Walk #1: January 5, 2026

A few steps into my walk today, I heard a voice, then I saw one of my neighbors on her mobile phone a way off the path. She had her head down and a hat on, so I wasn’t quite sure who it was, although I had an idea. As I thought of her name, I thought about how difficult it can be for me to remember people’s names, and to remember name-entity correspondences of all types – objects, events, public figures – I can often remember roles and functions and derive events and consequences but struggle to recall them by name. In some situations, I remember a set of names and a set of faces, but I can’t always remember which name goes with which face. I believe that this stems from a cognitive emphasis on abstraction, specifically finding abstract patterns in complex entities. When you name something, you identify a specific entity within a set of entities, a specialization of a generality that represents the set as a whole. When the focus of your thinking and/or your life’s work revolves around manipulating abstractions and concepts, dealing with specifics can be secondary.

On the other hand, that may just be a rationalization. It could be that I am just a techie geek who doesn’t deal with people well. I certainly do a lot better with numbers.

Anyway, the day was lovely, and the path was unfolding under my feet. I tend to keep my eyes down when I walk especially if I am thinking – scenery can be distracting to the mental process. Also, I need my visual and perceptive faculties to keep my balance, especially if I am lost in thought. The bits of mulch were worn down in some spots but in others they were piled deeper, juxtaposed in some kind of pattern that looked random to me but maybe wasn’t from the point of view of an individual piece of mulch. As I walked, the mulch pieces came in and out of focus – standing out in sharp relief at some times and at others, blending into the whole. The effect was on some level hypnotic and inducive to a meditative state and as I walked on, bits of thought fragments streamed through my consciousness –

the naming problem, modeling the naming problem a sequence of set correspondences, you start with one name for a group of people, but if the group is finite then there are finite number of names within the group, so you can start with a many-to-many correspondence, then as you interact more, you start to narrow it down, so maybe the correspondences are smaller, then maybe they become one-to-many – you remember a name and then several people it could belong to, until eventually you have a one-to-one correspondence and you have correctly associated every name with every face, the faces would be the keys because they are unique but the names may not be unique so it’s not really a one-to-one set correspondence, more like a database join operation, it’s kind of like when you represent a group of people by one name for a while before you develop individual notions of them, like the idea of a “Karen”, that you read about – why do people do that anyway, develop some stereotype of a “Karen” and then make conclusions or judgments on them so now the name Karen has that connotation, however little it may convey anything useful about the actual person in front of you named Karen, and why Karen anyway – who came up with that name? Was there some group of people who noticed a statistical correlation between the name Karen and the social characteristics and outward appearance of people named Karen? Who were they and how did they acquire the authority or social gravitas to influence an entire community? What about the other names that start with the “K” sound – Caitlin, Kathy, Cara – why not those? What about a word, like the word Cayenne – what if that were somebody’s name anyway? It’s kind of pretty, sounds like it could be a name, but it would be weird to name your daughter (it does sound feminine) Cayenne – why would you do that? I suppose if your last name were Pepper – but would you really do that? Why would you do that to your kid? Although it does have a cool ring to it…

That brought me about ¾ of the way through my first loop of my walk, that’s the point where I start thinking about whether I have a second loop in me. I didn’t think about that today because another mental process kicked in. I call this the Meta process, it’s the one where you kind of wake up and realize that the thought that you just had was either profound or silly. Or profoundly silly. In either case, the Meta process stepped out and examined the current thought stream and then put another question into my mind:

What if somebody asked you what you think about during these walks and your actual, no-shit answer was that you meditated about the idea of naming your child Cayenne Pepper?

Imagine you are at a party or with friends and somebody asks you and you come clean and answer. There is no way you walk away from that one without people thinking you are possibly very strange and certainly very socially awkward. The best you can hope for is a good-humored “that’s so random!”.

But is it?

There was a sequence of thoughts that led to the idea, maybe a strange sequence of thoughts, but a sequence nevertheless, where there was a well-defined connection between each thought and the one preceding it. What characterizes “stream-of-consciousness” thought is while each thought may have a connection to the preceding one, the sequence itself has no goal, no direction, and no pre-determined conclusion – we just don’t know where it is going to end up or why we are thinking it. Another way of putting it is that there was a cause-and-effect relationship between each step in my thought-stream – for each thought in the stream, I could point to the part of the preceding thought that produced it. However, the final effect was trivial and out-of-context, so we call it random. Random behavior can certainly be cute, but I left those days behind long ago.

