Into the Wilderness 2026

 For the period from Wednesday 2/18/2026 until noon on Saturday 4/4/2026, I will once again go into the Wilderness. This will be for the 9th time.  

The reasons are to come to grips with distraction, experience silence, constructive idleness, and develop the habit of working on aim as I continue to explore life and living.  I will only do the task at hand, whatever that may be.

The rules for Wilderness 2026:

I am idle unless I am working on Aim.

I work only on Aim, items listed in Performance Planning or on other aim-related items that may come up as worthy of action.

It is intended that I find things that require action and going out to do, as opposed to sedentary activities.

Reading, studying, or research on comedy, acting, and life-philosophy, however, are encouraged, especially at times that would otherwise be spent in distraction.

Continuing physical activity, such as daily exercise, golf, pool, and whatever others, is encouraged.

Social interaction is encouraged, especially where it concerns the acting and apartment communities.

The journal will be continued and used, as now, to record thoughts on life and living, and anything else that comes to mind.

Avoid scrolling on Internet feeds, limit Facebook and Email to acting related posts.  Developing presences on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube are allowed.

There is to be no posting of opinions nor commenting on the posts of others.  The exception is for family members or where a response is required.

Viewing TV before 9PM is a no-no, and then only with my wife, or guests, to catch the news.

Puzzles are limited to one Sudoku and the Woodoku enigma du jour.

   Go to bed by 12:30 AM, daily.

Ground Hog Day Updated--Again, and for the fourth time

This update is short, a short sentence.  The situation remains the same except she never goes out.  We move about the building but always inside. 

She's a warrior, going on to her fifth year since the fall.  Cannot say there's been improvement, but on the other hand there has been only a little decline.

As for me, the carers here allow me to go about my outside activities knowing she's in good hands.  This may be the last of the Ground Hog Day updates. If he sees his shadow, or not, let us hope for at least 6 more years of life.

Memento Mori

 Called a friend to talk about a new idea, and he said, for starters out of the blue, "I've got six months to live." A neighbor with liver cancer, has a year. Another friend, same floor down the hall, died today; "Eaten up with cancer." Carola is on borrowed time.   Any number of my friends and neighbors have already died.  I am the last of my generation on the Lina side.  There are several of the same generation on my mother's side because she had siblings who were younger and they had children.

Various...isms say to remember death, so that's what I am doing.  I wrote another blog post with my beliefs about it, On the Subject of Death, in March 2025.

As for me, I am 86 years old, in excellent health and condition. I should live a long time, genetically 100 years or more, barring any sort of accident.  That's less than fourteen more.  That many ago, would be 2012.  Thanks to my logs, history, and planning files, it can be reconstructed. It would be interesting, although it would be of no practical value.  The present is a good place to start.  Even that is an exercise in futility.

There are a few things of this body that could run amok: heart, lungs, bronchia, knees, feet.  The heart is genetic, the breathing apparatus from smoking, knees and feet from age, wear, and tear.  The only thing to do is continue treatments from appropriate doctors and maintain this healthy lifestyle.  There is no cause for alarm.

This one, the persona who is writing this, will cease to exist at death.  Core-being will continue and be a little better than he was when he came into this lifetime.  There will be some memories that we share that will be retained by him.  A lot of the good we did was important at the time but, even now, much of it has faded away.  The only things that haven't are the effects we've had on others, and, if that happened, those things may have passed along to others.  The most noticeable "others" being family.

Core-being is sufficiently apart from the rest of the being (us) that there's little or nothing known about him, his intentions, his aims.  There have been some hints, during this lifetime, of where he has been in the past, the kinds of activities in which he was involved.  I have identified some of them in past writings, but as to his job, his aim, his goals, we (the rest of the being) don't have a clue.

We can only hope that Core-being will share some knowledge of himself with us before the end of this lifetime.  We can only wonder if, and how, this will occur.  Will it be subtle familiarity as we have experienced in different locations? Will it be Voila! moments when we realize a heretofore unknown fact? Will it be memories, like watching a movie of this being doing what Core-being was doing, but on a more meaningful level of understanding?

