wouldn’t it have been great if Sigmund Freud, the
father of psychoanalysis, had left us his observations
about the quirky little things we do?

not those crazy, pathological thoughts and actions
that would cause us distress and lead us to seek
professional help

no, only our dumb and annoying habits, things that
cause others to shake their heads

maybe he had recorded such observations, perhaps
in a yet to be discovered book; a book with a title like

Outside My Window, Observations of Semi-Patholog-
ical Propensities

and wouldn’t it be great if this work were illustrated
with entries like the one below?

.

.

.

(adapted from a line by Brendan Francis)

the video below begins with this simple but profound
question,

Take single modern human and place a parent behind him . . and then a parent behind that . . and so on . . generation after generation stretching into the past . . forming a line of spectacular proportions.

who or what would be standing way back at the
beginning of this stupendously long line?

for a provocative answer to this hotly debated
question, take a look at the video below

consider the events of your life; your personal history

try to remember not only WHAT happened, but also
HOW it felt

now what if, as a philosopher once asked, you were
forced to re-live your life -

made to re-experience EVERY single event, without
the possibility of change, and ALL of the associated
pleasure and pain

and you were to do so again and again and again,
for eternity,

” . . . would you be overcome with despair? Or would you fall to your knees in gratitude?”
- Friedrich Nietzsche

would this kind of existence be closer to Heaven
or to Hell?

image credit

how many self-help books are there on the market,
thousands, tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of
thousands?

do they really help us to free ourselves of problems?

it’s doubtful that they do; but what if one did?

what if a publisher stumbled upon THE ultimate self-
help book, one that solved ALL our problems?

one that could stop us from smoking, drinking, over-
eating, and treating each other badly

one that could help us reach our potential, find
meaning, find love, experience fantastic sex, smile
and be happy -

all of the time and forever?

this is the premise of a best selling novel titled
Happiness by Will Ferguson

the premise of Ferguson’s satirical work is a chilling
What If? worth PonderingAbout and a novel worth
checking out

What If the evolution of human language began to
shift radically -

shift in such as a way that meaning becomes -

- less dependent on the actual words we speak, and

- progressively more dependent on HOW we say
those words, on intonation and gesture

that is, language evolves in such a way that
meaning is conveyed by the movements of our
bodies and the pitch of our voices; with our actual
words having little importance

in time, fewer and fewer words would be needed;
and our vocabulary would shrink drastically

long ago, Mandarin Chinese began to evolve in
this manner; and now a single word can convey
multiple meanings -

Mandarin, a tone language.
In tone languages, a single word can differ in meaning depending on pitch patterns called “tones.” For example, the Mandarin word “mi” delivered in a level tone means “to squint,” in a rising tone means “to bewilder,” and in a dipping (falling then rising) tone means “rice.”
-www.edu-cyberpg.com

perhaps in our distant future, the English language
will have evolved into a tone language; a language
so radically different than our own as to be virtually
incomprehensible to 21st century English speakers

perhaps the situation would look something like this