I barely noticed starting the second half of the second loop, the final walk home, the one that usually does me in. I hadn’t really left the party in my imagination yet, so I was still explaining my thought process to my imagined friend. The logic of each step. The innocuous beginning. How much sense it all made when you knew the whole story. It was an entertaining conversation for both of us. That’s when I got to the next level.

As I “watched” my imagined self at the imagined party talking to my imagined friend, I realized that the whole imagined situation had a role to play in the chain of cause and effect related to my thought process and was in fact an integral part of it.

Here’s how it goes: what if the final effect of my thought process was not meditation on the idea of naming your child Cayenne Pepper. What if the thought process itself was the result and conclusion, specifically, my articulation of that thought process? What if the story I am telling my imagined friend is the final product of my thought and the goal of my thought process is the situation at the party where he is entertained by that telling? Would you not then say that the ultimate cause of that final effect is the situation at the party? However, the party occurs at some future date after the thought process, violating the time sequence of causality (causes happen before effects). Furthermore, the party is imagined, it does not really occur. However, it is a reality with a high likelihood of occurring given both my social nature and my habit of recording my thoughts verbally. If the ultimate cause of my thought process is my desire to entertain, but the act of entertaining occurs after my active of creative thinking and my will to entertain is caused by imagination of that future event. Non-causality doesn’t happen in the real-time world humans live in; however, the imagined world doesn’t have to obey that constraint. What if the real, physical world which is subject to laws of causality is a subset of a larger world that includes the imagination and that is not subject to laws of causality insofar as the imagination is involved? The situation would be like Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics; in a certain realm Newtonian laws hold, and quantum effects are zero but in other realms, Newtonian physics breaks and only quantum equations hold. In the physical, human world, causality must always hold, but in the realm of imagination as it intersects with that reality, non-causal relationships can occur.

Let’s take this further. Let’s think about the set of all possible physically realizable futures of a given situation. Realizable meaning consistent with both physical laws of reality and able to be constructed with means currently available, thereby eliminating fantastical and science fiction-based worlds. If they are realizable, then there are humans who can imagine their existence. If there are humans who can imagine them, then there are humans who can realize them. If the existence of a possible physical reality implies the existence of humans who can imagine and then create that reality, can you then conclude that the potential future existence of that physical reality is its own cause for creation? Would you then say that the future reality is the cause for the creative effect in the present? In other words, is not human imagination the property by which the future creates the present?

Let’s take another situation. There is a ball on the ground in front of me and I kick it against a wall. Prior to my action, there existed a future reality in which the ball struck the wall and bounced off. Was my imagination of that reality the cause of my action? What if my kicking the ball was the result of an impulse and a momentary desire and no imagination was involved? But on some level, despite my impulsive behavior, my awareness of the laws of physical reality informs me, if only subconsciously, that the ball, when kicked, will strike the wall. So maybe I have internalized my imagination of that eventuality. Could you then say that the mere existence of the ball, the wall, my foot, my leg, the ability to kick, the distance between me and the wall, and the nature of Newtonian mechanics were all together the cause of my action?

If this doesn’t seem right, it is because we are forgetting something. That little thing we call Free Will. I did choose to kick the ball against the wall, and my will converted that choice into direct action. So, there is something beyond imagination, maybe the combination of imagination and free will. Let’s examine the converse: a situation where I would choose not to kick the ball, despite my impulse to do so. Say the ball is on the floor in my friend’s house, the one holding the party, guests milling around with drinks in their hands. I would certainly choose NOT to kick the ball against the wall in that circumstance, since the charge would be significantly worse than randomness, especially if any glasses or other household effects were broken or if anybody were injured. Can we then conclude that there is a second process at work here: in the first process, my Imagination and Free Will allow the future to create the present, but in the second process, my awareness and my sense of the situation prevent non-desirable futures from being created? What constitutes that process – social norms? Values? Ideas I have about what is desirable behavior? Empathy for my friend and other guests at the party? My imagination of the undesirable future in which I have alienated everyone by my antisocial behavior stops my impulsive present action. Could we say then that human morality is the property by which undesirable futures prevent themselves from being created?

