New Horizons by Max Roy

  The Nitty Gritty   They say we all die alone, the human fate. I see it differently. The most fortunate will see it differently. When I was a youngster, surveying the world, the place I inhabited, it was like a puzzle I was trying to unravel. Who were these people in the family wherein I had been planted? I had this sense that I had been dropped among them like a Cuckoo’s egg deposited in some random nest to be hatched. I left home for a year when I was eighteen. When I returned, my feeling of isolation was reinforced. How could I relate to these members of my own family who had not shared my growing-up experience? I felt inarticulate, unable to translate what I had become to the people with whom I was closest. Was there any hope for achieving that with strangers? We go forward in life, like the Argonauts of ancient Greece, into the unexplored, the unknown. We gird our loins to confront the dangers we know that life will place before us, as we seek the Golden Fleece. We all ho

        Life As A Beautiful Story Once upon a time there were humans on a planet called earth. They shared consciousness with only few mammal species that we know of, dolphins are one, as are those creatures in the ape family and related species. Killer whales make the grade. Surprisingly, only the European Magpie is the winner among the flying species, but I wonder about those canny crows? Earth teems with life, but consciousness seems to be a very limited commodity among living things according to those who are knowledgeable about these matters. Consciousness has to do with an awareness of self. So a mouse and a bee are alive but do not seem to know and appreciate that. And the same seems to be true about chickens and cows, and even cats and dogs. Our children recognize their own images before they are two and have an awareness of self by the time they are three. Being conscious means we are aware of ourselves as having a separate life. We can become aware of the beauty of life

              What’s Going On? I’ve just had the shock of my life. I’ve just come to realization that I’m not living at the center of the universe in the way I have always conceived it of myself. I am watching television programs like Sunday Morning and Face The Nation. I come across the faces and names of people who have been famous for years and realize I have never known of their existence. How did I miss that? How did I miss knowing them? Where was I all that time- was I marooned on some desert island? How could I not have known what was going on? I have always thought of myself as having my finger on the pulse, aware of the currents in the ocean of world events. Don’t you sometimes think of yourselves that way? I have had an education. I can make myself understood in at least six languages. I have travelled to many countries, seeing a good part of the world. Retired from the workaday world for the last twenty-five years, I have nevertheless seen myself as an attentive viewer o