Ship of Theseus

​I didn’t write a column last week. It was an interesting week, there was a lot going on or, at least, it felt like there was a lot going on. There was a lot going on. None of which I am going to share here with you today. It’s funny how life can get to be so routine that it becomes easy and almost comfortable to take what’s familiar and pleasant for granted. The things we have, the people, the life we lead, the opportunities, etc. we can just wake up every day and expect it in our lives, we forget to enjoy it and to covet it. I try to make it a point not to do that, at least with the things that are the most important to me and the most fragile, in the sense that they will not always be there; life is fluid, it’s organic and we have to remember and appreciate that. So I do, and it may not always be so obvious to people why I do and say some of the things that I do and say, nevertheless it’s not complicated and, if you ask, I am willing to share.


Life is too fragile and the people in our lives are too fragile for us to make assumptions, it never hurts to ask, even if you think you already know the answer, and to communicate—sometimes it seems hard, because sometimes it is hard, but the slightest bit of effort and insight will always make a world of difference. I like to think about that scene in The Office: Pam and Jim had, kind of been struggling, it was shortly after Jim started splitting his time between Scranton and Philadelphia, the pair stopped communicating, at least about the little stuff, which would ultimately be the important stuff—the continued conversation about the small things all of the time makes talking about the difficult things that much easier—anyway, Jim was getting ready to leave for Philly and, walking to his car, he stopped, he came back, and gave Pam a hug and, for a moment, she stood there and let Jim hug her, she didn’t hug back, and then she both realized and made the conscious decision to let go of the ‘block,’ all of the things that she had found it difficult to talk about and deal with, and she hugged him, and the two of them began to work through it. Even the Pam’s and Jim’s have to consciously remember to communicate, because even for them it can actually be work, but only if they loose sight what makes them Pam and Jim.





I bought a treadmill. It’s in my bedroom. I ran cross-country in high school to condition for basketball and within a few weeks I was one of the best runners on the team. Since then running has continued to be an important part of my life. No, I’m not one of those marathon running cross-fit lunatics that casually judges people who don’t work out 10 hours a day every day for the better part of their lives. The simple truth is a persons’ body was not designed to exert in that way; in the same way that we were not designed to eat three chemically induced meals a day with more sugar than protein—it annoys me when people are more inclined to believe what they hear and not the inherent truths apparent via a few brief moments of conscious reflection…

Um, anyway, I got a treadmill...

The Greek philosophers, although we hear a great deal, only about how they exercise their minds, were known, as well, for finding balance in the intellectual the emotional and the physical, and that working and maintaining your body not only benefits your body—in a number of physical, uh, enterprises ;)—but it’s equally as healthy and beneficial for you emotionally and intellectually, as well. I was beginning to find increasingly difficult to get to the gym and it was getting to me, ergo: treadmill. I’ve been running at least two miles every day and I feel fantastic! It took a few days to get back into the rhythm of things but when you challenge yourself, just a little, in every aspect of your life all of which are rooted somewhere in the intellectual, the emotional, and/or the physical, the challenges that life brings really don’t seem to challenging. I struggle a bit with depression and anxiety, and either of them can declare themselves without warning, and once they do, if I don’t manage it, they act as catalyst for a spiraling disaster of chimeric upheaval, which is to say that an intelligent and creative mind, when in emotional distress can invent awful, awful truths that can seem alarmingly real. I manage it, for the most part, but without exercise it’s considerably more difficult.

Reading helps too.

I’ve been reading S.: Ship of Theseus by Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams, it was a gift, and it’s really good, it’s interesting because it’s layered in story and in interpretation, subjective in a way that, although all books are—or can be—is conceived in a way that is almost romantically so. The Ship of Theseus concept, philosophically, is rooted, in the ideology of identity, in the question that if an objects elements have all been replaced is that object, fundamentally, the same object. What is it that makes a body? The individual components or pieces, or the observable sum of the collection of parts?

And, I wonder how that might relate to the meaning, or intention of this particular column? (And for the sake of abstract speculation: what does the sum of my respective columns say about me? Who am I to you, based solely on how my columns read, and what they are about...)