

So, I'm taking this basic mountaineering course.  It's kind of weird to have people telling me things that I know by rote.  It's weirder still to try to explain to people why I'm taking the course.  "Wait," they say, "you've climbed that shit, on your own, and you're taking this class?"

Years ago, I did a series of leadership seminars.  Things that were intended to teach group dynamics, how to lead, what it means to lead, the downfalls thereof, etc. etc.  An interesting concept that I picked up from that was what they called (if I recall correctly) the chain of failure.  Namely, that after disaster or accident, be it major or minor, you can trace back the bad decisions that led to it, sometimes for years.  A chain of one bad decision after another.  The idea was to be able to identify, in the future, when you were starting to make bad decisions, and to see where they were leading you.

Personally, I'm a big believer in reading the signs of what the world is saying to you.  I feel like there's a reason why people experience strings of bad luck in their lives.  It has everything to do with how we lead our lives, and the decisions that we make on a daily basis.  If we start to notice things going downhill, it's time to stop and reevaluate.

But similarly, if all is well and we feel like we're in control, I think that it's time to stop and reassess the fundamentals.  Overconfidence has killed more than one person, or dream.  Sometimes the world helps out with that by kicking us with bad luck just as we think we've got it made, just to press the point home.

So I'm taking a fundamental climbing course after years of climbing solo on steep rock and in high mountains; after making expeditions up big peaks and new lines; after having taught this very stuff for years to rank beginners.  And each time I go, I find myself astonished that I'm learning something new.  I learn about technique that has changed since I started; I learn about the area, to which I recently moved; I learn about the ethics and style of my community; I learn about leadership in ways that I had not previously considered. 

And I learn about teaching.  I taught this very type of course for years and years back in Colorado.  But now, from the students' perspective, I see people teaching it to me.  They're very good, and I appreciate that.  But there is a constant and pervasive message of .... something.  Clanishness?  Entitlement?  I dunno.  I see the teaching staff treating the newbies as... something less.

That really resounds with me.  I think back, and I can remember doing the same thing.  I was full of accomplishments when I started teaching, full of daring, full of bravado.  I still am.  But now I'm on the other side of the bench.  I'm learning so much more than they intended to teach.  I'm learning what it means to be a teacher.  I can see and understand my fellow students' struggles, and I see where the teachers' curriculum is frankly absurd and doesn't advance the program.  But much more than that, I am starting to see how the sociology of groups plays such a huge part in learning.  When people feel that they are a part of something, and accepted, they can excel.  And if rejected... failure is a likely option for most.

That's a huge lesson, and it's not at all limited to my narrow little example. 

On Understanding Complexity (or, Looking Inwards)*

As a scientist**, I often find myself turning to works of philosophy to consider questions that science cannot answer.  Contrary to popular belief in some corners, we freely admit that those questions exist -- because, by necessity, there must be first principles and science only deals with matters that follow from them.

For example, what does it mean to live a correct life?  This is partially a question of morality, but what is morally correct?  Why, for example, is the Golden Rule any better, from a moral standpoint, than Might Makes Right?  There is no easy answer.  One's choice is simply a preference than cannot be "proven" to be superior.  The christian bible is essentially an historical collection of first principles (the Old Testament) with errata and appendices (the New Testament) that provides a convenient starting point, but one which is not really usable by anyone who does not accept that morality is what God says it is, particularly when He had such a penchant for contradiction and His Children have such a tendency for picking and choosing.

Lately I've been reading a lot of Dennett, particularly his musings about determinism and free will.   The nice thing about Dennett, beyond his readability, is his thoroughness.  It's not enough, for example, to say that we have free will because we can make personal choices -- Dennett probes the source of those choices.  He uses the clever example of the spex ichneumoneus wasp, which lays eggs next to a paralyzed cricket.  When the time comes for egg laying, he quotes a biologist, the wasp Spex builds a burrow for the purpose and seeks out a cricket ... She (then) drags the cricket into the burrow ... and the wasp grubs feed off (it).  To the human mind, (this) seemingly purposeful routine conveys a convincing flavor of logic.  He then goes on to describe how the nefarious biologists vex the poor wasp by moving her paralyzed cricket around, to which the wasp can only respond by going through apparently preprogrammed biological actions that -- had she actually been using logic and reasoning -- she would not have done, for apparently the wasp inspects the burrow first, before dragging the cricket inside.   If the cricket is moved a few inches away while the wasp is inside making her preliminary inspection, the wasp ... will bring the cricket back to the threshold, but not inside, and will repeat the prepratory procedure. ... On one occasion, (the biologists moved the cricket) forty times, always with the same result.  "The poor wasp is unmasked," writes Dennett: "she is not a free agent, but rather at the mercy of brute physical causation, driven inexorably into her states and activities by features of the environment outside of her control."

