Sometimes you swim; sometimes you just tread water.

We're taught from day one, or soon after, that we always need to be moving ahead.

It's not enough to say "mama" or "dada." Now it's time to sit up and then crawl and then walk and then think and reason and become adults and -- my, how the time flies!

From our first days, we're hurried along. Grow! Learn! Get taller! Get smarter! Stand up straight! As the drill sergeants in basic training used to yell at us recruits, "Move it, move it, move it!"

But life presents diversions along the way that slow us down, make us pay attention. As we grow older, we find we're interested in things that take a lot of our time and don't fit our parents' desires for us. They, understandably, want us to be doctors or lawyers or scientists or business men and women -- jobs that guarantee an income, and benefits.

Inevitably, we get distracted. Life is full of so much fun and beauty and wonder that we can't believe our parents never told us about it. Their principles seem pretty strict in the face of all this amazing stuff.

And at some point, we either go along with out parents, or we rebel.

Some of us thrive in the career our parents laid out for us. Some of us find fortune in a career our parents never imagined. Others of us settle for something just short of what we'd hoped for. Some of us get lost.

But somewhere in our lives and careers, almost all of us get stuck at one time or other. It may be indecision about that career or who to marry. It may be a mental illness, like depression, that stops us in our tracks. It may be a bad job or a -- you name it. Even those of us on the fast track to success sometimes get waylaid.

For whatever reason, we can't move forward. We thought we knew where we wanted to go, and the way there, but now we don't seem to have the energy to move in that direction. (I would try to be more specific about what it feels like, but it's different for every person in every situation.)

What to do when you hit an immoveable object? Ask advice? Seek medical help? Get drunk?

We do all of those and more to try to get going again. But you know what? Maybe we don't need to do anything. Maybe there are times when we need to STOP moving and just sit still. Be quiet. Think about things. Enjoy nature or good food. Re-evaluate. Make a new plan -- but in no hurry. Assuming we still have a paycheck, or at least savings, and aren't deathly ill, we have time.

Take a deep breath. You're in waters too deep or too turbulent for you. Don't fight them. Relax. Tread water. (For you non-swimmers, including me, that's a skill they teach swimmers to stay afloat without going anywhere; I'm assuming you can do it as long as your arms and legs let you.) The key words: stay afloat.

You may not be moving forward right now -- for whatever reason -- but that doesn't mean you have to sink to the bottom. Lots of suicides happen because someone lost momentum but didn't know that it's sometimes okay to stop struggling and do absolutely nothing beyond the minimum for a while. Lie back and float. Look up at the sky.

Tread water. Just don't sink. Time is on your side. A wave could catch you at any second.

Whoa! Look at you go!

I like to be naked.

No, this doesn't mean that I want to join a group who walks around un-clothed with others at some kind of spa or resort devoted to that. It just means that I feel good being naked. By myself. Without clothes. With no one watching.


I first realized it when I was working for a company that sent me on the road a good part of the year, and once I was in a motel room, I thought: you're alone, so why not take off your clothes and be comfortable? I did, and I liked the freedom from, in my case, pants with a belt and shirts buttoned to my neck. Even underwear. I was naked and felt at ease.

The sheets were newly washed and smelled good, and I turned on the TV and switched stations with abandon, watching shows I'd never imagined even existed, some devoted to fishing, others to cooking, still others X-rated (for an additional fee). I didn't care. I watched anything. I was naked and totally relaxed. A nice feeling.


Granted, I had to put on some clothes if I ordered room service or pizza to be delivered to my room, but, once that was done, it felt great to be in my own space again and with no clothes on. I ate the pizza totally naked, using the hotel/motel towels to wipe up my messes

I guess one reason I felt so good being au naturel was that there wasn't anything sexual attached to it. No pressure to "perform". It was just me the way I came into the world. It felt good.

I brought up the subject of being naked once in a business group, and while most of the men said that, yeah, they'd done that, the women unanimously disagreed. Take off all your clothes? With the lights on? And all those goddamned white-light mirrors in the bathroom? Are you nuts?

(Also avoid those full-length mirrors often attached to bathroom doors in hotels/motels.)

