The river is placid today. A mirror stretches throughout as though poured like a shining liquid then frozen in place. The 44°NE wind of 3 km/h is unnoticeable. There is a subdued reflection of the lush growth along the southern shore. In the adjacent corn fields the stalks tower to the heavens. Their preponderance blankets the horizon. Everywhere is green.
Synthetic: Logic (of a proposition) having truth or falsity determinable by recourse to experience; eg., snow is white. Compare with analytic; eg., all bachelors are unmarried.
Synthesizing means combining different elements, ideas, or information to create something new and coherent. It’s a higher-level thinking skill that involves more than just summarizing or restating information from various sources. Instead, it requires identifying connections, relationships, and patterns among those sources to form a new understanding or perspective.
Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are all products of synthetic logic or synthesizing. Most often unwittingly – by the mere strength of our experience and the enforced absorption of those changing spheres of thought and activity – we create new and alternate comprehensions, insights and outlooks. To resist the evolution – or synthesis – is impossible. Any attempt to do so is imperilled both analytically and empirically.
The good news however is that we have a built-in accommodation; that is, an adjustment or acclimation (albeit of varying capacity). Furthermore, the adaptation is of necessity both inevitable and instructive. We build on change; we discover new options; we grow.
Nonetheless overcoming existing patterns of behaviour and thought is not without its challenge. Its most formidable obstruction is that its lingering mosses and barnacles only contaminate the new perspective. Rising above the former posture is often equivalent to attempting to walk backwards – a strait which sadly means only backwaters as convincing as the past may be in one’s (dubious) memory. Awakening to new possibilities is however an adventure reminiscent of the former transition from younger years to the present – that is, excitement and novelty. It is illogical to presume that nutrition for growth lies only in what we have as often as not done only coincidentally (that is, without any particular foresight or formula in mind). It does of course mandate a degree of ingenuity to override resistance to and reinterpretation of change. Keep in mind too that the etymology of resistance is not, as one may be inclined to imagine, to repeat a stand, rather it is to stand against a proposition.
from re- “against” (see re-) + sistere “take a stand, stand firm” (from PIE root *sta– “to stand, make or be firm”)
Conjoined with this qualification is the further strategic limitation that as enhancing as our memories (and be assured that is all they are) may be there is no turning back. The consumption of the past has already dissolved whatever ingredients of distinction may have characterized and stimulated them. Regrettably – and in spite of accepting this axiomatic a priori assertion – we often persist to believe that we shall reignite the flames of the erstwhile attraction. But to adopt the metaphor of romance (with which no doubt we’re all familiar) when the flame is out the candle is done. Time to move on.
It is this candid acknowledgment which preserves the hope of buoyancy. It is also the key to open new doors. Looking back only prolongs the anxiety of change and the illusion of loss.
Commensurate to removal from the past is plotting the future. Naturally we are never more distant from either the past or the future than we were a moment ago; but the proximity illustrates the irrelevance of both. It is instead the urgency of the present which forces apart the two, which enables us to escape our fears and to excite our trenchancy. It is a paradox of the present that it is often hidden from view, secreted by clouds of the past which we allow to insinuate the present. Brushing aside those clouds is a matter of purpose and determination which once conceived is the vehicle to riding the atmosphere. One must accept the delicacy of detail, the draw upon the senses, the propulsion of the spirit from within. It’s simple logic.
It was in the evening after dinner and a day’s work at the law office on Little Bridge Street. There were no meetings to attend or social conventions. It was a performance repeated often and with identical prescription. I was alone at my desk in my upstairs study. It was a time before my French bulldog Monroe had been recommended to me by Marilyn Harris. What it was that then preoccupied me at my IBM computer I do not know for certain. Computers were new. No doubt then – not unlike now – I was typing an account of my daily thoughts (as I have been doing since I was 14 years of age), probably using WordPerfect as the platform for an expanding collection of entries which replaced my former typewritten or handwritten entries in tiny plastic covered diaries and legal size hardcover lined paper or blank typed paper in leather bound and gold embossed 3-ring binders. The cathartic accounts – whatever their vernacular – were forever proscribed by immediacy and irrelevancy. I was constantly overwhelmed by the present. And while the daily account altered immeasurably – like watching the mounting corn stalks – things nonetheless unfolded.
I’ll come right out and say it: I failed the on-line exam of l’Institut National de Sécurité Nautique. The course offered by National Boating Safety School © 2025 is accredited by Transport Canada. Here’s the email I received.
In theology the interval is small indeed between Aristotle and a child, between Archimedes and a naked savage. It is not strange, therefore, that wise men, weary of investigation, tormented by uncertainty, longing to believe something, and yet seeing objections to every thing, should submit themselves absolutely to teachers who, with firm and undoubting faith, lay claim to a supernatural commission. Thus we frequently see inquisitive and restless spirits take refuge from their own scepticism in the bosom of a church which pretends to infallibility, and, after questioning the existence of a Deity, bring themselves to worship a wafer. And thus it was that Fox made some converts to whom he was immeasurably inferior in every thing except the energy of his convictions.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
writing of George Fox, the founder of the Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as the Quakers. He was a 17th-century English Dissenter who challenged the religious and political norms of his time. Fox emphasized the “inner light” as a direct connection with God, rejecting the need for intermediaries like priests or elaborate rituals.
Between the in and out of morning sunshine, spherical particles of rainfall glisten on the balcony chairs and railing. The humidity is rising while the cornstalks urgently fill the last vestige of space among them. The tanned grounds keepers – with intermittent pauses for chatter – loudly hum and buzz along the grassland boundary of the property restoring it to manicured perfection – though it, like the difference between a good and bad haircut, is two days. It is a sultry summer day in July.
Le Fairmont Tremblant est un hôtel de luxe situé au pied de la montagne Mont-Tremblant, offrant un accès direct au village piétonnier et aux activités principales. Il propose 312 chambres et suites, dont certaines avec vue sur la montagne ou le village. L’hôtel dispose de piscines intérieures et extérieures chauffées, de bains à remous, d’un spa complet, d’un centre de remise en forme et de plusieurs restaurants.
Ironically perhaps the focus of my attention today has been upon the renewal of my Canadian passport. I say that the red tape inspires wry amusement because presently we have no intention of travelling. Our erstwhile mutuality of international domicile has dissolved. We are still reeling from the perceived unwelcome mat in the United States of America. Instead of seeking bookings on Hilton Head Island, Longboat Key or Key Largo we are inclined to be sardonic.
My first passport – which I believe I may still have stashed in my lower desk drawer – was a diplomatic passport reflective of my father’s assignment to Canadian Embassies. We (that is, my family and I) always felt the vague privilege of diplomatic immunity when traveling although to my knowledge we never abused the entitlement. If I recall correctly the ancient diplomatic passports were regularly stamped with the ink of the name of the places we visited. At the moment our travel plans have evaporated – though tomorrow morning we venture to Lac Mont Tremblant, QC on an investigative run just to keep the fires smouldering.
The town laments the recent death of a 9 year old boy who – as I understand it – collided on his bicycle with a school bus driven immediately nearby the school. The tragedy is an unparalleled misfortune and isolation at the end of the school year and at the beginning of the summer. It is too a lingering heartbreak for the family, the school children and the community. Everything by comparison is trivial, vaguely irrelevant and confusing, forcing disparate philosophical conclusions – all impossible to reason.
A cathartic spume spread upon the terrestrial environment today. Everything appeared calculated to render a freeing nature to the day. The morning grey cosmic masses incrementally dissolved beneath a light blue sky and fleeting white billows. The corn stalks continued their upward surge, shimmering green in the light wind and mounting brilliant sunshine.