Destiny is Bunk

Destiny is a human construct. Your dog and your goldfish probably don't fret about destiny.

It's understandable that we'd invent destiny to allay the disturbing notion that carbon-based life-forms probably have no purpose and no destiny. We unwittingly delude ourselves with language. The word destiny gives the notion destiny false legitimacy.

Like other species, humans once had a biological purpose to procreate. Today it's a different story.

Our biological success has depleted earthly resources. Our biological explosion has degraded the life raft engulfing the planet. Human population is an existential threat. If humans have a biological imperative, it has toggled from procreation to population control.

To proclaim a personal destiny, we assume a bogus exceptionalism which is laughable knowing we share 36% of our DNA with fruit flies.

Don't get your undies in a bundle over the bogus construct of destiny. 

We're not meant to do or to accomplish shit. Rather, we simply live life to the fullest. Our journey begins with learning what's most meaningful. For me it is to love and be loved.

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
― Alan Watts, The Culture of Counter-Culture: Edited Transcripts

REFEFENCES

• Genes In Common, The Tech Museum of Innovation.

Paper is the New Vinyl

Barnes & Noble Booksellers
Highland Park, Saint Paul
Closed December 2015

English poet Lord Byron wrote, "A drop of ink may make a million think", which has held true since the 15th century Gutenberg Press.

Johannes Gutenberg was the first European to use movable type printing circa 1439.

The written word thrives, but the form has changed. Mass production of paper books is in steep decline.

The decline of the paper book, the independent bookseller, and the big box bookseller parallels most of my adult life.

Independent Booksellers

Independent booksellers endured a protracted decline. Those that remain seem comforting but anachronistic. The decline was prompted by hyper-competitive big box booksellers, but prolonged by the missionary zeal of ownership and the fierce loyalty of customers.

The Bookshop has a thousand books,
All colors, hues, and tinges,
And every cover is a door
That turns on magic hinges.
― Nancy Byrd Turner

My favorite independent, Hungry Mind, operated on Grand Avenue from 1970-2000. Hungry Mind sold the rights to their name in 1999 for a cash infusion. By the following April, it assumed the new name Ruminator Bookstore. Four years hence the Ruminator space was emptied out and replaced with a local branch of the upscale clothier Patagonia.

Big Box Booksellers

Bricks and mortar, big box bookstores are disappearing too. Barnes & Noble in Highland Park closed this past December. The decline of big box booksellers was prompted by better e-commerce tools, better e-readers and by the growing mass-produced and independently-produced digital markets.

Bookish Future

Alan Watts said, "The menu is not the meal" which neatly dovetails with the consumption of the written word. The written word is increasingly consumed in some form of digital text or audio. Collectors of finely crafted traditional paper books will drive a small but burgeoning market of limited edition, hand-printed, hand-bound books.

Ink is disappearing. The digital form thrives. And for collectors and traditionalists,

Paper is the new vinyl.

REFERENCES

• Ruminator Bookstore Closing by Marianne Combs, Minnesota Public Radio 29 June 29 2004.

Nobody in his Senses

SS Vallejo

I first read Alan Watts' The Way of Zen (1957) in the early 1980s. I was alerted to Alan Watts by my then future father-in-law who kept a picture of the SS Vallejo on the wall of his bedroom in Minnesota.

The Vallejo is a legendary ferry that was converted to a houseboat and moored in Sausalito. Alan Watts inhabited the Vallejo from 1961 to 1969. The epicenter of the 1960's counter-culture was centered around San Francisco, if not this venerable but dilapidated houseboat.

The Way of Zen became a seminal book that introduced a burgeoning youth culture to Eastern Philosophy, and specifically to Buddhism, throughout the decades of the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

The teachings of Alan Watts, and of my father-in-law, continue to guide me.

The video of Awareness Meditation (below) is from a KQED TV program called The Silent Mind  (1960 © KQED).

‎If we live in entirely in a world of thought, all the things we pursue in life tend in a way to become arid and unsatisfactory because we are living in an abstract world. In other words, nobody in his senses is going to eat a menu instead of dinner.
~Alan Watts (23:40)