I believe it’s worry that drives some of us nuts, leading to rampant historical amnesia,  socially-induced adult autism, and insistent issues.

These are simply your basic garden variety “concerns” or fear-based uneasiness — and they reflect a worrisome certainty that the future is bleak.

We humans have been despoiling the planet since at least 1750 C.E., when the West’s industrial revolution kicked off in Europe and her North American colonies. Hence, we now welcome a prevalent new human sub-species: the GINKs (Green Inclinations, No Kids).

Look at the declining birth rates in “the West,” the GINKs, the American madman trying to rule the world, out-of-control hyper-nationalism, catastrophic climate change — and many more armed conflicts.

Hiking along rustic trails in Santa Barbara’s bewitching backcountry helps me dispel most of these pathetic perturbations, and none of these worries quite make it to emergency, klaxon-blaring outright fear status.

Thus, I try to eke out more miles on foot, to get better sleep, drink less coffee and eliminate screen time.

It’s like the protagonist in Willa Cather’s novel “Alexander’s Bridge,” who moans aloud that “a million details drink you dry.” She caught on to this cosmopolitan, pre-internet malady back in 1912.

A score of middling worries and over-intense concerns may also drink you dry — dry of all your creativity and stripped of your essential higher energies.

We may lose our occasional access to portals (thresholds) into perpetuity, into the non-linear eternity once championed by religion and poetry, and celebrated in transcendent music.

Sometimes when I’m roaming along the San Rafael Wilderness’ awesome Manzana Creek Trail (30W13), the tiny obsessed “mind” suddenly cognizes its own puny position.

Deep breaths and gaping at Santa Cruz Island’s black silhouette across 25 miles of wine dark sea help create this recollection of one’s own unimportance. Geographic context can lead to a reassuring spiritual contact.

In nature, one experiences one’s own microscopic position in relation to the vast universe. The old verse contending, “The ant’s a lion in his centaur world,” expresses this.

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor makes the useful temporal distinction between one’s “lived time” and the individual’s coequal sense of cosmic time (eternity).

My predominant mood seems to be controlled by my daily sense of these “lived-time” experiences. How much of this lived time vs. that cosmic time do I enjoy/experience each day?

Obviously, the internet, social media and my cell live forever (“eternally”). They’re constantly running; algorithmic Alexa will always answer promptly.

These devices are audio gods in a form of (electronic) cosmic time bathed in an eternal ether — a bewitching visual elixir.

As “Dan,” I live a 24/7 existence — 168 lived-time hours each seven-day week — but social media on the internet never shuts down, never falters and overwhelms the individual with its appalling infinitude.

It’s the AI version of the old Mind Machine. The weatherman drones on effortlessly on every channel about each possible upcoming natural disaster, for example.

Yet my aging body and archaic mind need to wallow shamelessly in the opposed lived time, where “I” can easily focus, figure out the context and proceed with confidence on a self-chosen path.

No need to worry about the next horrible hurricane or earthquake — or World War III.

By purposefully walking uphill or in near-wilderness, the self must aim a micro-focus on the immediate topographic surroundings.

If I should perchance careen off trail and crash into the chaparral, which has happened, I’ll accept the lesson in cuts and bruises, but also feel gratitude that I’m OK.

Yet I also appreciate the lesson of coming face-to-face with Gaia in the hills, walking on clean dirt and perhaps taking a header into the bushes in a shocking encounter that reanimates the spirit.

Such episodes include bathing in the icy stream of reality, nature’s primal power and acceptance of bardo (death experience). Living is encountering the hidden spirit each day. The main negative issue with time lived is that it will certainly end.

Gut punches such as falling on your face, getting off-trail for hours or dealing with severe poison oak support one’s appreciation of this planet and of one’s own singular existence.

Face-to-face acquaintance with green physical reality tightens you up, heightens consciousness, stokes your flame and obliges super-scrutiny of the immediate path/place/weather you inhabit moment by moment, 24/7, within lived time.

There is no time for idle speculation or to vent and spew about recent politics (arrggghh!), or about theology, the economy, sports or even the impending climate catastrophe.

We must give exhilarating attention to the humanizing now, to the next tiny step on one’s own stupefying life path. (Note: These columns all fall under the title On the Trail.)

During 12 years given over to university studies, I changed myself into a “perpetual student,” and I would have loved to become a tenured teacher assistant at UC and to continue studying western and Mediterranean cultures for the rest of my life (see 4.1.1.).

In order to earn my daily bread and give back to my society, I became a teacher (4.1.1.). During the following 45 years, my head has improbably oscillated between theory and practice (German Theorie und Praxis), between the mystical right brain and the pragmatic left brain hemispheres.

Where is essential meaning, and in which sphere? Why am I here? What should I do? What is my duty [dharma]?

During those post-university 45 years, my life partner and I traveled relentlessly to Europe and Asia. I’ve scrawled seven tedious books, and I’ve maniacally hiked and backpacked in the wild Santa Barbara backcountry.

Such rapid shifts between Theorie and Praxis, between the mystical right brain woven into the pragmatic left brain, all engender optimism and creative energy. In this way, I’ve remained up in the cloud of cosmic time searching for the eternal, but with my hands and feet in the human forest, working in fields of lived time.

I view this metaphorically as having spirit in the clouds, and feet on the forest trail, with the heart-mind (buddhi) managing the furious blend. I see myself riding the creative tension while attempting to live an authentic and interesting life.

If I don’t step off the treadmill and kick back enough, I become ill. Yet, when I focus too relentlessly for too long, I become insane. I suppose balance is everything. Worries and tedious “concerns”’” condemn us to post-bourgeois mediocrity and a kind of social epilepsy or a chronic migraine state.

4.1.1.

A 2019 reference shows “Data Finds U.S. Birth Rate at Lowest Level in 32 Years.”

My student years were 1966-1971 and 1973-1979, mostly at UCSB but also at Pierce College (Los Angeles), UCLA, American School of Classical Studies (Athens) and The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City).

Charles Taylor, “Cosmic Connections” (Harvard 2024); GINKs (Green Inclinations, No Kids) derives from Edward St. Aubyn’s novel “Parallel Lines” (2025).