We tend to think of fear as something loud and visible, but most of the time it works quietly, guiding how we interpret the world. Our greatest fear is that of the Unknown. And it is everywhere. So, what do we do? We tend to favor what’s familiar. We gravitate towards structures that give the impression of control. In short, we manage it by keeping it at a distance. That is, most of us do. But there is another way, and it is one of awareness. It comes with strategically using the unknown as a emancipating force for uncovering antagonisms and living well within them, not pushing them out of sight.
 
I’ve spent many years trying to expose how these concepts are not just personal but also influence the business world. Most of our businesses find themselves pushed around by forces that seem out of their control. They feel in a perpetual fire drill. But our businesses too can become enlightened, with the right level of awareness.
 
Risk and Opportunity (R&O) management is a good example. It exists because, in complex business environments, uncertainty is unavoidable. It is our attempt to face the unknown in a disciplined way. But the same instinct that drives us to create R&O practices—the desire to contain uncertainty— is also what can make those systems unreliable.
 
When R&O activity is segregated from everyday execution and confined to periodic reviews, separate registers, or specialized roles, it creates a subtle but critical distortion. Uncertainty is something to try and uncover but still is treated as something that lives “over there,” apart from the real work. And through this it becomes more an exercise in documentation rather than a continuous part of decision-making.
 
This mirrors how we handle fear in our personal lives; we compartmentalize it. We set it aside so we can keep moving. And while that may offer short-term clarity, it comes at a cost: we lose sensitivity to the signals that matter most.
 
In business execution, the unknown doesn’t arrive as a neatly defined risk. It shows up as friction. As hesitation. As small deviations, weak signals, or things that don’t quite make sense yet. When R&O is separated from execution, these signals are less likely to be recognized for what they are. They remain embedded in the work, managed in disparate daily activity trackers, or worse, unmanaged. The result is a gap between documented understanding and lived reality.
 
The answer, however, is not to simply document and administer to more R&O.
 
Adding more fields, more reviews, or more reporting layers only reinforces the separation. It increases administrative burden without improving awareness. It asks people to step out of the work to describe uncertainty, rather than equipping them to recognize it within the work itself.
A more effective approach is to adjust how we organize day-to-day execution.
 
The work is already generating the signals: decisions made under constraint, shifts in assumptions, delays, workarounds, moments of confusion, unexpected accelerations. These are not just operational details, they are the raw indicators of risk and opportunity in motion. If captured with the right intent, everyday activity becomes the source of truth.
 
Instead of maintaining a separate system for R&O, we can make daily execution data leverageable, structured just enough to surface patterns, In this model, R&O is not an added layer of effort; it is an emergent property of how the work is observed and recorded. This reduces burden while increasing fidelity.
 
It allows organizations to move from static representations of risk to dynamic awareness of conditions as they evolve. It closes the gap between what is documented and what is actually happening. In that sense, R&O management becomes less about maintaining a list and more about cultivating visibility to potentially impactful conditions in a structured way.
 
Just as individuals grow by facing what they do not understand, organizations become more resilient when they stop distancing themselves from the unknown. The goal is not to eliminate uncertainty, that’s impossible, but to remain connected to it as the work unfolds. Because the greatest risk is not the unknown itself, it’s believing it’s being managed somewhere else.
 
I’ve been working on a business book for a few years to organize and further explore the implications of these concepts. If you’re interested in being a pre-reader, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

If you enjoyed this new meditation on the deeper meaning of the game, you’ll love THE ART OF WAR AND BASEBALL!! Check it out here: www.theartofwarandbaseball.com 

I've been working on a Western novel for a few years. Although it is far from completion, its structure is basically complete, and I thought this a good time to try to explain why I even embarked on this journey in the first place. If nothing else than for my own understanding. As my readers know, I’m entranced by the power of myth and storytelling, and I use them as the backbone of my creative work. Many years ago, I came across the book Christ and the End of Meaning by Paul Hessert, in which he provides fascinating descriptions of myth and connects the “Western” to our quintessential understanding of Christianity and life in the West. I would be lying if I said that reading Hessert wasn’t an inspirational moment for me to use the Western as the form for my next tale. After years of struggle, my Western novel is taking shape.
I would like to share Paul Hessert’s words below:
 
