The Optimist Daily Brilliant Thoughts

• The Voice of the Village • 16 – 23 April 2020 MONTECITO JOURNAL 27 Born London, 1933. Mother Canadian. Father a British civil servant. World War

II childhood spent mostly in Toronto and Washington, D.C. Berkeley PhD. in

American History, 1964. Living in Santa Barbara since 1973. No children. Best-known for his illustrated epigrams, called “Pot-Shots”, now a series of 10,000. Email ashleigh@west.net or visit www.ashleighbrilliant.com Brilliant Thoughts by Ashleigh Brilliant Reason? I n a popularity-survey of some of my recent “Thoughts and Ideas,” the winning line said, “One advantage of living alone is that you never have to be reasonable.” Although these words expressed my own feeling, I was surprised how many others also apparently feel the same way. I suppose it means that living with other people inevitably means accepting compromises, sacrificing one’s own preferred ways of doing things. Being reasonable, in other words, means not always insisting on being right. That is how families are run – so are companies, and practically any other human grouping with a common purpose – even universities, and other institutions supposedly based on free thought.

Only within the individual mind need reason not prevail. Indeed, where only one person is concerned, reason has, so to speak, no reason to assert itself at all.

But what do we mean by “reason,” anyway? It has something to do with another equally elusive concept: logic. Believe it or not, logicians actually recognize certain “Laws of Thought.” For example, there is what’s called “the Law of the Excluded Middle,” which simply says that nothing can be, and not be, at the same time. I would question that, right off the bat. Take joy and sadness. But that gets us into emotions, which are notoriously unreasonable and illogical.

Bing Crosby, singing the lyrics of Johnny Mercer, said the same thing in a different way, when he advised us to: Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative Latch on to the Affirmative –Don’t mess with Mister In-Between.

George Bernard Shaw was no friend of Reason – at least, not in his famous statement that “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

It may have been the French revolutionaries of several centuries ago who first gave Reason a bad name by declaring theirs to be the “Age of Reason” while at the same time they were cutting off people’s heads. And many of the “rational” changes they did bring in, such as reforming the calendar, didn’t last very long anyway.

Thomas Paine, who had already stirred up the American Revolution with his “Common Sense,” and “The American Crisis,” made the exaltation of Reason even less unanimous with his own 1794 tract, “The Age of Reason,” which was about as anti-religious as you can get without being an out-and-out atheist. The term for such wafflers was “Deists,” and many of our Founding Fathers were seduced by this empty creed, which says, in effect, “OK, there may be a God, but He, She, or It, has nothing to do with us, in any way which would require our worship or devotion.”

It remained for the philosophers, like Kant, with his “Critique of Pure Reason,” and Bertrand Russell, with his castigation of what he called the “Unreason,” of movements like Fascism – to put Reason back on its pedestal.

But I cannot leave this subject without telling you of one of the few occasions in my life when I felt I acted heroically. It occurred in Los Angeles, when for a brief period, I was employed by the City as a substitute teacher. One of the hazards of such work was never knowing in advance, from day to day, just what sort of challenge would be awaiting you. Usually I was sent to a high school or a junior high, where the biggest problem was simply keeping order. But just once, I was sent, for one day, to teach a class in a Junior College – and, to my surprise, it turned out to be a class in LOGIC. I had never studied Logic, and would have been perfectly justified in letting the students devote the hour to “private study.”

But something in me said “this is your chance to learn!” So, I asked, “Where are we in the textbook?” and, when shown the place, I proceeded to read aloud the next paragraph, teaching it to myself as I did so. Then I explained it to the class. And I went on that way, paragraph by paragraph, as far as time allowed. When the bell rang, I had learned a little about Logic – and I don’t think one of those students even suspected that they didn’t have a fully qualified teacher.

Thus did I give conclusive proof that I was capable of teaching a subject I knew nothing about. And what could be more logical than that? •MJ The Game of Life... Currently Ernie’s World by Ernie Witham Read more exciting adventures in Ernie’s World the Book and A Year in the Life of a “Working” Writer. Both available at amazon.com or erniesworld.com. “M y bucket is definitely fuller than yours.”

Pat looked in my bucket. “Guess you’re right.” Yes! I thought. “Of course, I’ve emptied my bucket twice so far.”

“No way!”

“Check the green waste container.” I checked. Sure enough.

“Yeah, well, I, ah, have emptied my bucket three times.”

“Then how come all the stuff in the green waste bucket is mine?”

“Because…” I took off my cap. My head expanded back to normal size. “Because I’ve been throwing my bucket contents over the patio wall. I’m making a compost pile for the good of all humankind. I’ll probably win some kind of award. Nobel or something.” I smiled the smile of a winner.

Pat stood, as if to go check my compost pile story, but instead headed for the green waste container. “While you were sitting there thinking I filled my bucket again.”

Rats! I was losing the weeding game!

We had a plethora of weeds. Due partially to my brilliant idea to teach three-year-old Jack how to water my bonsai so that he could someday become a bonsai master...

“Why doesn’t the water work anymore?” Jack asked me as he kept squeezing the trigger.

“Because the utility company shut off the water,” I explained, while wiping down the patio doors, the barbecue and the dog.

“Why?”

“Because they think we have been wasting water,” I said, as I used a push broom to spread out the puddles.

“Why?”

“Because Cachuma Lake is going dry,” I said, wringing out my sweatshirt.

“Why?” “Because… I said so.”

After Jack and his parents went home it took me days to dry out my little trees. Then the March rains came and they got soaked again. But when the sun finally came out they started sending out new growth every day. Unfortunately so did the weeds. Game on.

See, after reading every written word in our entire library during this extended quarantine, binge-watching every DVD comedy ever produced, and erasing and redoing all the newspaper puzzles accumulating in the recycle bin, we were running out of things to do. That’s when we decided it might be fun to engage in a little friendly competition by playing a few games. We started with cribbage.

“Well that ties us up 63 games to 63 games,” Pat said.

“By my count I have 63 but you only have 62. That makes me the winner of the best of 129 games. Ta-da!”

“What? Did they even teach you math in New Hampshire?” That was when the cribbage board went into the trash.

“Uno?” Turns out Pat is an Uno whiz. So, it was less than a day before the Uno cards followed the path of the cribbage board. Then we tried Star Wars Trivial Pursuit, which Jon had left during their last trip up from L.A. After playing for an hour and realizing we knew nothing, we watched all nine episodes on Disney+. Didn’t really help. Too many planets and characters. Then I had a brainstorm. I answered every card with “Jabba the Hut” until Pat had to finally begrudgingly say: “Correct.” Then Trivial Pursuit made its exit.

We decided against Monopoly. Last time we played that the neighbors complained about all the yelling. And we gave up on rock-paper-scissors after an argument about how paper could possibly beat a rock.

So we tried poker. “You now owe me four million one hundred and eighty-three thousand dollars,” said Pat. “When may I expect payment?”

“As soon as my stimulus money comes in.” Do you know that playing cards smell a little like pizza when they burn?

That’s when Pat suggested a new course of action.

“Weeding? Seriously?”

“Well, it would be nice to be able to get to the back gate without having to use a machete.”

I could see her point. The backyard was starting to look like an RV storage lot. Plus, we had been getting quite pale from all the time at the dining room table.

“Okay,” I said. “Prepare to be outweeded.”

“Not a chance.”

And now here we were in a weeding battle. I grabbed my weed puller tool with one hand and a spade with the other, did a couple of neckrolls and conjured up my best Edward Scissorhands image. I could smell victory… •MJ