My take is that women are much more conscious of what they look like naked than men are, which may account for all the overweight older men who get caught with younger women in sex scandals. Trust me: money passed hands. No attractive self-respecting young woman would give an older, paunchy, balding guy a blowjob -- or more -- without being paid. Would you?

When I was a kid, I often heard about "nudist colonies" (that was the term) where people paraded around with no clothes on as if nothing unusual was happening. They frolicked on the beach and played volleyball. All stark naked. Pretending everything was normal.

Hello?

How can you not notice when someone of the other sex is naked? If you're a guy looking at women un-clad -- except the very oldest ones or the very youngest ones -- you have to notice. It's biology 101. Not sure about girls, but I'd guess it's pretty much the same.

My point is that it's natural to be naked, to have no binding clothes on, to let yourself just spread out as you're intended to -- but it might be best done in private. Just you and your body, at peace and enjoying a moment together. Heavier than you want to be? No problem. Snuggle up with yourself in bed and relax. Tomorrow you'll start that exercise routine that will change your life. (Groan!) Tonight just be yourself.

If you have access to a pool where you won't be observed, try diving in and swimming or floating or just walking around in the shallow end -- with not even a swimsuit between you and the water. Nothing like it. Guaranteed. You'll think you're a dolphin.

The danger of seeing yourself naked, of course, is that you may discover that you don't look all that good. Your dress or suit may have been covering a lot of bulging faults. So you have a choice: get yourself into shape or put your clothes back on -- or maybe just stop looking in mirrors.

I think it's therapeutic to get naked every chance you get. Step out of the shower and, after towelling off, walk around in your birthday suit for a few minutes. Go into all the rooms of your house as God intended you. If no one else is home, fix yourself some breakfast. (Watch the spattering hot grease!) When was the last time you ate breakfast naked?

If you're like me -- never. Why not?

No one's watching, so maybe it's time, no?

You first.

Lots of us are fuzzy about numbers but shouldn't be.

If you're old enough to remember the TV show The Sixty Four Thousand Dollar Question, you know that a contestant had made it through preliminary rounds to reach that point when he or she, in a booth (maybe with an expert), had to answer a really hard question that would earn him or her that much money, which, at the time, was probably like a million dollars today.

That show is long gone -- the highlight (to me) being Dr. Joyce Brothers as an expert on, of all things, boxing --but The $64,000 Question has become part of our vernacular. It's applied to small deals and big ones alike. The numbers change, but the basic principle applies: You bet everything you have to get lots more. I recently heard a high-level government person refer to "The Billion Dollar Question."

You can substitute your own amount: the concept is what counts.

So how much, really, is $64,000? This is a simple math question, not related to inflation, etc.

(And all you smirky math whizzes can check out for now. This isn't for you.)

Break it down. Sixty four thousand (64,000) is sixty four (64) times one thousand (1000), right? That means that if you'd won the big prize on that show, and they'd agreed to pay you weekly, you might have gotten a thousand dollars ($1000) a week for a year, and you would still have twelve (12) weeks left over!

Are you with me? Most are, but not all. Why not? Because some of us don't know that there are fifty two weeks in a year, much less how to calculate a pay-out based on that amount. If you remember that old kid refrain -- "Thirty days has September, April, May, and November" -- then you know that there are four weeks in every month except those four, which have an extra day, which means add four to the forty eight (48) weeks and you get fifty two (52) weeks.

If your head is reeling, you didn't get enough basic math when you were in school. This is actually a pretty easy problem. It gets harder when you're a grown-up trying to figure out square footage on a house you might want to buy. What is a square foot? And what if it's nine dollars and fifty cents ($9.50) per square foot? How can you possibly figure out what that house should cost?

Well, of course you get out your calculator. A device that transformed consumer finance decades ago, it's still useful for those of us who aren't good at math. But you still have to know something about math just to be able to enter the figures into the calculator. Adding and subtracting and dividing and multiplying. Do you understand what those words mean?

Our school systems don't always teach us the math we need to know to make sense of our world. Being a high school graduate should certify that we understand numbers and what they represent and how they function in our lives and how they can make us rich or ruin us. How they can make life easier or harder.


Here's another example. Get ready.