In popular understanding, myth is an untruth… Technically, however, myth is a story telling the culture’s understanding of truth. It articulates a circle of reality. Our dominant myth is probably the hero story typical of the Western…The basic shape of the Western is simple: A community suffers from lawlessness it cannot control. Someone from the outside rides into town and by employing extraordinary procedures saves the community, either by his own strength and craft or by organizing the otherwise impotent citizens. In the process of saving the community he may be killed. But if not, when victory is won, he leaves the community and disappears…Many shape the story of Jesus in this same form as they read the gospels…Because this is the shape of our culture, it is also the shape of our religion. It is the master form in which we appropriate ancient traditions, sacred books, and familiar liturgies. It is the shape in which we recognize our own development. Any challenge to this shape will challenge the circle of reality itself.
 
I found all these statements extremely insightful, but it was that last sentence that stayed with me. What would happen if the Western was used as the medium to challenge the very structure that it inhabited? And so, I embarked on my take on the Western. There are obvious and simple heresies throughout my book that conspicuously refuse to follow the shape Hessert describes. There is no clear hero, no uncomplicated villain, and no ultimate victory. There is also, perhaps, an even more blatant disregard for the traditional Western: the story does not take place in what we ordinarily think of as Western territory. Set east of the Mississippi, it might, more correctly, be categorized as an Eastern Western, an oxymoron that seems appropriate for a story concerned with emphasizing the inherent contradictions of reality.

But perhaps even more radical is the idea that neither of these deliberate dissensions are technically incorrect. Perhaps the West as we know it is something of a fantasy, and never really existed. Perhaps the West is the combination of a set of conditions that the American East needed to invent and glorify in order to counterbalance their manners, etiquette, and social politeness, and to justify their atrocities. Maybe the West is what the political and religious leaders of the East needed to keep it under control. An immense treasure, just out of reach. Something similar to the role Heaven plays in the myth. When describing one of my favorite Western novels, Butcher’s Crossing, its author, John Williams, said:
 
There’s a very real sense in which ‘The West’ does not, did not ever, exist. It’s a dream of The East—almost as if The East made up The West.
 
If that is true, then perhaps the popular Western has always been doing more than entertaining us. Perhaps the popular Western (and, in today's day and age, I would include the common pop-country song) has become a superficial mythology that reinforces a simple narrative propagating a hidden agenda of the American East. And what did the East use as its basis for that West? Not the truth of raw frontier territory, lawlessness, violence, extreme wilderness, or the hopeless grind of subsistence for anyone daring enough to venture there. Instead, it emphasized endless beauty and the promise of wealth hidden within the land. It emphasized evil, but only insofar as evil was necessary to make the salvatory nature of the protagonist unmistakable. And it coated it within the guise of a universal nationalism, as John Williams pointed out in his article, “The ‘Western’: Definition of the Myth.”
 
Its rhetoric and repetitive structure, is its fundamentally nationalistic nature. The heroism, the bloodletting, the superhuman bravery, the terrible mutilations—these are given point and intensity only by the nationalistic impulse that lies behind them. Without that impulse, the adventure is empty, is bombast, is violence without rage.
 
Once the story is sufficiently charged with nationalistic pride, the crowd becomes entranced by the hero. But who, then, are the hidden protagonists of these stories of the West?

John Williams lays out an answer in the same article, proving how the Western has historically served as a vehicle for propagating a Calvinist agenda as American values, embedding Calvinist ideals beneath the surface of the adventure. The popular Western becomes, in this sense, a kind of mythology that reinforces our inherited circle of reality as fundamentally Calvinist.
John Williams writes:
 