There was a time, long ago during the Age of Reason and the young ascendency of empiricism, when it was thought that the time would come when the future could be predicted through mathematics.  Physics, went the reasoning, was guided by fixed laws, and hence the path of a particle through space (and thereby its future) was predetermined by the position and velocity of of every other particle in the universe.  All that was needed was the precise identification of the latter two quantities.

Today, we know that prediction of the behavior of something as simple as a quadratic mapping -- practically the 2nd most simple type of nontrivial equation known to mathematics -- is fundamentally unknowable, given the basic limits on precision in the real universe and our inability to capture anything except the finite in an empirical sense.   Long ago, I once wrote something along these lines regarding the number of problems in the universe: how not only that the number of provably solvable problems is finite, but that the number of humanly indescribable (much less solvable) problems is uncountably infinite***.

We are meek and small animals, we are.  Well, small, anyhow.

*This line of thought actually has a point and is going somewhere, I think, someday, although the ride may take innumerable side trips.  Who knows.  It makes some kind of weird sense to me.

**I use that term loosely these days, given that I have long since sold out, as it were.

***That particular statement is provable, too.

Thursday Night Music

Once while driving through Texas, I found an AM radio station that played this song on an infinite loop. I listened to it for four hours*, through the night, before it faded into static. Find the album version**, it's better than the live videos (with its spanish guitar interlude; I'm such a sucker for spanish guitar).

"Now when I talked to God I knew he'd understand, he said 'stick by me, I'll be your guiding hand, but don't ask me what I think of you, I might not give the answer that you want me to...'"

*Texas is BIG.
**"Then Play On" - ping me if you can't find it.

Retrospective

The Maroon Bells

Elk Mountain Range, Colorado

"Dude, please--they're called long-term bivy sacks."

-- A Mountain Rescue colleague who objected

to my use of the word "body bags"

"In my end, is the beginning."

-- Mary, Queen of Scots, 1542-1587

"When you die it negates the whole game: you haven't just fucked yourself, you've hurt lots of other people--that's when it becomes irresponsible and tragic."

-- Greg Child, famous Australian climber

We recently did a mission out here, a vanilla search and rescue for a missing skier.  They disappear all the time out in the Mt. Baker Wilderness, especially in autumn, winter, and spring.  This poor guy had skied up onto a cornice, and it had collapsed underneath him; his wife said that he was 20 meters from her and "just disappeared."   We found his body two days later.

Then there's the friend of my dad's, back in about 1977 or so.  He was a peak-bagger in Colorado, and more particularly, a bagger of 14'ers: someone who tries to summit every one of the 54 Colorado peaks that are higher than 14,000 feet.  One weekend, he'd topped out on one of the two Maroon Bells, which are renowned for their awful, crappy rock.  He was walking back down the trail, far past the difficult and dangerous sections, when the part of the trail that he was on sloughed off and slid down a vertical face, 1000 feet.

Trail in the Mt. Baker Wilderness,

in summer

A friend of mine was climbing a difficult route in Eldorado Springs and got off route.  Instead of downclimbing, she kept going, onto territory far out of her ability.  She told me later that she put in two pieces of protection, a good microcam (a kind of spring-loaded device that goes into parallel cracks), followed by a brassy (very small brass nut) in a suspect notch.  She climbed five feet higher, and then fell.  The brassy pulled out, spinning her sideways and upside-down, but the cam held.  She impacted the rock wall on her side, and her belayer reported on the 911 call that "she's unconscious and blood is streaming out of her helmet."  She survived that one.  Barely.

The worst climbing accident to ever happen to me occurred when I was ten years old.  I lived in a valley, and sandstone cliffs marked its boundaries.  A friend and I decided to friction up one side, which (looking back on it now) was an easy climb, but somewhat silly for a couple of preteens to attempt.  We got about halfway up when my friend started lobbing down loose rocks; one hit me on the forehead.  I said "OW!" and put my hand to my head; he looked down, freaked out, and took off.  I looked at my hand and saw blood all over it.  Funny, it didn't even really hurt.  I almost bled out that day, but managed to make it back to the house (and completely freak out my mother, for what it's worth).  Since then I've taken a lot of truly epic falls, but never been as badly injured as that.

Once, though, I almost walked off a cornice.  On a big peak.  I was leading the ropeline: me, my friend Bob, and my Colorado rock/ice climbing partner Gabrielle.  We were on the summit of a "little" peak in Ecuador: at a mere 19,500', it didn't really count for much as Andes peaks go.  There were really good views up there, or so I'm told: we were in a total white-out at the top.  We enjoyed our rest at the top, and then started for the first rappel.  It seemed like we walked for a long time, and I paused.  Bob called out "stop.  stop.  This is too far."  The fog and mist and blowing snow parted for a moment -- just a moment -- and I saw clouds below me, directly in front of me, not 20 feet away.  I was standing on a cornice, Bob was on the border, and Gabrielle was the only one on firm land.   We high-tailed it back, got our bearings, and made it off that mountain.