Let's assume you want to see a movie at a certain time. The movie starts at 7:15. It's 5:30 at your house. How much time, from right now, do you have to get there? Quick! Do the calculation. Did you? Could you?

If not, let's break it down. It's 5:30 right now, so that means it's a half-hour (30 minutes) until six o'clock (6:00). Then it's another hour until seven (1:00). And another fifteen minutes after that until the movie starts.

So go back and add all that up: 30 minutes plus 60 minutes (an hour) and 15 minutes. Can you do the math? 30+60+15=105. That's how many minutes you have to get to the movie - minus parking and seat-picking time, which may take another fifteen (15) or twenty (20) minutes. So you have to subtract that time from your total of 105 minutes, right?

You come up with 105-20=85. That's how minutes you really have, from right now, to get to the movie theatre. So how much is 85 minutes? Well, I think most of us know that there are 60 minutes in an hour (just as there are sixty/60 seconds in a minute, which I hope you knew). So if you subtract 60 from 85, you get 25. Twenty-five. That's how many minutes more than an hour that you have. You have an hour and twenty-five minutes. (1:25) Get moving!

Try one more. Let's say you order a pizza and the guy delivers it and you want to give him a fifteen percent tip. The pizza costs -- to make it easy -- fifteen dollars ($15). What is fifteen percent of that?

If you suddenly blanked, don't be ashamed. But vow to do better.

The bill for the pizza -- and this formula applies to any bill in any restaurant -- is fifteen dollars ($15), so you could multiply 15 (percent) times 15 (dollars), but only if you remember, from your math classes, how to do that.

Or you could take a short cut and say that ten percent (10%) of $15 is $1.50 (a dollar-fifty), and another five percent (5%) is half that, or .75 (seventy-five cents). If I add 1.50 and .75, I come up with 2.25. That's the tip I'll give the waiter or waitress.

So if my bill was $15 for the pizza, and I add a fifteen per cent (15%) tip, or $2.25, my total is -- what?

To recap: I'm paying $15 for a pizza and another $2.25 for a tip, so my total is $17.25. That's the amount that I agree to pay. That's what I sign my name to on the credit card receipt.

But there is another reason to care about numbers, beyond the rational and practical. They rule our universe. The smartest scientists -- the physicists and astronomers -- live and learn by numbers. How fast something can go, what the rate of speed is, the distance between stars they can't even see, etc. It's all numbers. People who design our space vehicles live in a world of numbers most of us are totally unaware of.

Occasionally a physicist -- a Stephen Hawking or an Einstein -- will try to explain what they know to the rest of us, but it almost always goes way over our heads. (Einstein famously said that he was bad at math, but I don't think he was comparing himself to me.)

You can get through your life being sort of stupid about numbers -- if you're rich and have servants, or are not so rich but have friends, who constantly, and patiently, remind you of your obligations -- but it's easier if you just school yourself in the basics.

Numbers are crucial to our existence and our understanding of our existence. By the way, numbers can be expressed either as numerals or letters. It's as legitimate to say 75 as it is to say seventy-five. Isn't that interesting? I think so.

Math is just playing with numbers, adding them up and subtracting them, etc. (I'm not talking about "higher" math, which most of us don't need or want to know about.) Start thinking about numbers. Simple numbers. Count things in your life. It's not hard. But it's important. It's important for your bank account, so you don't run out of money and not know it. It's important in shopping, so you don't spend more than you need to or can. It's important when you have to measure ingredients for a special dish you're cooking. Numbers tell you how tall your kid is, how much money you make.

Quick now:

How many teaspoons in a tablespoon?

How many ounces in a pound?

How many pints in a quart?

How many milliliters in a liter?

How many pounds in a ton?

How far, within 10,000 miles, to the moon?

How far, within 10,000,000 miles, to the sun?

How many feet in a mile?


Give up? If so, join the crowd. Most of us have only a rudimentary understanding of how numbers and mathematical equations underlie our lives, of what numbers really mean to us.

Woody Allen once said, more or less, that success in life consisted of (1) 80 percent showing up, (2) 90 percent showing up, (3) some other percent. Do you recall his actual number? Neither do I. But what he meant was that just showing up, being there when we're supposed to, is a big part of our success, in life and love and career. The number is inconsequential. It's the concept that counts.

