Author: Fred Blahnik

Opportunity cost–easily the most important economic concept of all to know, yet one that is trickily difficult to understand. Capsulized, opportunity cost is the expense in time one incurs by doing something when you could just as easily have been doing something else.  Commuting to and from work in the mornings and afternoons is the classic example of opportunity cost.  You may save a ton of money upfront by purchasing a cheap house way out in the exurbs, but in the long run that shitload of time you spend on commuting–time that could have been spent doing something more productive or more enjoyable–must be factored into the final financial equation.  Time is truly money, more valuable than money even–everyone agrees on this fundamental point or at least they should–and if you choose to spend sizable blocs of your personal time performing menial activities in order to “save” money, said is no different than tossing one hundred dollar bills onto a roaring bonfire.

For all of you whiners and bitchers and decriers out there, it is exponentially better to be five percent alive than one hundred percent dead. Be thankful for your very existence, even if it may be a shortchanged, compromised, undermined version of someone else’s.  Everyone is NOT created equal; this point should be breathtakingly obvious, yet it should not be a reason for excessive chagrin and teeth-gnashing.  Don’t obsess over fairness and equity; just be grateful for your sentience and your acuity and for the magic which unfolds before you every moment of every day of the year.  Not everyone is equally blessed–True true true!!!–but then again only a microscopic percentage of fused egg and sperm cells ever reach the terminus of a birth canal.  You lucked out on that account given the fact you are here reading this passage, so stop bitching about the things you are missing out on in life and begin focusing on the positive things that you are currently experiencing instead.  Trust me, there are A LOT of them out there, and if you cannot see them it is only because you are too busy complaining and not looking very hard!

Emotional scars take longer to heal than physical scars. Truthfully, some never heal at all.  Given enough time, physical scars will pull together, gradually fuse along the edges, create a nice smooth symmetrical zipper of off-colored flesh, and remain that way for perpetuity.  Emotional scars, on the other hand, fester and roil and never want to congeal; at times it may seem as though their various components have settled their internal disputes and reached some sort of shaky compromise, yet those same bed partners frequently resume hostilities and pull apart at the first hint of affective turmoil.  Emotional scars live on forever as volatile, pulsating, stricken entities minus any real recipe for permanent reconciliation.  Physical scars live on forever too, as, well……well, merely as routine physical interruptions on otherwise homogenous skin.

Being a tiny minnow testing your wits against the mighty ocean is far preferable to being a big fish claiming dominion over a tiny pond. One takes a large measure of courage; the other–a pronounced absence of same.  Obviously one’s comfort level holds at a steady equilibrium when you settle into constantly familiar surroundings, but that lazy condition also defines the word “stagnation”.  Limited or no personal development is the obvious outgrowth of a sheltered, static existence.  Just as a stagnant backwater breeds all varieties of pestilence, a stagnant, never-changing existence breeds ignorance, bigotry, and closemindedness.  The only way to truly challenge oneself is to put your head right on the chopping block and pursuantly not flinch even one iota when the dreaded ax begins to fall.

…..Don Henley’s classic paean “The Boys of Summer” was playing on the radio as she drove east along Interstate 90, and she couldn’t stop thinking about the way her own summer had gone. Away from home for the first time, out on her own, testing her wings for air worthiness…..and then—like a lightning bolt from out of the blue–she had met HIM.  She hadn’t planned on that happening, not planned on something like a serious relationship developing at all.  This was to have been her summer dedicated to experimenting with independence for the first time, not with dependence on others as had so often been the case at home.  Yet she had quickly fallen under his spell, grew to need him more than she had ever needed anyone in her entire life, and the summer had flown by in glorious fashion with its three months seemingly condensed into three short days.  Now as she was headed back home while Labor Day rapidly approached, and he was headed off in the opposite direction–Don Henley was still waxing nostalgically about the importance of “Don’t look back; you can never look back!”–she began to cry—giant involuntary crocodile tears–for she knew the troubadour on her car radio was absolutely right, and that she would never learn nearly as much about herself in any summer yet to come than the one which had just passed and was currently receding ever further in her Elantra’s rear-view mirror as she continued driving eastward toward home…..toward a fresh year of college life…..toward a newly found level of independence…..toward a future, heartbreakingly, without HIM anywhere in it…..

NOTE:  The following poem is borrowed from an anthology of poetry entitled “The Changing Seasons of Life”, authored by Fred Blahnik and published in 2017.

 

I Did Nothing…..

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

He was hurting…..

And yet I did nothing…..

He was in desperate need…..

And I wasn’t there for him…..

He was being tormented…..

And I stood by and watched…..

The bully was real…..

But my response was virtual…..

His eyes were haunting…..

Yet I paid them scant attention…..

I had an opportunity to do right…..

Instead I did nothing, which is the same as doing wrong…..

We crossed paths for but a few minutes…..

Yet that was plenty long for me to shirk my duty to mankind…..

He was in need of an ally…..

But I didn’t step forward to offer a helping hand.

 

Today I faced humanity’s most crucial test…..

And I failed…..failed it miserably.

 

And now I have to live with my unforgiving conscience; it is as relentless and constricting as a Burmese python…..

But I deserve this fate……

I really really do…..

I will be punished severely by my moral compass, by my inner conscience, by my metaphysical weather vane, by my avatar of God…..