The early Calvinists saw experience as a neverending contest between Good and Evil. Though fundamentally corrupt, man might receive, through the grace of God, a state of salvation. Of this inner state of Grace man can never be fully sure, but he may suspect its presence by such outward signs as wealth, power or worldly success. Since this state is the choice of God, the elect tend to be absolutely good; and the more numerous damned tend to be absolutely evil. This affair is wholly predetermined; man’s will avails him only the illusion of choice; and the world is only a stage upon which mankind acts out a drama in which Good will ultimately prevail and in which Evil will inevitably be destroyed. In the very simplicity and inadequacy of this world view lies its essentially dramatic nature. All experience is finally allegorical, and its meaning is determined by something outside itself. The relationship between this habit of mind and the typically primitive Western is immediately apparent. The hero is inexplicably and essentially good. His virtue does not depend upon the “good deeds” he performs; rather, such deeds operate as outward signs of inward grace. Similarly, the villain is by his nature villainous, and not made so by choice, circumstances or environment; more often than not these are identical to those of the hero. And even in those instances, relatively infrequent today, when the villain is Indian or Mexican, the uses of racial origin are not so conventionally bigoted as they might appear. Racial backgrounds are not explanations of villainy; they are merely outward signs of inward damnation. In the curiously primitive nature of this drama, it is necessary that we know at every moment the figure in whom Evil is concentrated and that we be constantly assured that it is doomed to destruction. Beneath the gunplay, the pounding hooves and the crashing stagecoaches, there is a curious, slow, ritualistic movement that is essentially religious.
 
So, beyond its flagrant blasphemy to the Western shape, the themes in my Western are furthermore intended as counter-themes to this traditional Calvinistic propaganda and to the simplified mythology echoed in today's top-charting pop-country songs.

Grief, struggle, and transformation are emphasized here, not as forms of masochism or manliness, but as natural conditions of the human experience that can provide us with greater access to life itself, if we’re willing to enter them. The promise of hope, belief, and salvation preached through the mouths of the chosen righteous few can be comforting, especially when it arrives in the familiar forms our culture has been repeating for generations.

But a story repeated does not mean a story that is correct. The same is true of religion. Using pagan traditions to justify an Absolute Good on high, sending His Son as a messenger to be killed and rise again in glory to overcome evil, in the literal sense, is not the only way to view Christianity. Those stories are tempting in their simplicity and powerful in the ultimate supremacy they provide to certain chosen groups. But what if the stories of Jesus call us to something more?

What if the Western (and, in turn, the Gospels) could be used as an instrument to call us to something deeper than these conventional readings. What if, instead of Jesus painted as the conquering cowboy, the story isn’t so simple. What if Christ is who we relate with, not in our supremacy, but in our shared brokenness and aloneness with he who felt the same upon the cross? What if the oxymoron of the crucified/God tells us more about the structure of reality than the all-powerful monarchical Lord God ever could. What if life’s journey is about dialectically delving into the unknown rather than making the unknown known?

When taking this form, the potential of the Western to explore new themes is therefore endless. Perhaps the frontier is not merely a place where a man goes to discover what is already there. Perhaps it is the place where he discovers that the act of searching changes him. Perhaps the emancipatory power of the Western comes in our shared experience of the true West, not in the fantasies of the American East.

John Williams ends his essay with words that, for me, capture the reason I continue to believe the Western is such a powerful form for exploring the human condition:
 
Viewed in a certain way, the American frontiersman…is man moving into the unknown, into potentiality, and by that move profoundly changing his own nature. He is an adventurer in chaos, searching for meaning there. He is, in short, ourselves.

If you enjoyed this new meditation on the deeper meaning of the game, you’ll love THE ART OF WAR AND BASEBALL!! Check it out here: www.theartofwarandbaseball.com ... Also, anyone interested in pre-reading my next novel, please don't hesitate to contact me.

This is the third year in a row now that I’ve given up God for Lent as part of Theologian Peter Rollin’s Atheism for Lent de-centering practice: a seven week course traversing through the impossibility of theism without atheism. The course uses the idea of dialectics, starting with an affirmation of God, only to negate that position, and continue to negate what remains each week. This process descends into the minds of some of the greatest thinkers to ever live, attempting to understand their perspective rather than dismiss it. I have yet to find a spiritual activity that is more fulfilling of the true intent of religion. Below is the journey as I experienced it.

The first week starts with the traditional theistic arguments for the existence of God. In this first position, existence is seen as obviously better than non-existence, and as one steps back, this supreme Superbeing very quickly resembles something like One God prevailing from a long list of deities: someone larger than us who made the world and exists beyond it, and watches us, listens to our prayers but has a plan for us, and is good, and is all powerful and happens to be so much like us that He even has a gender. He becomes the answer that bridges the deep contradictions of the world, the points at which science has yet to discover (like the mysteries of the beginning of the universe).