And with that, my walk ended, and with it, my speculations and thought streams.

I have no answers to any of the questions I have posed here, and I have no answer as to why I would even ask them other than my own enjoyment in the act of thinking and then channeling that thinking into structured words and paragraphs. The air still smelled sweet when I left the Vineyard mulch path and the sun was still shining. It’s a new year, and since I would like to make this a year of Writing, I came inside my house after my walk and did just that, imagination and free will in concert, with no moral convictions to constrain my action, and buoyed by the idea that if I can imagine somebody who can be entertained by what I write, then there is a non-zero likelihood that that person exists. As I exited the Vineyard. I said hello to my neighbor, who had finished her telephone call, and crossed the street to return to my house. I said goodbye mentally to my imagined friend at the party with a slight twinge of guilt that I didn’t stay to help him clean up.

At least I didn’t kick that ball in the middle of his living room.

Preface: Vineyard Walks

When I walk in the Vineyard, I use the inner mulch path that winds between the vines and trees, starting in front of my house and emerging from the park at the other end. After emerging from the park, I wind my way around the traffic circle at the other end, re-entering the park to return to my house via the same mulch path. The distance from my house to the end is approximately a quarter mile; I usually do the round-trip loop twice so that I have walked a full mile each time. I try to do this once or twice every day, weather and schedule permitting.

There are a few reasons why I use the inner path instead of the road that circumscribes the park. The first is for the workout: the inner path provides a more varied terrain that exercises my ankles and core, coordination and balance as well as the muscles of my legs. A second is that I enjoy the proximity to nature: the smell of the trees and the mulch, the leaves at my feet, the greenery of the vineyard in the summer, the crunchy grass of the fields I traverse, the chirping of birds in the trees overhead in the warmer weather, pine cones strewn on the path with near perfect symmetric composition (as well as the potential to cause a sprained ankle should I put my foot down carelessly). The air inside the park feels pure and oxygen laden and I am inspired during these walks to regulate my breathing for both the bodily and the meditative effects produced.

Despite spending considerable cognitive effort in managing my movement and my breathing, these walks always seem to produce a plethora of thoughts and thought chains that start with idle speculation and occasionally end with mental puzzles, conundrums, coincidences, contradictions, insights, stories, narrations, monologues, and even essays. Inasmuch as this type of mental activity is the primary driver for most of what I have written to date, it occurred to me today that I should write down some of my thoughts, if only for my own enjoyment at some later date. Whether some other audience or usage for these ruminations presents itself in the future will depend on what is written here; I will not prejudice the beginning by undue speculation about the end.

With the scene is set and the context provided for what follows, I will put my attention to what I had intended when I returned to my house about an hour ago: writing down my thoughts during my first Vineyard walk of the year, nurtured by the sunshine and surprisingly warm weather, energized and rejuvenated by a lengthy and restful holiday vacation, and ushered in by the feeling of purpose and possibility that the new year brings.

January 5, 2026

The Mentalist and the Hero's Journey

The main character of The Mentalist is Patrick Jane, who at the beginning of the epic, is a television personality using his powers of observation to pose as a psychic. The show starts with Jane working as a non-psychic but highly observant consultant to the CBI to solve murder cases. While the show is comprised of great characters, clever plots, excellent writers, and superior acting talent, a large part of the show’s success is due to the hidden depth of its story. The transformation of Patrick Jane throughout the seven seasons of the show follows to a large extent the blueprint for the heroic journey (as laid out by Joseph Campbell) and therefore represents the most enduring and universal themes in human literature: the victory of cleverness over strength, the struggle for personal growth, transformation into higher levels of awareness, and the search to find meaning.

When the epic starts, Patrick Jane’s normal life is based on the carnival. He has succumbed to his father’s control and embraced his life as a shyster, suppressing his discontent. Established with money, wife, and child, he thinks he is on top of his game. His ego and sense of superiority dominate; he is arrogant and begging for comeuppance. When his wife and child are murdered after his public display of contempt for Red John, he must face this loss if he is to survive. After a mental breakdown, he spends 6 months in a psychiatric ward, his emotional world destroyed and broken. He is helped by a therapist, and during this period, he formulates his quest motivated by his thirst for revenge: he will find and kill Red John in retaliation and as a matter of justice. He is helped in this by the CBI director Minelli and by Teresa Lisbon, both of whom start him in his role as consultant to the CBI. He commits to this role while planning to use his position and its resources to further his quest.

