What is Truth?

I don’t know about Truth with a capital T. The word is used often to express or imply the idea of some one big overriding Answer to Everything, something transcending ordinary verbal logic. I don’t know that there is such a thing, and anyway I see no reason to talk about it if it transcends verbal logic.

I do care about descriptive accuracy. It helps us in many ways to manage our lives, to predict and manipulate the flow of phenomena; and since I find some phenomena to be very pleasant, and others quite the contrary, I regard their prediction and manipulation to be a most worthy enterprise.

This has nothing to do with whether I believe it all to be Ultimately Real. As in the old limeric -

There was a faith healer from Deal
Who said, “Although pain is not real,
When I sit on a pin
And it punctures my skin
I dislike what I fancy I feel.”

So, you can say that for me “truth” with a small t, “truth” in the sense of descriptive accuracy, is a value. Not the only value, not an absolute ultimate value, but an instrumental value, important to me in my constant endeavor to get the other things I want.

But rather than say that there are other kinds of “truth” besides descriptive accuracy, I find it less misleading – more descriptively accurate, and so more “true” – to say that I have other values besides “truth.”

Standard Time

For years now I’ve been in the habit of turning my clocks back or forward in the morning of the time change, after getting up, rather than the night before like they tell us to do.

I figure if I’m going to gain an hour, I want to be awake to enjoy it; and if I’m to lose an hour I’d rather lose it when I can make adjustments to my routine and work around it, instead of having it come out of my sleep.

Yesterday evening I decided to try something even more unconventional. I enjoyed the extra hour yesterday morning so much I wasn’t ready to give it up, so I put my bedroom back on Daylight Savings.  Turned everything forward again, so I was reading the time that corresponded to how my body felt and the sky looked. I went to bed the same astronomical time, the same body-rhythm time as the night before; and in the wee hours of the morning, whenever I woke or half-woke  and looked at my bedside clock, it told me the time that it felt like, so I was able to get up and out comfortably by the same solar time that I was used to. Once out in the real world, I put my watch back again so I was in sync with everyone else – just up an hour earlier! It felt great, and I’m going to keep it up a few days longer if I can.

Walking for Hunger

No Deep Thoughts today. Been Walking all morning and into the afternoon. Raised well over $700 thanks to the online registration system – all I had to do was assemble a contact list, semi-personalize a message or two and click “send” and watch the money come in.

The Walk for Hunger is such a well-known institution here in Boston that  it’s easy to raise money for. I just have to say “I’m doing the Walk” and people understand, they don’t need explanations or persuasion, they may have Walked in the past themselves, or volunteered at a checkpoint or traffic crossing, or had other friends who did the Walk. Just say the word and money comes in. The Walk is bigger than the Walkers. It has a life all its own. We may walk the Walk, but at the same time the Walk is carrying us.

The weather was fine, a bit cloudier and cooler than I would have liked but cooler is OK for Walking. I met a whole lot of friendly interesting people along the way, old-timers and first-timers, white and black and India Indian. The ice cream was waiting for us at the end (unlike my first Walk three years ago, when the truck broke down on the way and the ice cream all melted). And finally at the Heart and Sole tent I met an Episcopalian woman priest whom it turned out I already knew from several years ago.

So a great Walk, and bul kogi at the Harvard Square “Mayfair” to start putting back the calories I burned up. I admit to my feet being a bit sore, but not a big deal.

Now back to Deep Thoughts.

Wow, almost a whole month without a post.

And I’ve just learned that Branden has stumbled on the site, probably by googling himself.

So I guess I’d better make more of an effort to keep it updated.

Spring

The equinox is less than a quarter hour away.

Moreover I  just took a walk through Kennedy Park, by the ruins of the old snow-penguin, to get a look at the nice new moon – a very thin crescent, just two days old, with what I believe to be Venus not quite twice as high in the sky above it.

All’s right with the world.

Rain, but dwindling.

Shoveling at 8pm was easy, nice fluffy stuff for the first time this winter.

Trouble was, by midnight there was enough new stuff to fill in all the gaps that had been made at 8.

Then this morning there was dense slush everywhere that there wasn’t ice…

And I seem to have misplaced one of my good new gloves.

Oh well, it will be spring soon.

Snow

finally arrived towards noon, just light flurries at first but gradually thickening.

Last I heard it’s supposed to turn to rain later, and be above melting tomorrow. We shall see.

Weather

rainy but still warmish.

Last night attended the first of this year’s Minns Lectures by Branden Thornhill-Miller. Covered a broad range of findings and theory regarding the Psychology of Religion.

Odd factoid: some of the prayer-and-healing studies seem to indicate that people who know they are being prayed for have more complications than others. He speculates that it may be because they are thinking “Things must be bad if I’ve got so many people praying for me.”

Are we “Wired for God” or simply wired to imagine personal beings where none are present?

Tonight: the psychology of us UUs.

A Taste of Spring

OK, a weather post.

The temperature hit 60 yesterday here in Greater Beantown, and today it is expected to go near 70.

The birds are twittering madly, and I’ve been seeing rowers on the Charles for the first time in a while (a week ago they would have needed icebreaking equipment).

The snow penguin they made in Kennedy Park is all melted.

Soon though things will get back to “seasonable,” temps back below 40 and maybe some snow mixing with the rain that’s on the way.

Such is the way of the weather.

Here I am again.

That was a while, wasn’t it.

I see some things have changed here at WordPress since my first attempt over half a year ago. Maybe I should spend some time investigating.

Meanwhile I’ve become a Trusted User on dKos, which has inspired me to post there even more regularly, leaving less time for other things like whatever I might be doing here.

However I just found out I could get a gmail account without being referred by an existing user; funny, they didn’t announce that we could, they just started making them available to anyone who asked. I saw a rumor posted somewhere that they might be planning a big rollout on April Fool’s Day, which is also their anniversary…

So while futzing with my new gmail I noticed they also have a “documents and spreadsheets” program that seems to work much the way zohowriter does (or did; haven’t visited them in a while either); so maybe I’ll start doing some kind of work using that.

Possibilities.