... life is a flickering candle we all carry around. A gust of wind, a meaningless accident, a microsecond of carelessness, and it's out. Forever.

The Zhuangzi is very good on telling us how the nonhuman-made world can enter into who we are more deeply than at the level of answering to our current interests. If the environment can shape who we are, it can shape our very interests, leading us to recognize things, events, and processes that are of genuine value and that we have not previously recognized as such.

In fact, our need to feel like big shots keeps us wedded to inadequate perspectives on the world, keeps us from exploring and dealing with what doesn't fit into those perspectives. We should be trying to formulate a bigger, richer perspective to accommodate what doesn't fit, but no matter how beautiful and true that new perspective looks to us, we should always be prepared to acknowledge that it doesn't accommodate something we haven't yet confronted.

All of society is built to prop up that lie, the whole world a big, noisy puppet show meant to distract us from the fact that at the end, you'll die, and you'll probably be alone.

But remember, there are two ways to dehumanize someone: by dismissing them, and by idolizing them.

The things we call cultures are dynamic, internally diverse, and their interpretation is internally contested among its members. Cultures are like ongoing conversations with many voices, often telling stories about who "we" are.

I fear that our loss of a sense of connection with, and duties to, each other leaves us unable to effectively address growing inequality and the bitter antagonism between different communities in American society. We've been at our best when we've felt in significant degree that our fates bound up with each other, where we've had a very inclusive sense of the other, and that's now very much not the case.