We don't know any of this and we may not even trust it if we were to be given such information.  Core-being may pragmatically know all of this and say, "Why bother? when the body dies, it's over, for that one anyway."

Still, we would like to know, but somehow, I don't think we will.  That would imply an emotional level, which Core-being may not have.  The death of this body will be like the death of any other animal that has been a part of our living arrangement.  After a period of grieving, however long or short it may be, Core-being will move on.

If he is, as we suspect, a member of a spiritual hierarchy, he may be assigned to a new host.  There is so much we don't understand, and I'm OK with that.  It is like being outside a large office building and seeing an employee of that company.  There is no clue of the intricacies of that company by seeing one employee out of context.

I think I understand death, and I am emotionally prepared for it.  I'll defer it a long as I can, but when the time comes, I'll go, more or less, willingly.

Apprehending

 

The Genesis account of the creation of Adam and Eve may contain a hint of where it all started.  Earth, before we got to where we are today, is Eden.  It is/was a balanced eco-system with different species providing whatever to keep it that way.

Then something sparked one species, us, to move apart from the rest and do what we are doing.  Perhaps it was a visitor, maybe the influence of the spiritual world.  We continue to evolve, to where?  We don't know, but what we do is not necessarily natural.  Oh, we don't violate natural law, but we bend and twist those laws in ways that they may not have been meant to be.

Something tweaked our genome, and voila! we have become unnatural.  One cannot say supernatural, yet.  That may be coming with the development of Artificial Intelligence and whatever is next.

It is, however, a house of cards.  We are putting all of our eggs in a binary basket, which would disappear without electricity.  We have chosen this path, and one has to wonder if it is a dead-end road.  It all goes away without electricity.  All the knowledge we have accumulated and stored becomes inaccessible.  All the tools that support our lifestyle become useless.  The hand tools of yesteryear are gone.   The night is once again, dark.  The population would shrink drastically, and after disposing of billions of bodies, it would have to be restarted.

(I don't feel I'm doing justice to this idea but I'm mushing on.)

The amount of electricity it takes to accommodate the computer processors that produce comprehensible results is staggering.  And it is causing concern as this is being written.   Bottom line, it may all be unnecessary unless there is some extra-terrestrial goal to be achieved.

Earth doesn't need us to function effectively.  Much of what humans do is detrimental to Earth and all the other living organisms that cohabitate with humans.  So, all of this, that has been done until now and after, could be one big exercise in futility.  It's possible that we could do the same thing with the mental powers that we already have but have not developed.  Are we involved in the ultimate distraction?  Like the guy looking for his lost keys in the area lit by a streetlight.  He lost them elsewhere, in the dark, but was looking for them here because it was lighted.  He may find keys but they won't be his.

The human population continues to increase.  Diseases appear and we develop cures, vaccines, and treatments.  The population continues to increase and much of what we have developed, technically, is to support our artificial lifestyle.  We are all superfluous.  

Are we, have we all been, the cast of a scenario whose plot is unknown to us, and kept secret from us?  And what we think of as unscripted, is actually not?  The lines and blocking are made known to us as the present unfolds.  Setbacks and off script moments are resolved, and the play proceeds to an unknown conclusion.

The Way It Is

It cannot be said that I would be better off concentrating on one thing instead of juggling all of the activities in which I am involved (I refer to them as endeavors).  When I step back and evaluate, I am happy to keep on doing what I have been.  I am at an age when a variety of activities is enjoyable.

And I truly believe that what will be, will be.  So, I've chosen endeavors to keep busy and interested while it all plays out.  I may have said this in previous posts; it is what I believe.  It is what my life experiences have taught me, i.e., have the dream and then let it come true.  In a world of possibilities, we are guided by our dreams to make the choices to realize them, even when we aren't aware of it.

The realization of dreams is not a scientific pursuit, but rather allowing it to happen, recognizing opportunities as they arise, positioning, preparing, asking, negotiating, and making the effort.  It often seems like serendipity, as with acting contacts, but it could be more than that.  

