Museletter the Seventy-first

Sometimes I dream of going back to college to study the same thing my dad did: he was a comparative religion major. Doesn't that sound cool? I can imagine him sitting in a big lecture hall, studying and thinking, "wait, they believe what?!"

Then, after school, my dad took those interests into his career as a psychiatrist and psychodramatist. (Of course, this job let him ask the same question: "you believe what?!")

So, when I was a young man, my dad confided in me a key universal Truth that he had distilled from his lifetime of research, and which I still find really useful.

He said, "David, there are some things we puny humans are simply not going to be able to know. That's the role of philosophy and religion. So given that we can't know, my suggestion is that you pick a set of beliefs that are a) reasonably logical, within their own frame of reference; and b) fun to think about."

After all, there are plenty of belief systems that are not fun, or seem to require a significant amount of guilt, shame, and angst — but given that we can't know if those beliefs are any more true than others, why go there?

He then explained his core "religious" belief, using a name that he and my step-mom, Allee, had coined: Gratitudinism. He would later describe this as "a spiritual practice of plunging in with all four feet, if I had four feet, and… there ought to be a word for frolicking mixed with wallowing."

The great thing about Gratitudinism — the practice of being grateful — is that you can do it whether you're a fundamentalist or an agnostic, a scientist or a mystic. Perhaps Thanksgiving is the Gratitudinist's annual celebration, but honestly, isn't every day a good day to give thanks?

Let's Connect

You probably know that a little mushroom, poking up above the ground is just the fruit of a much larger, more complex organism hidden beneath the surface, called mycelium. One of the most fascinating things about mycelium is that its appearance — meshlike, like a dense spider's web threaded through the dirt — looks surprisingly like the map of galaxies spread across the universe: dense in some areas, sparse in others, with fine, drawn out tendrils stretched across billions of light years in space.

Of course, where mycelium weaves together organic fibers, galaxies and interstellar gas and dust hangs in a vacuum, held together by gravity and electromagnetism. But the results — stretched like loosely spun cotton candy — are similar, not just to each other but to other patterns we see around us: look at street maps that connect cities and towns… charts that connect a wide diversity of people into a single social network… the nodes that connect the zillions points of light that make up the internet.

The universe tends toward connection: the way atoms form molecules, and molecules form into latticework; the way one word attaches to the next to form strings, sentences flow to paragraphs, connecting thoughts that build a gauzy mesh of meaning, slowly strengthening, until it, too, can form fruit, and seeds of ideas may find purchase to spread out even farther.

Thank You!

I enjoy sharing my musings… and I enjoy hearing yours! Please share this newsletter with a friend, follow me on LinkedIn, and send me feedback. You can always reach me at david@creativepro.com