I was recently at Stonehenge. Big circle of big rocks doing big things, lining up for moments in time. People put that together. Something was so important about the times being marked, that the people it was important to had to make Stonehenge to do what it does because, quite likely, other methods had failed to do the job. Stonehenge does not smack of a first effort.

The time kept by Stonehenge is not the accrual of hours, days, or years. It serves to track the rhythm of a solar year. Why is that important? When we look at the dots and lines on the backs of animals painted in paleolithic caves, we can figure that they correlate to important times in the annual cycles of the animals: when they migrate into the area, when they mate, when they give birth. All of this in correlation to the advent of Spring in the Vernal Equinox. Knowing the days of solstices provides similar information that can be used to track everything else that happens in a year.

Look at how the Egyptians tracked the flood of the Nile as another one of these annual rhythm approaches to keeping time. And while we put a year on a calendar because we want to keep track of that sort of time, we still have an ordering of days that repeats with each year. We are very much like our nameless ancestors in that regard. We are aware of the passage of time, just as much as we are aware of right and wrong, good and evil.

If there was no time as we experience it, but we instead existed in a frame of reference that was outside of the bounds of time. Our first thought would be perhaps, “Ah! Now I live forever!” Except that would be wrong, as “forever” implies a passage of time. More accurate would be to realize, “Ah! Now I exist timelessly, in a state that has no beginning or end, no now or then.”

In such a frame of reference, all of our time-space existence would be visible. We would be aware of everything that happened, every choice made. Seeing those choices, we would see people as we used to be, very much unaware of what other choices are being made and of what it means to be a human creature. None of us know who we are or what we are doing, to paraphrase what the character Nigel Tufnel said about the people of Stonehenge in the film “This Is Spinal Tap.”

But when we see people who choose to be altruistic, we see people who have made such choices because they have first chosen to see the essence of divinity in their fellow human creatures. They assign dignity to existence and are ready to forgive one and all. And why not forgive, since almost everyone who does something selfish is doing it because they do not know what they are doing? They certainly don’t know who they really are.

We exist with imperfect knowledge and assign the characteristic of perfect knowledge to God, however we view such a construct. For the sake of this essay, I consider God to be real, to be both capable of and interested in the choices I personally make as much as anyone else’s, and that there is a connection of love that exists between us all, should we take time and effort to become aware of it. Others are free to believe what they will, this is not meant to be an argument for or against God’s existence, just a thought experiment about a God that has perfect knowledge.

Perfect knowledge means that God exists without a boundary of time, that God is able to behold the fulness of the universe and comprehend it all. And if we postulate that God is loving and that we are children of God – literally or figuratively, either works for this experiment of thought – then it means we exist in this universe for a purpose.

If there is no time, no before or after, where God exists, then it means choices are eternal things. It means mistakes cannot be repented of – they exist without bounds of time. To be in the presence of God means a commitment to make no mistake. That implies that none of us are ready to be with God, as we still make mistakes. But, by existing in a context with time as a boundary, we are able to learn. In learning, we are able to change our nature to become more Godlike, if we so choose.

Now, how a final reconciliation for what errors existed in past thoughts and deeds in order to be complete enough for entering into the presence of God can be performed is outside the scope of what I want for this essay. It is a matter of belief, and many others have spoken their piece on that subject such that I would only be quoting them to explain my own position. But I do believe such a reconciliation is possible if and only if we have become someone who is motivated by love towards others, realizing the divinity within.

Once we know who we are and what we are doing, then we are ready to work within the bounds of time to help others attain that same knowledge, hopefully allowing them to choose to transform out of the person they used to be into one who is enlightened by a fuller knowledge of light and truth. We still endure the cruelties of choices made by others without that knowledge, but we forgive them. We do not count down to when we stop forgiving and start a path of violence – we forgive and hope and pray that they can see better how to live without violence. We engage in that eternal round of soulful agriculture, tending a garden or flock, as it were.