Now, this is where traditional atheism comes in the second week, denying the existence of God as first naively described. This week pulls back the curtain and exposes that God as a Deus Ex Machina / Elilim, described through finite words that are organized in a book which religion uses to provide the answers to the universe through belief. An invisible being, suppressing questioning. A supernatural entity that allows evil, calling into question His goodness and power. A God that must be continuously qualified to justify things like the extermination of those who don’t believe in the same definition of this God. Beyond evil, a God who seemingly allows the senseless death of millions of children under the age of five each year through famine and sickness, yet answers prayers to win football games, or bends the laws of physics to save you from slipping on ice. It is important to note that this type of atheism always requires a shape of God to deny. This leads us to the next week.

The third week follows the Christian mystics (Dionysis, Eckhart, Maimonides, and others) who ignite the apophatic tradition, which doesn’t simply disregard atheists but recognizes the theological importance of the atheistic turn. They claim that any of the conceptual framings of a Superbeing God are always less than God, and are therefore surely idolatrous. Resultingly, they honor atheism as a type of spiritual purification process, to rid one of their fetishistic perceptions. They claim that true interaction with God happens only as part of a saturating, numinous, sensory experience which we are lucky to encounter. It is an experience that comes to us the more we’re able to rid ourselves of finite images of God. Religion, in this sense, is an emptying process. It is this group that says that one can’t deny that if God exists, He certainly exists as a Hyperbeing; something that is otherwise than existence as we know it, and greater than we can conceive.

The fourth week takes a functional turn and involves studying theologians and philosophers like Feuerbach who claim that if God is, in fact, greater than we can conceive, then the material religious dogmas and doctrines and words we use to describe this indescribable entity don’t actually tell us about God, but are what tell us the most about ourselves as human beings in the current epoch. In short, theology is anthropology, and in struggling to describe the indescribable divine perfection, we learn the basis of the ideologies of our current systems. God, in this shift, is revealed as a Projection; a greater version of our own beliefs which reflects the “oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind,” as Freud claimed, and not the characteristics of a deity. If, for example, the powerful people in the current system happen to be oppressive, then campaigns of death become God’s will, the fear of God is used to repress revolt, and religion is built to justify that sanctified order rather than critique it. In Marx’s view, it’s the opium of the people.

If the fourth week anchored the mystical experience of God to a projection screen where we place our own ideas, then the fifth week lowers the idea of God further, into the earth. It is in this week that Paul TIllich shines by describing God as the Ground of Being. God becomes what everything arises from and shifts from the object of a question to the basis of it, preceding the subject/object relation. This God connects to the prior week in the agreement that our understanding of God is intimately tied to us and what we do, but describes God as the depth dimension of our acts. We know, against societal and instinctual common sense, that there are things more important than our own self interest or pleasure, and by engaging in the work of selfless things like justice, love, mercy, and care for the other we are affirming something that’s not reducible to the material world. Art, for example, is inspired by beauty, but the point of the artist isn’t to ever capture beauty, but in a sense to continue to fail to capture beauty, and the act of continuing to pursue amidst this failure, they testify to it as something ultimate. In this role, doubt and failure aren’t something to avoid but become our most important attributes. When we doubt we most fully affirm truth, because doubting presupposes that there is an underlying truth that is unconditional. In this interpretation, God is not found in the privileged mystical experience that only happens to a few lucky individuals, but indirectly witnessed by anyone who is grasped by something unconditionally: in the act of being ultimately concerned.

