Morning Musings

Spent the weekend chasing nieces and nephews back in Cornwall.  Feeling it today.  There was a time I could run up and down a mountain, engage in sword fights and wake up the next day feeling fresh as a daisy; those days are no longer.

Blackrock is on "high alert" for a debt downgrade in Ontario.  Big stuff, this - impacts borrowing capacity.  Meanwhile, there is plenty of capital here in Ontario, held by people who'd like to see less government and greater private opportunity.

The opportunity is here, folks - why not step up to the plate?  The only reason government needs to spend public dollars on incentive programs is because those with the capacity to spend aren't feeling incented to do so proactively. 

Meanwhile, various Western presences in Iraq are on high alert because things are getting nasty.  I have a friend who works with nationals who find themselves in precarious situations - he can't and would never tell me the details of his work, but whenever he says "I've been called up" I scan the headlines to try and figure out for what.  Lots of options these days, but Iraq is the one that stands out.

I have another friend, the gifted Dr. Miloud Chennoufi who does a lot of analysis of events in the Middle East.  It's a complicated mess of history, culture, geographic, geopolitical interests, personality, diplomacy, tactical capacity, so on and so forth.  When he gets home, he watches Sponge Bob as a break from the complexity of his work. 

Yet at the national policy-setting level, we've got a government that believes in white hat/black hat simplicity - anything else, in their view, is tantamount to committing sociology.

Depression is in the news again in a subtle way, as in how when people in positions of influence succumb to the Black Dog, it impacts the choices they make that impact the lives of countless others. Yet we're still not ready to have a serious discussion about the mental health stigma and cognitive labour.

Back to the family weekend.  In one of the quieter moments, I had a chat with a 10 year-old niece about paradoxes and the Divergent books.  A question my niece told me has been vexing her - if we are in control of our brain via the frontal cortex, but that cortex is part of our brain, who's really in control?

All I could think was, "I used to change your diapers."

We're in uncharted waters, folks, surrounded by Undiscovered Country - yet where we sense monsters, there is also hope.  When we shed a bit of light, it becomes clear that which we fear is not the world, but our place in it.  

Life is but a dreamed-of butterfly, until you become conscious. 

End of musing.  It's time to get back to work.