And that comes back to the time tracked in Stonehenge, Lascaux, and along the Nile. The rounds of agriculture, as it were. The year exists because of the events that mark it, not the other way around. Similarly, it is our choices that stand as reasons the universe exists.

I see lots of people talking about “walkable cities”, praising them for their goodness and charm and how everything is a short stroll away from one’s residence or from a mass transit network that’s easily accessible from one’s residence. I like a good, walkable city, as well, but I’d hate to be snobbish about it.

First of all, the words – “walkable city”. That implies that, for those who walk without issues, this is a great place to be. For those with mobility issues, however, we may be casting our eyes about for ramps and sloped crossings and non-cobbled pedestrian zones. Now, I can navigate the curbs well enough with my disability, but those cobblestones are deliberately trying to give me a twisted ankle as I painfully navigate my way across them. And when it comes to stairs, I prefer lifts. Ramps will also do, but it’s a lot more walking on them, if they’re sloped correctly. If they’re too steep, then it’s something that forces me to use the stairs and the folks in wheelchairs have to have assistance to get up those too-steep things.

When we look at mass transit, we can often talk about switching modes as if we were just hopping on and hopping off of them. Most people are. Now, let’s ask the people who don’t hop with ease and ask them about intermodal switches. Where others hop, people in wheelchairs have to endure a slow ascent/descent procedure that makes them agonizingly aware that they’re the center of nearly everyone’s delay. For those who can walk with assistance, there are often steps to clear without handrails that give us great pause as we assess the best way to improvise an injury-free crossing. For all of us, once we get from one to the other, we have to re-engage a potentially hostile commuter who thinks we’re “not disabled enough” to surrender a seat clearly marked as one to surrender to anyone who asks. We still have a long road ahead of us with disability rights.

Then there’s the matter of the local climate. Weather is one thing – I can’t go bawling to the city council if I’m caught out in a surprise rainstorm without an umbrella, those things just happen. Climate, however, is what every day is like when we’re not having weather. Once the local climate crosses out of a temperature band that’s comfortable for most people to walk in, we begin to face miserable conditions. My hometown of Dallas, Texas is a prime example of misery for the 4-5 months of the year we call “summer”. Our late spring and early fall are hot enough for others to find uncomfortable, but our midyear heat coupled with humidity are so bad that other people with similar conditions somehow feel better if theirs are worse than ours – and we somehow feel vindicated if ours are the worse of the two being compared. It’s an odd thing we humans that endure extreme climates go through when what we should be doing is expressing concern and sympathy. But I digress.

In cities with temperate climates that don’t get all that hot or cold, most of the year is a walker’s dream and the praise of walkable cities flocks to their stately names. In cities where things get miserably hot, we build roads to handle the capsules of controlled climates that make daily activities possible. On the hottest days, people could actually become ill or die from exposure to the heat, and that’s the case even in a shady bus stop. The concrete will radiate heat ferociously, making conditions on the street even more miserable than the ones at the local weather station. A short walk to a bus stop with a short wait for the next bus becomes a calculation on whether or not one’s life is worth the trip.

In colder places, where they’ve got 4-5 months of harsh winter, it’s the inverse with temperatures, but the same concerns about one’s health after exposure. Once we get out of a temperate band, the walkable city vanishes and all those personal automobiles look like life-savers for getting around town. Accommodating them means the city itself grows and develops in ways that are less walkable and much more rollable.

Working from home and handling services online can go a long way towards getting rid of the daily commute and the need to be in person to handle certain things, but those don’t make a city any more or less walkable if the climate isn’t temperate or the mass transit isn’t truly accessible – or the destinations aren’t accessible, either. For a city to be truly walkable, it needs to stop being a heat island. But the very building materials that allow us to have more people closer to cool stuff like attractions and mass transit are also the building materials that trap that heat and make things much more miserable when the thermometers rise. And there’s the problem I don’t have an answer for. So, until then, I’m a champion of rollable cities.