Sometimes it seems like spiritual intervention.

Pithy Comments

 

During the year, from time to time, little sayings popped into my ken.  They may be of some value to others as well.

If it is meant to be, it is.

Thy will be done.

A motto: No more I was, only I am.

Don't let your last shot influence your next.

All of life is trial and error.

Who are you? Who am I? I am he who takes care of you and me.

Confidence is the levee that protects us from the flood of discouragement.

In what I believe is not important to you, but important to me.  So, don't ask.

In what I believe is altered with experience, improving with time.

I truly accept all of myself, right now.

If it can happen, it will.

Core-spirit, third person in this being, make your presence felt. Instill in us joie de vivre for all that we do.

Replace the questions that have a 'W' with a 'T': what-that. When-then. Where-there.

We do what we can to get along in life.

"Don't push me around," she to me.  "I never would," I told her.

"I accept, I trust, I let go, I thank you, good night." Karl Jung

When alone, focus inward (on me); when not, focus outward (on others).

Learning Explained

 I said I wouldn’t do this.  I wrote and published that I wouldn't, but the urge to share these thoughts with you is too great.  As I look back on my life, I see that there were certain times and places that were pivotal.  When certain people, places, and things resonated and could not be denied.  This happened recently when the book, Ultralearning by Scott Young, crossed my path.

As in most of the other instances of this sort, the magnitude of the crossing didn’t register at the time.  I began reading the book, and it is quite good.  It sparked in me some introspection on my learning experiences, which I am going to share.  These are personal and not from the book.  Important to me as I read and study the book, but not related to it, other than it is about learning, my pattern of learning.

Primary question: What is learning? Answer: The journey from ignorance to assimilation, and beyond.  It is a continuum that hardly has a defined beginning, because we are born with intelligence and imagination and begin learning immediately.  Once knowledge, the result of leaning, is assimilated, it has utility that requires only incrementally more learning, unless a conscious decision is made to become a savant in a particular subject or pursuit.

Answering the question, how do I learn, results in identification of 9 patterns:1) Memorization (rote) as in scripts, music, and movements.  2) Practice to hone skills.  3)Methods of finding answers already known by others, such as puzzles and math problems. 4) Reasoning for that for which there are no answers. This learning is in the extended use of reason. 5) Using essays to expound a line of reasoning. 6) Solving, as in resolving issues, problems, and situations that are undone.  7) Studying subject matter unknown to me but readily known and understood by others, such as language, mathematics, history, philosophical works.  8) Training on how to do something using methods, tools, and processes already established.  And 9) Trial and Error, by which a multitude of things are learned.

Thinking is an interesting item, and part of all in this group of 9.  Others involve work with subjects, areas, and endeavors that have not been previously encountered or attempted.  Thinking requires that work previously done be applied in ways that go beyond, extend, what was previously accomplished.

There may be more than 9, but as I look at these, they cover quite a few of the avenues of learning that I have followed.  I don’t intend to explore these in detail, other than to think about them.  It will be interesting to see if the book, Utlralearning, adds to, agrees with, or detracts from them.

Learning can be defined as adding to the store of knowledge one has, and uses, to pursue aim. Ultralearning, autodidactism, is one of several ways to do this, in addition to formal education, training, and thinking.

The bases, from which all learning proceeds in our collective culture are the alphabet, the digits, musical tones, and binary code. Learning, until and beyond now, extends them and allows answers to the basic questions: who, what, where, when, how, and how much.

Problem solving is the application of learning to an unresolved issue.  So, it isn’t learning per se.  I think this to be important. We use what we have already learned, what we already know, to solve problems and, in so doing, we may learn something new along the way.

Furthermore, preceding the basics above, are intelligence and imagination.  These are genetic and have been incrementally developing since their beginning, when the spark of awareness started enlightenment, to get to where we are now.  This development process will allow us to go on, to “infinity and beyond.” (Buzz Lightyear)

It may have all started with a similar eternal process in the timeless, spiritual world, which led to the question: what if a physical manifestation of this spiritual realm happened? Voila!  Here we are.