Chapter One
To live the considered life is to dwell in an enigma. Nothing is truly as it seems. The certainties we hold when we are twenty- five have become absurdities by fifty. In the pro cess, we have to nose along through the clamor and smoke of existence, trying to understand what is really going on as opposed to what only seems to be going on, struggling to separate the vagaries of the moment from the constants of existence, to eliminate the obvious irrelevancies that so many people get hung up on, like fashion and, oh, I don’t know . . . dogs. Dogs are a good example. They are there, for some reason, and can be enjoyable creatures, but the why of it is not worth our time and energy. Alexander Pope said as much: "The proper study of mankind is man." Man, not cats or rabbits or hyenas or aardvarks. Or dogs.
Eliminating the trivia, clearing our minds of chaff, allows our attention to fix on the things that really matter. Then sometimes those things, things we otherwise might not even notice, can stun us with their relevancy.
The element o ... read full excerpt from The Wolf in the Parlor ebook
