I tend toward the pessimistic end of the spectrum, and unfortunately there's little in human history to convince me that pessimism is unwarranted.

The urge to move is natural and understandable. As will be the case throughout your life, no matter how long or brief, the choice is, in the end, yours. Simply bear in mind that most every choice will have consequences, and in this instance those consequences would likely be quite grave.

I am not your God. Or if I am, I'm no God you can seek out for deliverance or explanation. I'm the kind of God who would eat you without compunction if I were hungry.

On a micro level, if we're not terribly lucky, this sort of thing can happen to us quite frequently - the political becoming the personal in dramatic and irreparable ways. I remember the first time I went out into the desert, passing by all these mine fields and getting the history on them from my guide and realizing all these murderous mechanisms were real, were just sitting out there waiting for a victim, and some of them had been for sixty, seventy, eighty years.

Love, in its purest form, is biology.

I know well what faith really means to people in their daily lives, as there are many people in my family whose lives are permeated by their faith: it dictates the way they behave and sustains them in tough times, of which we've had too many lately.

I bailed out on social media for a while, and in short order I found I was able to sit down and read a book again. For the first time in a couple years I could read more than three pages without my brain wandering off into the ether. I drew a direct causal line between all this sort of ratta-tat-tat staccato stimulation that we get from the Internet and my growing inability to sit down and read anything that was longer than 500 words. But for me it came back because those synapses were already latent in my brain.