If the fifth week grounded the mystical experience back to the earth, then the sixth week pulls the floor out from under us to reveal God as a Groundless Ground of Being. In comes my subtle fascination with Simone Weil (and the initial inspiration of my book Klobberland). Through this dialectic deep dive we can begin to understand the ultimate power of Nothingness. Not nothingness interpreted as insignificant or worthless, but as the most influential and true aspect of reality. Nothingness doesn’t exist, it insists, and it is foundational to every human being. At this stage we start interpreting the unconditional ground from the prior stage as something more like a primordial lack. We are all driven by that which we don’t have. We all became subjects from a fundamental separation with our primary care giver. We all learned about life through mirroring. We were all initially intrigued by the same questions: What does my primary care giver desire? What do they want from me? But this was the one thing that we couldn’t mirror: the unknown desire of the other. So we create fantasies and beliefs to fill this gap of unknowing and live by them to protect ourselves from experiencing this unknowing. In this week we start to see how the Unknown dimension of the world is the only thing that’s “real,” as it is the only thing uninfluenced by others, but that it’s also the one thing that we can never know. In that sense, everything we experience and do is true to the degree in which we attempt to descend into the unknown. Religion then becomes an invitation to encounter something unknowable. Belief is eradicated and unnecessary and replaced with love, for love is the ultimate openness to the unknowability of the other. Religion also begins, at this stage, to lose its distance from science, biology, philosophy, politics, and such. My next book explores this concept of the unknown in the business / program management world. In summary, if we are all determined by our fantasies of what the other wants, then the sum total of these fantasies shapes society, placing all of us in a social play of control. Freedom is in the ability to see the system for what it is, and to understand the paradoxical / kenotic directionality required for health. Understanding this is a step to enlightenment.

If we stopped at the sixth week we could still subtly hold belief that there is an endstate of wholeness and complete nothingness which is the answer to achive. This can turn to nihilism quickly. So this last week helps clarify that the Absolute (true enlightenment) is actually a Hegelian claim: that Absolute isn’t that which bridges the contradictions, but the Contradiction itself between Nothingness and Somethingness. Contradiction binds us all. This is the deepest meaning of Yin/Yang. This is the deepest meaning of Tat Tvam Asi. This is the deepest meaning of Christ Crucified - the human/god atheistically/theistically crying out on the cross; the immortal God that dies. This week reinforces that there is something that we do know, and our faith is the degree to which we embrace it, and it is that we don’t know. The more we live in that space, the fuller our life becomes.

​If you enjoyed this new meditation on the deeper meaning of the game, you’ll love THE ART OF WAR AND BASEBALL!! Check it out here: www.theartofwarandbaseball.com

I recently went through my ten-year ritual of buying a car. The anticipation was exciting; the search was stressful but enjoyable. Like most large purchases, we decided on a reasonable price range, browsed within it, and inevitably fell in love with something at the upper limit. We sat with the salesman, negotiated, and shook hands. You would think that spending so much money on something I genuinely wanted would make me the happiest guy in Rhode Island. But, if I’m honest, I didn’t feel much different.

Someone might say it just wasn’t the right car—that the right object would have changed everything. But most of us know that’s not true. We may feel a brief spark of pleasure, but not any sustained joy. Why? Because the fantasy surrounding the object disappears the moment we possess it.
What can sustain real contentment, however, is understanding the structure of desire—learning how it deceives us. Once we grasp this structure deeply, we gain the ability to enjoy the present rather than being manipulated by promises of future satisfaction. The one who inherently understands this structure can ever-sustain their enjoyment.

So I begin with a warning: satisfaction does not come from gaining things.
Everyone knows this. And yet we all behave as if buying the house, the car, or the jewelry will finally fulfill us. Every time. Why? Because we misunderstand how enjoyment works. We don’t see the structure of Desire, and we confuse it with something far simpler: Demand.
​
Some things we “desire” are actually Demands—needs tied to survival, like food and drink. Demand can be satisfied by obtaining an object. A hungry baby gulps, burps, and smiles—that’s Demand fulfilled. But the moment a need moves beyond necessity, it enters the realm of Desire, and if we don’t understand Desire’s structure, dissatisfaction sets in, even when it appears we get what we want. This is the moment where others—especially those who understand Desire—gain power over us.

Because some objects satisfy Demand, we imagine an object must also exist that can satisfy Desire. We are promised this everywhere. But Desire is more complicated: it points not to a real object, but to an imaginary, idealized object shaped by what we imagine others desire. A useful name for this is the Sacred Object.

The Sacred Object is built by what we imagine other’s wanting—cars, houses, jewelry, status, beauty, youth, success. The greater the sacrifice required to obtain it, the more valuable it seems. And our culture exploits this structure relentlessly. Advertising is one of its most sophisticated tools. It is no coincidence that the father of public relations, Edward Bernays—Sigmund Freud’s nephew—used psychology to engineer mass desire. As he famously said: “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?”