We think we've got things figured out, in our daily lives, but if there's one thing that these experiences have taught me, it's that we don't.  We just don't.  I suppose that's yet another reason why climbing is so vital and real to me:  it's a simple thing, to put a foot up another few inches and stand upon it, but in that motion lie some deep truths and pressing realities that are all too easy to lose sight of in the repetitious grind of daily life.

Be safe.

Curious Facts About Time

Years ago, I wrote a dissertation on the synchronization of clocks to earn my Master of Science degree, a fact that has come in handy for some work that I'm currently doing now.  Also, it's just freaking interesting stuff.  Some thoughts:

• Every few years, scientists at NOAA introduce a leap second into the official time.  Why?  Because the rotational speed of the earth is slowing down due to tidal friction.  There have been 24 leap seconds added since 1972, which comes out to about 0.65 added leap seconds each year.  At this rate, the day will have 25 hours in about five and one-half millenia.  If you can wait the same span of time since Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in his coup d'etat against the Senatus Populusque Romanus (SPQR), then you'll get an extra half hour for your lunch break.
  
• Those same kind folk at NOAA broadcast an AM radio signal from station WWV that reports the current time, accurate to within about a second or so.  That's what all those self-setting clocks listen to, and it's how they set themselves.
  
• There is no such thing as simultaneity, at least not for everyone.  This is a consequence of relativity.  Events that I perceive as being simultaneous may not appear the same way to you, with one or the other happening first.  This has deep implications for cause-and-effect, and it places fundamental limits on just how synchronized two clocks can be. 
  
• Einstein's investigation into relativity began in his childhood.  He reports that he wondered what he would see in a mirror, were he to hold it and go faster than the speed of light.  The fundamental insights of Special Relativity are nothing more than simple algebra problems that follow from the assumption that the speed of light is fixed and the fact that the hypotenuse of a right triangle is longer than its other two sides.  From these two facts, Einstein deduced gravitational lensing and the bending of light itself, time dilation between reference frames moving at wildly different speeds, and the heady conclusion that space itself can be warped and bent.
• Before the Big Bang, there was no time.  Hence it makes no sense to say "before the Big Bang."  Astronomers now know the structure of the universe after only the tiniest of increments after the Big Bang, but nobody can yet say what was there "before," and they never will because there was no before.  The $1,000,000 question is: what started time?  Who wound the clock?
  
• The universe is now bigger than there is time enough for light from one end to reach the other, and it's still expanding faster.  Hence light from the most distant star on your left will never reach the most distant star on your right.
• Buddhists have a saying that the only time is the Now; everything else is simply noise in our minds.  That to find happiness, one need only quiet that noise and live in this moment, the one right now.
• Although today we keep track of local time via standardized time zones, these are only rough approximations.  There exists the notion of a true local time at every point on the globe.  The local time for you, a few miles away from me, is a few minutes different than my own.  Mariners once used this notion (along with a sextant) to find when the sun reached its apex at noon, and by comparison to a known standard (GMT) could compute how far east or west they were of that standard based on the difference between local noon and GMT noon.  Every 15º change in longitude represents one hour's difference in local times.
  
• To make that computation, they needed accurate clocks.  Even a small drift in the clock time could lead to many miles of error in the longitude calculation.  Pendulum clocks -- the most accurate of mechanical land-based clocks -- are useless on a pitching and rolling ship.  In 1714, Britain announced a prize of £20,000 for the first person who could design a non-pendulum clock that would be accurate enough for longitude calculations at sea.  The winner, John Harrison, labored until 1761 before finally succeeding.  The golden age of the British Navy followed shortly thereafter as they used this new tool to build (and later defend) an Empire.
  
• Pendulum clocks placed in proximity on the same wall will eventually synchronize their pendulum motions due to subtle physical feedback motions imparted to the wall.  What appears to be a solid wall is in fact an elastic medium through which the two clocks find a common harmonic swing.
  
• The motion of a pendulum, although described by what may be among the simplest of physical equations, becomes indeterminate and chaotic -- the most complex of dynamic behavior -- when driven by an outside force.  (Hence the unusability at sea!)
• It is possible to determine North if you're lost using only an analog watch.  In our northern hemisphere, point the hour hand towards the sun, and then bisect the angle between the hour hand the the 12 o'clock mark.  That line is the north/south line; north will be the direction further from the sun.  (Same deal in the southern hemisphere, except north is the direction closer to the sun.)  Don't have an analog watch, but you know the correct time, you digital watch wearer, you?  A drawing of an analog watch on a piece of paper works just as well.  Can't see the sun due to overcast?  As long as you can cast a shadow, you do the same thing with a drawing on the ground and a stick.  If all this is too much to remember, then just remember this: wait until noon, and then walk away from the sun.  You'll be walking north.  (Or towards the sun, for you lucky Southern Hemisphereans.)
  