I just spoke at Texas Cyber Summit. It was about headless devices, IOT, OT, and other things I knew zero about 10 years ago. But I dressed out the technical stuff with metaphors from The Marx Brothers, Guys and Dolls, and the philosophy of Zhuangzi. Point being, if you learn something, you have the power to use it in real life. If you don’t learn something, there’s no way you can use it in real life. If you stop learning, your real life is limited. If you choose to constantly learn things, then your real life’s boundaries fall away.

I had a dream in which I was helping two warring sides deal with a cycle of vengeance, in which one side always felt satisfied after inflicting violence on the other. At the root of the violence was an idea that each side had a duty to avenge an age-old offense.

As I heard them take turns speaking, underneath their disdain for each other, I heard a pained desire to end the life of hate and violence. They were trapped by this thought of duty.

I then began to speak to them and acknowledged the duty they felt. Then I pointed out that while we invent duties to perpetuate cycles of violence, we are all given a greater duty from our Creator to end these cycles through peace, forgiving, and repentance. We all felt something spiritual stir within us, and began discussing again. This time, it was no more the pains of the past, but the tentative and tender hopes for the future.

I recently came across the term “holy envy” to describe how we can find uplifting encouragements to our personal spirituality by observing great examples in the lives of others, especially those not of our faith or shared background. In so doing, we compare our best to their best and find deep similarities in our human experiences.

The Ancient Egyptians viewed the body as more than just a physical system – it had emotional components, reasoning components, a spirit, a shadow, an intellect, a personality, and other parts – it was the sum of many things to them. Today, much of modern thinking views the body as a physical system. Yes, a physical system with some incredible mystery and beauty to it, but ultimately as a deterministic system.

I think the Egyptians were on to something – we lose an important concept of the body when we see it as something in isolation, as one item with many elements. When we see it as a combination of equally-important parts, we see that health and well-being involve so much more than making sure the physical system has enough food and sleep. Seeing the body as being made up of so many equally important things makes bonds of compassion easier to feel.

The actions of my past are part of me. Like sediment, they build over time. They may impact me in the present moment and influence my decisions for the future, but they are not a prison. They do not completely predestine me, though I cannot avoid consequences. I will always reap what I have sown, but what I choose to sow next is not forced upon me. It is always my choice.

My hopes for the future are part of me. Hopes, however, are easily twisted into fears should I become caught up in a worry that the universe might produce an unjust, unbearable outcome. But those fears, I come to learn, are unjustified. There is no promise of a terror-free existence. There is no guarantee of justice in this world. The absurdity of existence, whether I read of it in Camus or Ecclesiasties, is all there will be. Fearing what will be because it will not be what it is not is – that is irrational. Life is unbearable when I expect it to be other than what it is. When I come to accept that things happen to people regardless of the goodness or badness of things or people, and that I am a person to whom things happen, I find that my fear of the future subsides.

Does my hope remain? It cannot remain, not by itself. It is a psychotic vision to hope alone. Hope must rest upon a realization that my present state permits me a capability to choose. My hopes must help guide my choices, in context of my life thus far. I have no reason to fear or dread when I accept that I always have capacity to choose.

Camus said of Sisyphus that we must suppose him to be happy. That is to say, any of us can be supposed to be happy when we know our own absurd situation and persist in making choices and efforts. I may suppose to hope for a better tomorrow, but am I realistic if I do not acknowledge that tomorrow, I am one day closer to my eventual death? Tomorrow may actually be the day I die, but why should I fear that? My experience is that, on the whole, most days – if not all of them thus far – I have not died. So I am free to live my life with an assumption that the choices I make today are of value and that they will give me something to reap tomorrow from what I sow today.

