A boat docked in a tiny Mexican village. An American tourist complimented the Mexican fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took him to catch them.

“Not very long,” answered the Mexican.

“But then, why didn’t you stay out longer and catch more?” asked the American.

The Mexican explained that his small catch was sufficient to meet his needs and those of his family.
The American asked, “But what do you do with the rest of your time?”

“I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, and take a siesta with my wife. In the evenings, I go into the village to see my friends, have a few drinks, play the guitar, and sing a few songs. I have a full life.”

I once found myself in a situation in which I shared my living space with three other persons. As we each had very different experiences and overall goals in life, and vastly different approaches to how we lived our lives as individuals, we often experienced frustration and miscommunications in our dealings together, especially at first.

Constancy and accountability.
For example, one of my housemates was an Army veteran, who after years as a sergeant, left the service to pursue a civilian life in the larger world. Sergeant’s expectations included keeping things tidy, working together as a team on projects involving the house, and clockwork precision in all matters great and small.

We live in a prosperous country, perhaps the most prosperous on Earth. However, our society is not without its challenges, not the least of which is the astounding number of our brother and sister Americans who find themselves homeless and without the safety, privacy, and comfort of a place to call home. As many as 3.5 million people in this country experience homelessness in a given year. This figure represents about 1% of the entire U.S. population and around 10% of its poor. In any given week, somewhere in the neighborhood of 842,000 people in any given week are homeless.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could get immediate feedback about when the mind shuts itself off and we go unconscious to ourselves and our communications with others? Wouldn’t that save a lot of grief and potential problems if we could say to ourselves, “Hey wait a minute, I’m beginning to drop off now. I’ll wake up when there’s a version of reality playing that I can relate to.”? Wouldn’t it be useful to be have a built-in unconsciousness meter somewhere in our brains that would alert us to when we go unconscious and when others do the same?