• Not exactly a time fact, but a lost-persons fact: if you are lost, and an aircraft flies overhead and spots you, do NOT wave your arms to attract attention.  That is the "wave-off" signal that signifies that all is well and that you do not need help.
• The Global Positioning System (GPS) that you use in that TomTom navigator in your car works by comparing differential time updates between satellites.  Each satellite is, in effect, an orbiting atomic clock with a radio transmitter.  The GPS you use knows where the satellites should be, and by comparing the differences in reported time from several, it can triangulate its location relative to the satellites.  Commercial and military GPS systems probably have the same precision (i.e., not much variability in their estimates), but the commercial signal is intentionally downgraded in accuracy (i.e., the exact location they decide you're at is not as good).  Even so, the high precision means that even if you don't know where you are to within +/-30 feet, you can still see a two-foot change in position, anywhere on the earth's surface.  Such is the power of the nanosecond.
  

Gardening

So, the new 4'x12'1' raised bed is now in place, and I've tilled the bejeebus out of the inside portion, pulling up innumerable rocks and even one giant tree root.  The clover that formerly covered the base of the bed area is now chopped into a bazillion tiny fine particles, which has turned the clay soil from "sterile gray" to "loamy black," almost by magic.  As I stood back after my exertions, happy and sweaty, I suddenly realized.... that the bed was a foot too close to the patio, and somehow skewed at a funny angle.  D'OH!  Oh well, I'll right those wrongs on saturday, after the snowstorm blows through here tomorrow.  The next step is to pound in some rebar and build a hoop house over the bed, so that the tomatoes and basil that I'm going to plant in there next spring actually have a chance to grow and ripen through the (relatively) short hot-growth season here amid all the hungry deer that skulk into my yard in the mornings intent on turning my herbs and vegetables into piles of deer poop.  The final step will come in the spring, when I order a truckload of compost to fill the bed.

I've definitely turned into a gardening maniac.  Part of it has to do with a distaste for buying produce that has been shipped from Peru (seriously.  Avocados from Peru) or even just as close as California -- if I can organically grow cucumbers and horseradish in my back yard, why should I be supporting an industry that ships the same food thousands of miles?  And why am I eating oranges in december -- just because I can?  They're out of season here.  It's a waste.  I view manicured lawns as a kind of shame now: where there could be a row of dill and calendula, why place a lawn?  Each summer weekend, my neighbors fire up their two-stroke gasoline mowers to perform the chore of trimming, blowing fumes into the air, while I weed my garden beds; they return inside either none the happier or perhaps even frustrated at another hour of another day lost to appearances, while I come inside feeling at peace from the meditation of the connection to earth and soil.

That's the crux, really: it has simply to do with reconnecting with the earth: getting dirt under my fingernails, improving the land, building and creating something living and vital where before there was nothing.  We often hear how modern life is too fast, too hectic -- "life out of balance," as the tagline for the movie Koyaanisqatsi so convincingly portrayed it, way back in 1983.  There are certain unavoidable facts about being human, and one of them is that we cannot live  in isolation from the world, no matter how much we might think we want to do so.

Perhaps this philosophical meandering is stupid.  I wouldn't disagree, were someone to think so.  But I do know that come autumn, my neighbors have bags of lawn trimmings as their crops, while I have horseradish, dill, tomatoes, potatoes, garlic, mint, corn, squash, basil, calendula, rhubarb, blueberries, raspberries, lettuce, cucumbers, spinach, peppers, dandelions, carrots, peas, onions, chives, rosemary.  And we spend the same amount of time out there.

So I till, and plan; I start seedlings and put the autumn bulbs in the ground; I welcome the shorter days as harbingers of a new spring to come, and I'm glad to be covered in mud.

Thought For The Day

"When asked by a pagan to sum up the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg, Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus, replied: "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the Torah -- and everything else is only commentary." His Holiness the Dalai Lama put it even more succinctly when he said: "My religion is kindness."


These traditions have also pointed out that it is not sufficient to confine our benevolence to those we find congenial -- to our own ethnic, national or ideological group. We must have what one of the Chinese sages called jian ai, "concern for everybody." If practiced assiduously -- "all day and every day," as Confucius enjoined -- we begin to appreciate our profound interdependence and become fully humane."

--Author and former Roman Catholic nun, Karen Armstrong