And what of disasters that could befall me? They will happen. I don’t know when or what form they manifest themselves in, but they will happen, and I will adapt. I will cope. I will persevere. Sisyphus pushes his rock up the hill and, upon reaching the summit, the rock rolls back to the base of the hill. So what? Sisyphus simply walks down the hill to labor again. His work is futile only if we fear for a future that does not exist for him. His work may have no meaning, but it is only a punishment to him if he chooses to dwell upon his fate with dread. One could suppose a Sisyphus who, over time, accepts that his life is what it is. He accepts that there is nothing better and nothing worse ahead of him: existence for him is what it is. Why not accept the absurd, the wheel of fortune, the blur of life as a given and fear not?

Our ability to choose means the past is not a prison and that our future is not a trap. All things happen to all people, so why anguish over the absurd illogic of existence? Instead, let us accept that we exist, that we can do things that we choose to do, and that we, like Sisyphus, can be supposed to be happy when we find choices that develop a meaning for our lives that extends beyond the mortality of our earthly existence. Such a meaning is a matter for another discussion. But I can see a way in which Sisyphus, in his mind, is not being punished in a hell, but may have found a gateway to heaven.

The basic story goes like this: four people of great learning enter the paradise of all knowledge. As each takes in the totality, one dies, one goes mad, one rebels and fights to destroy the knowledge, and only one takes it all in and survives. That person then returns to the world of humanity to teach by word and by example.

In my reading of this story, I see a deep wisdom: I am one of those people, and I do not know which one I am. I suppose if I am not ready to leave behind the things of the world to teach peace and love by word and example, then I am one of the other three, incapable of handling the whole of knowledge and truth, incapable of being in the presence of G-d. I use the form G-d, as this story comes to me from Jewish tradition, and I wish to observe how some in that faith render that name so as to show it respect.

And while some beliefs allow me a clear pathway to heaven, not a one writes a guarantee that I am capable of being in the presence of G-d, to know as G-d knows, as an unprepared human being. Any belief that calls upon me to make that journey to the paradise of all knowledge does so with a caution that I have much to change in how I live and think and act in order to be ready for that ultimate revelation, that it not consume me. And then, once having attained that knowledge, I become even more different from the natural human I was at birth and through most of my life.

For I read the story to understand that those who die, who go mad, who rebel against truth, all them were unready to abandon the ends that they desired so that they could live only according to righteous means, even if it led to their worldly perishing. They were unwilling to be as compassionate as they needed to be. They did not welcome the ideals demanded of us when we understand the whole of the truth and knowledge of the universe.

All around me, I see people caught up in arguments about this or that, and at times I become caught up in them, as well. And, in the moment I argue, in the moment my hatred rises even a little bit, in that moment, I start to wonder if I am a dead man, a mad man, or a man who makes war against G-d. Because, in that moment of anger and contention, I am not a man who teaches peace and love by word and by example.

I am yet alive and I can yet re-think my ways, repent so that my reactions are different the next time I see a contention around me. If I want to be the kind of person who takes in all knowledge and survives to teach, then I must work at being a person who behaves as such a teacher even before I enter into that knowledge. It is not enough to show a checklist of things I never did and another list of things I no longer do. The lack of evil does not make us good. It must instead be a list of things I did where I made sacrifices in faith and love so that others would have better lives and hopefully themselves begin to prepare to become teachers themselves.

I have much yet to do with my life. May I draw breath and think clearly long enough to make as much preparation now for the knowledge that is to come. May I give thanks to my fellow humans of the Jewish faith, for they have been a light of wisdom unto the nations.

Sometimes, people ask the question, “Do you have proof that there is a God?” My answer is yes, but it’s a personal proof. It’s not something I can trot out and point at and say, look, see, this is proof of God. It’s inside me, but is a result of an experiment I did before and frequently repeat.

The experiment is simple. I desire to believe and let my heart reach out in love for anything receptive. I feel the love coming to me from an unseen source and follow up on that with further faith, prayer, fasting, and study. Other things follow, and I have before me, in my heart and mind, the proof of a loving God that encompasses all of humanity, all of space, all of time.