When did Columbus sail over "the oceans blue" to discover The New World? Do you know the year? More importantly, was it 100 years ago or 500 years ago or 1000 years ago?

And why does it matter?

Because a hundred years ago Florida was already awash in development, while a thousand years ago no white people even knew it existed. You don't need to know that Columbus sailed the sea in 1492 -- you just need to know that it was about 500 years ago. Not a hundred or a thousand.
Got it? Get the concept of numbers, and the specifics, if they're necessary, will come easier.

There used to be a high school course called Consumer Math. It was intended to teach those of us not fast-tracked into business or physics or engineering all we needed to know about math and how it functioned in our real lives. Buying a house, getting a loan, managing our finances, etc.
Academically, it was ranked alongside Home Ec. But I'm willing to bet that the students who took those courses probably remember more from them than from all their history and science and English classes put together.

I think it's time to bring back Consumer Math. Give it a snappier name. Math for Life! Or How Numbers Can Make You Hotter!

When it comes to the eduation of our kids, I think we need to understand and admit that lots of them aren't going to college and need just a thorough understanding of numbers to find and keep a good job. It would be great if they had verbal skills, too -- through writing and Public Speaking classes -- but that's another topic for another time (and maybe wishful thinking).

Acquaint your kids with numbers early on. And re-acquaint yourself. It's never too late!

Kids need to keep their parents in perspective.

If you're a kid reading this -- not likely but maybe -- you either love and revere your parents -- again not likely but maybe -- or you're thinking they are way too strict, forbidding you from (1) dating an older boy or a trashy girl, (2) going to a concert with your friends, (3) hanging out downtown on school nights with tattooed people, (4) using your cell phone while driving, (5) leaving the house until you've picked up your clothes from your floor, etc. Pick your battle.

To you they look like the police. To themselves, they look like you but older. In you they see who they used to be, more or less, and that means seeing the mistakes they made and trying to spare you most of them. In the process, though, they do sometimes have to flash badges that say PARENT.

They didn't aspire to this role. It was visited upon them when they had you. They probably wanted you -- may have gone to extreme measures to have you -- but they never imagined how their lives would change just because of you. It's like one minute they were young and in love and so into each other and -- zap! -- the next minute they were up half the night, taking turns quieting you, snapping at each other the next day because they were so damned tired and, thanks to you, sleep-deprived. They loved you, but boy o boy, did you change their lives!

Your parents are just grown-up versions of you. They're not necessarily smarter -- maybe or maybe not -- but they've seen so much more of life than you have that you really ought to pay attention to what they have to say. If, after a while, they seem full of crap, tune them out -- as young people have been doing since the last Ice Age -- but not until you've listened. Even grown-ups who don't seem all that smart sometimes have insights about particular things that they're interested in or good at or spent a career doing. Keep your ears and minds open, okay?

It's true, of course, that parents have been repeating the same old cliches forever, all about choosing your friends carefully and driving safely and cleaning up your own messes. Also being home on time and eating your vegetables and respecting your elders and having good table manners and saying please and thank you and not dressing like whores and pimps. It's because cliches are true. That's why they've become part of our language. But each generation has to be taught them all over again. Your parents learned them. So will you.

Parents have a very serious obligation to their children, who were brought into this world with no say-so about it. Children have only an obligation to themselves, to figure out who they are and, if need be, ask a parent for information or, in rare instances, advice. But someday those children may become parents themselves, so we can only hope they've been paying attention.

And so the cycle keeps repeating itself. Just like the seasons. Like clockwork. As Yogi Berra said, "It's deja vu all over again."

It was Mark Twain who said that when he left home as a young man, he thought his father pretty much an idiot, but when he came back home again, he was surprised to find out how much the old man had learned. Part of deciding whether or not to trust your parents is simply the process of growing up and learning that, yes, those old cliches really are right. The Golden Rule. Manners. Perserverence. Trust. Goodness. Love. No matter what age, there are goals you should be pursuing but also values you should make part of your development.

Grandparents have always been held up in our society -- and lots of others -- as being the repositories of practical wisdom, and they are. But your mom or dad are good sources, too, and are closer to you than your grandparents, who are one generation removed. (Aesthetic distance, they call it in the art world.) Check in with your parents before you believe everything your friends tell you. Then, if you need a second opinion, ask your grandparents.