As well I should be…..

Absolutely I should be!!!

 

Inactions can be every bit as sinful as forthright actions.

The bully was very real, but my response was virtual…...

NOTE:  The following essay is excerpted from the incomplete, as-yet-unpublished treatise entitled “A Manifesto on Time, Mathematics, Infinity, and Related Issues”, authored by Fred Blahnik.

 

A human egg cell and sperm cell unite in a female’s birth canal—inarguably a purely biological act—yet somewhere during the midst of this strictly procreational requirement sentience is magically created and a soul—sentience’s inseparable hand-mate—likewise forms from what was previously nothing.

How can this be???  How can this “miracle of life” occur?

Scientists struggle mightily to discover the source of consciousness, but their determined effort is invested far more in academic duty and vanity than pure logic.  They will never succeed in this quixotic quest.  They will never find the “source” of consciousness, never succeed in solving this most transcendent of “puzzles”.

How do I know this?

Because the weapons they employ within their arsenal–mathematics, metrics, equations, rational thinking–are not relevant when one is talking about emotions, feelings, and inscrutable human urges.  Emotions are not quantifiable.  Feelings are not quantifiable.  Loyalty is not quantifiable.  Melancholy is not quantifiable.  Happiness is not quantifiable.  Hatred is not quantifiable.  LOVE is definitely not quantifiable.  Thus these pompous ignoramuses who continue to stubbornly pursue the source of consciousness in concert with the tenets of consciousness are no more learned or insightful than Ponce De Leon was when he swept through the swamps of Florida grandiosely pursuing the Fountain of Youth.  Consciousness is a metaphysical entity, a cosmic mystery; it is not bound by the strictures of science.

Why is this so?

The more appropriate question to ask would be:  Why should it NOT be so???

Why must we as human beings feel an obsessive compulsion to know the answers to everything that impacts our daily lives?

Why indeed?

For certain seminal things there are no true answers, nor should there be.   Some issues are just better left unquestioned.  Appreciated, yes, but unquestioned.  And once an individual realizes and accepts this overarching fact, life automatically becomes considerably easier to accept and, in the process…..more endearing.

We do not need to know all of the “answers” attending our collective daily existences, for the simple reason there oftentimes are none.  Just accept life and be appreciative for it.  Maintaining ignorance on the origin and reasons for consciousness is perfectly okay; it is laudable even.

…..and the incessant volley of moments kept passing by my head like stray bullets in a far-off combat zone, but with a shameless helping of luck that was augmented by neuro-physiology too complicated for anyone other than God to understand, a few of them lodged in the back of my brain and remained stuck there permanently as sweet, fleeting memories offering tribute to glad times long since passed. Ah, yes, the visceral beauty of random moments magically transformed into lifelong memories which we can take with us to our grave.  What else in life can match that?!  A miracle, perhaps??…..

…..she didn’t take herself too seriously. She didn’t think she was the end-all, be-all, do-all.  She wasn’t egotistical, not in the slightest.  And why would she be, might I ask?  She knew there were over six billion fellow human beings inhabiting Earth’s finite surface, each bringing their own peculiar talents and capabilities to the Sisyphean task of furthering mankind’s ultimate destiny.  She was merely one out of over six billion. That surely didn’t make her special, didn’t make her entitled, didn’t make her indispensable.  She brought to the table her own unique skill set, to be sure, and those skills were undoubtedly formidable, yet she was still only one member of the choir, not its director.  Not its maestro.  Not its grandiose synchronizer.  And she could live with that, live with that quite easily actually.  Others could feel their lives were absolutely crucial to mankind’s ongoing survival, but she knew better.  She was a grunt down in the trenches fighting hard and soldiering forward every day, just like everyone else.  Only some people don’t recognize this fundamental truth, cannot acknowledge the fact they aren’t exceptional.  They believe they transcend those around them, transcend humanity.  Utter craziness!   No one is more special than the person standing next to them.  No one approaches demigod status.  Everyone can be replaced; everyone derives from the same basic carbon molecules.  She was a humble person, always had been and always would be.  Humility is key to a happy lifestyle, if you really want to know the bedrock secret to survival.  If one takes himself or herself too seriously, the disappointments in life eventually start to outweigh the legions of pleasures……

…..and the moment came and then disappeared almost instantly…..followed by the next…..and the next…..and all those moments disappeared in her wake with little fanfare and no more permanence than the misty contrail a jet airplane leaves behind high in the stratosphere to mark its ephemeral presence. And she wondered right then about how purists always chide everyone to “Live in the moment!!” and “Live life to the fullest!!”  She questioned how you could live your life in “the moment” if you never even knew when that moment started and when it ended……and even though she knew for a fact that it MUST theoretically exist…..it disappeared with such fleeting swiftness and elusiveness that one never had any time to actually enjoy it and make plans over what to do with this super slippery little particle of time before it disappeared and the next one magically appeared in its stead.  She knew “the moment” and “the present” were the same thing–interchangeable entities, inarguably–but in her mind the million dollar question centered over what to do with the infernal things?!  Both of them–“the moment” and “the present”–were here and gone before you knew it, hence “living within the moment” made no more sense to her than struggling to understand the birth of our universe or living one’s entire life with a blanket pulled over your head…..