For the next 10 years he participates in murder investigations, during which time he meets many allies and enemies, some that chip away at his emotional isolation (Lisbon), some that challenge his status as a know-it-all (Kristina), some that entice him (Erica), some that attract him as power-equals (Walter Mashburn), some that ally with him (Bret Stiles, J.J. LaRoche, Hightower), and many other characters that contribute to his world. Finally, he enters the final route to Red John, he fakes his own dissolution, he gets involved with Loralei, he whittles down the list to a few names, he takes risks with himself and others, the tempo increases as he nears the end. Amid violence and death, he ends his quest: identifying and killing Red John. His reward for completing his task is freedom; as he runs away from Red John’s body, we feel the wind at his back and the air on his face. We understand that he is running away from something bigger than the body and from capture by the police – he is running away from his own demons. He finds his way to Mexico where he takes the time ne needs to enjoy life and heal from the violence and obsession of his path.

His letters to Lisbon during this time pave the road back to the world. He returns to the FBI to resume a life of investigation, but as a man without an obsession for revenge. He must understand what this means; he tries his former manipulative tricks, but they don’t work; he can’t control Lisbon, she won’t let him. He begins to suspect that she represents a new quest (or maybe the true quest all along), but he doesn’t yet understand what this means. He is at a loss how to proceed. He is frustrated by Lisbon herself, who is losing her patience and turning toward other rewards. This continues until his resurrection is accomplished: he finally realizes that he must be honest with himself and with Lisbon about his feelings or he will lose her. He confesses and begins his relationship with her, but even then, he encounters more tests. He must face his rival and his own inadequacies. He must encounter danger in his job both for himself and for Lisbon, who has now become important to him. He must learn to communicate and trust. Finally, he must face the biggest challenge: the reality that Lisbon faces danger on every job, with the very real possibility that she could die and be removed from his life – how will he face that loss, a loss that could return him to the hell he endured after the death of his wife, a full circle without end or beginning?

When he finally returns to the world for good, he brings the elixir of completeness: he has accepted himself and Lisbon, his place in the world, and believes in his own capability to deal with his own emotions and in the sanctity of his union with Lisbon. He has left behind his false life for a life of authenticity and connection. His full reward is his new marriage and the cycle ends, symbolically with new life: new life for Jane and Lisbon as a married couple, and new life with the birth of a child. The heroic journey is complete.

If Jane is the hero in a Homeric journey, Lisbon is the Woman Who Waits. She waits for Jane to join the team at the site, she waits for him to reveal facts in an investigation, she waits for him to reveal the identity of the murderer, she waits for him to provide the conclusion of an investigation, she waits for him to explain himself, she waits for him to speak his truth, she waits for him to heal, she waits for him to come to terms with his path, she waits for him to grow up. She waits actively; she pushes him, but she doesn’t walk away when he fails. She accepts his foibles even when she protests them. She teases, berates, insults, taunts, and even derides him, but she never abandons him. Even when she finally decides to leave, the door is still open, and when he is ready, she falls back through it with the grace of full understanding. She both completes his heroic journey and at the same time makes it possible.

The depth, power, and universality of this story provide the context for seven seasons of banter, flirtation, disagreement, concord, withdrawal and reunion during which Jane and Lisbon fall in love with each other and we in turn fall in love with them and their story. As much as we love the characters and would like to remain with them as their story continues, in fact, the story ends in its right place. Jane and Lisbon have passed the tests that life has put before them and have earned the sanctity of their private world. With completeness achieved, their story has ended. To continue beyond would deny their status as completed characters and reduce them to the ordinary and commonplace. Jane and Lisbon are protagonists in an age-old story, one that has lived in ancient times as much as in present, one that continues to guide and inform humanity as we undertake our own journeys through life. As with all great literature, we let those stars shine in fixed firmament, living always in our reflections and memories, never forgotten and always beloved.