Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
Isn’t it ironic that my brain started making it’s own free associations at a time that social free association is proscribed?
It started again when there came a pier walk first thing this morning. And with that came a waft of stale urine from long closed public conveniences.
We were in Paris back on this day in 2009. I was working in London and my wife was working in Paris. I was lucky enough to spend every weekend that October with her using the convenience of train travel on Eurostar.
Paris is all about art, food, architecture, culture and so much more more. Sometimes, the more interesting story is about the daily grind of city living. On street parking is such a story and it was very restricted, even then. So limited were the opportunities that I snapped several solutions with my small Sony camera. Here are two that I stumbled over earlier.
‘… there is as yet no consensus on why religion arose nor on why it has so tenaciously remained. And not for lack of ideas: coopting the naturally selected brain, driving group cohesion, calming existential anxiety, protecting reputations and reproductive opportunities’
― Brian Greene Until The End Of Time.
Does religion persist because it confers an adaptive advantage? Could it be that faith is a byproduct of the evolution of cognition? Could there be better things waiting for us in the future than we are experiencing now? Once you start asking questions like this, potential answers are legion.
Another morning, another pier walk under a clear sky, the shadow lengths already halved while the sun continued to rise towards the upper meridian transit of the solar noon.
Imagine that it’s 11872 HE and a novel has just been published. This is a novel that future generations may consider as defining the expectations of the age.
HE is the Holocene era, a calendar formed by adding 10,000 to the widely used Common Era calendar CE. The Holocene Calendar is intended to mark the time elapsed since the Neolithic Revolution. This revolution is arguably a reasonable turning point in mankind’s transition from hunting and gathering to the sessile, settlement based lifestyles that forced us to cooperate for food production. The competitive and risky gathering practices had become outmoded. I presume that hunters and gatherers never imagined the value of their imaginings to the world but is that presumptuous of me?
This is the two hundreth consecutive daily blog and I think it’s a great achievement considering it has been done without incentivisation.
