At the end of a friend's recent e-mail, he asked: "Why does every national problem we face today present us not with clear solutions but with seemingly unsolvable dilemmas?" Interesting question. Allow me to riff on it --

I was diagnosed with ALS nearly 20 years ago. More than 16 years ago, I commenced sitting at my dining table, and I've been there ever since. Fortunately, I had begun psychotherapy 3 years earlier, and thus avoided a major funk. And then, just when I needed something else to shore me up, my "hippie" daughter sent me "Lovingkindness," Sharon Salzberg's introductory text on Buddhism. I slowly began to realize that peace of mind and heart is not a destination, but rather a lifetime's journey -- for us all.

My closest friend here in NM has recently had a spate of ill fortune, including an unpleasant divorce, a blocked coronary artery, and what appears to be an undiagnosed hiatal hernia. For the latter, he finally found an acupuncturist who's helping, and that doc has been teaching him about the Tao, an Eastern way of looking at things. And, just when I needed something more to sustain me -- I can no longer talk, I can hardly read, I type my e-mails with one finger, etc. -- my friend gave me Derek Lin's "The Tao of Joy Every Day." And in it I read the following --

"The knowledge we possess is about the limited and finite material world. The eternal Tao is far vaster and infinitely more interesting.
When we glimpse how much there really is beyond our grasp, it is truly a humbling moment."

Does the concept of a vast unknowable lead you towards an acceptable answer to the question that I quoted above?  If not, the perhaps Zorba's explanation will help. He said: "Am I not a man? And is a man not stupid?!"

I never believed the theory that the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid hitting the earth. I hold that, as Darwin would have predicted, the dinosaurs no longer "fit" into the environment which had changed because lizards had grown into dinosaurs that were so large that they had no effective enemies, and so could eat up their entire food supply and then starve to death! So, humans, whose brains are so large that they "hold dominion over the Earth" and, like the dinosaurs, have no effective enemies will, as Malthus predicted, over-populate, and then eat up their entire food supply, etc. But first, I'm afraid, humans will use up all the energy-producing resources, crowd into the remaining temperate zones, fight devastating wars over food, and finally eat up the entire food supply, etc. This will take a while, perhaps millions of years, but it's inevitable. Eventually, we, too, will no longer "fit" into the environment which we, ourselves, LOUSED UP, and we'll become as extinct as dinosaurs.