The Sacred Object promises to fill an inner lack that began when we first became separate subjects—when the “oceanic oneness” with the mother ended. That lack stays with us for life, taking the shape of frustration, alienation, brokenness, or incompleteness. We seek to heal it. The Sacred Object promises to heal it. It never does. This is because in order to be a subject, in order to participate in the world, a gap is required, we must be a part and apart from it. And, therefore, the Sacred Object does not exist.

To understand how Desire traps us, in the non-existence of and inability to obtain the Sacred Object, we must explore how its two main components– Object of Desire (OoD) and the Object Cause of Desire (OCoD) – work together. Desire requires something we want (OoD) and a barrier that keeps it out of reach (OCoD). The barrier can be money, distance, wrapping paper—anything that maintains the “gap” between us and the object. Once the object is obtained, that gap collapses, and Desire collapses with it—leaving eventual boredom or melancholy.

This is why the “cures” for this alienation like commodities, self-help, drugs, and endless novelty fail us. They exploit the structure of Desire without revealing it. Two other “solutions” have been created which seem to escape the Desire trap, but they are tricks as well – my book Klobberland talks of a third option:

Option 1: Openly Position the Object of Desire as Unreachable.
This creates an infinite gap and an eternal Desire. Hedonistic Western religions often rely on this strategy—promising heaven, utopia, or salvation always “later,” always out of reach. This sustains Desire but hides its structure. It creates dependence on doctrine, priests, rituals, and “enemies” that must be defeated to preserve the promised future. It is a structure that has fueled everything from proselytization to genocides.

Option 2: Eliminate Desire Altogether.
This is the nihilistic approach associated with many Eastern traditions. It seeks to extinguish Desire by extinguishing the OoD. But Desire is essential to human life—it drives passion, purpose, and meaning. And the pursuit of “no desire” is its own Desire: Desiring not to desire. The OoD and OCoD remain intact. This path often turns violence inward through asceticism, bodily domination, or ego-annihilation; in some cases, it spills outward, as in those who use spiritual belief to justify self-destruction or harm to others.

Option 3: A third way — the path that Klobberland explores.
This approach teaches the structure of Desire openly. It refuses superstition and rejects fantasies of heaven or nirvana. Instead, it makes an object of desire out of the lack itself. It shows how “Nothing” can be desirable—not as nihilism, but as liberation from being controlled by illusions of completeness.

This is not defeatism. It is the only stance that dissolves external control and restores genuine freedom. It accepts brokenness rather than fleeing from it. Its byproduct is kindness: to ourselves, to others, and even to our own anxiety.

In this third option, the OoD and OCoD collapse into one another. We no longer chase a final “Something” as though it will fill some hole within us, because we understand that once the object is obtained, the obstacle disappears and Desire evaporates. Instead, we set our sights on the gap itself—on the “not having”—and discover enjoyment there.

Love is a perfect illustration:
In love, the other is an object of desire whose endless mystery always maintains a distance. That distance sustains Desire.
In lust, the person is reduced to a simple object; Desire ends the moment they are “gotten.” 

The process of meditation also exposes this entire structure. We often assume that suffering belongs only to those who fail to get what they want. But even in the best of times—when I do get what I want—I immediately feel the impulse to gorge on it, and in that very indulgence discover that this isn’t what I wanted after all. Satisfaction folds quickly into dissatisfaction, and it is the belief that we can escape this cycle that produces suffering.
 
Meditation reveals this truth directly. The moment we attempt to sit still—even for five minutes—discomfort rushes in. With no distractions, we become acutely aware of the restless dissatisfaction built into us. This is the point: not to flee the frustration, but to encounter it. Meditation’s purpose is to expose the contradiction rather than to dissolve it. And in that exposure lies a quiet liberation.

This is enlightenment—not escape, but finding joy in the very contradiction that makes us who we are.
 
This is why meditation aligns naturally with the third option that Klobberland explores: embracing the structure of desire rather than masking it, fighting it, or elevating it into fantasy.
 
Klobberland does not say we cannot passionately pursue objects; only that achieving them will not complete us. It teaches that not-fully-getting – that getting Nothingness – is essential to Desire and the true path to enjoyment.

​If you enjoyed this new meditation on the deeper meaning of the game, you’ll love THE ART OF WAR AND BASEBALL!! Check it out here: www.theartofwarandbaseball.com