But don't do any of this if you're not mature enough to listen and learn. If you're young and crazy and bent on rebellion for its own sake, then go ahead and heed the advice of your friends who haven't been alive any longer than you and who may not be as smart. Good luck with that.

In the end, remember that your parents consider their lives enriched because of you and the experience of having you and trying to raise you. That's why they took you on in the first place and why we keep on doing it as a species. Like even the simplest of creatures, their biological drive is for you to survive. But humans take it a notch higher and want their offspring not just to avoid predators but to enjoy the things they've enjoyed themselves -- sex and kids and good food and sports and job satisfaction, etc. And to avoid the miseries of life. Some problems, after all, are avoidable, and some lessons can be learned: the triumph of intelligence over instinct.

There's not a parent alive who hasn't said to himself/herself: God, I wish I had that moment back! They don't want you to someday say the same to yourself.

Raising a generation of humans is not for the faint-hearted. It's a wonder most of us do it as well as we do -- and that most of our young survive to pass on the cliches to their own offspring.

A well-designed system, no?

Yes and no. Granted, I couldn't have planned it better myself. But, being a husband and a dad, I can think of places it could have been tweaked.

So can you.

Being human isn't perfect, but it's the best evolution has come up with so far.

Eyeballs are amazing.

If you're like me and introspective, interested if not outright obsessed with figuring out not just who we are but how we work, you can't help being intrigued by our eyeballs.


Tucked away inside bony structures that do NOT protect them nearly enough -- a simple poke with a sharp stick will splatter one -- our eyeballs working together show us the world. How they do it I can't begin to guess, any more than I know how this computer works. The difference, of course, is that one is man-made, the other a true mystery.


Once upon a time, Somebody or Something figured out that if we humans were to move about in our world and learn to work with it, we had to be able to see it. Thus, we have eyes, which really means eyeballs. Truly amazing inventions. Little worlds in themselves. Working with the brain, they give us whole lives in photo and video form.


But given their importance to our very existence -- how can you avoid a predator if you can't see it? how can you fall in love if you can't see your beloved's face? -- I've always been dismayed at how precarious their situation is, how endangered they are. An elbow in a pick-up basketball came can blind you forever on one side. (I know someone it happened to.) So can acid thrown by a lunatic ex-husband. So can any number of other things.


It may be a design flaw in our make-up that Whoever or Whatever created us didn't think far enough ahead to know that we'd be trying to put each other's eyes out or that we'd do it all by ourselves accidentally.

Think about it. Our arguably most important organs, the brain and heart and lungs, are all encased in bone, the skull and the ribcage respectively. Of course those protections can be breached, and often are, in car wrecks or murders, but for day-to-day living, our brains and hearts and lungs are pretty well-defended.


Our eyeballs less so. About the size of large marbles, and squishy to boot, these invaluable orbs are sunk into a bony circumference that only provides protection against blows from blunt instruments -- fists, clubs, stones -- bigger than itself. But any kind of sharp object, even a primitive spear, can penetrate and blind us. What's that all about?

We humans have devised some protections on our own: the masks of hockey goal tenders and baseball catchers, safety glasses lots of workers use, even sunglasses to keep out the sun's most destructive rays. But we had to come up with all those. Why didn't Nature install them in the first place?

I was just rubbing my eyeball because it was itching. And you know what? Not only was it not painful, it felt kind of nice. My eyeball, like a pet, seemed to like being rubbed. I wonder if my liver or my bladder would react the same. Not likely. The amazing eyeball, no?


I wish I could say that there's something you can do to prolong the lives of your eyeballs, but I don't have a clue. You can't exercise them, but there are drugs and surgical procedures that can correct problems. Stilll, for most of us, our eyeballs are standard issue, and we're stuck with them, for better or worse. They are what they are. And they're self-sufficient. They moisturize themselves continually even as they just keep going, year after year, blinking and blinking and blinking, seeing and seeing and seeing.

What can we do to keep them going longer? Not a clue.


Just get lots of sleep, I guess, and when you're awake, keep your eyes open.

You never know what you might see!