Intellectual knowledge is one thing, and emotional experience is another.  This is one reason why it's "a darned shame" when you hear a friend's story of having compared ticket prices on the plane with fellow passengers, finding out he or she paid a couple hundred bucks more than any of the others for the same deal -- and why it's "a murderously cutthroat breakdown in society" when you are the one stuck with that extra-jumbo-jet of a bill.

Those differences are the birth pangs of empathy, so mutter away, and to your heart's content. Welcome to humanity.  We are not ants or otherwise able to experience the hive mind, so we have to grow our awareness and empathy fresh, every day.  And yes, tending that particular garden can be a real drag at times.

You can unexpectedly explode an expelled spew of coffee over a sudden comeuppance or shock of news, or choke without warning on a bite of food, or have your tongue trip over a sip of soup and collapse.  The causes of the so-called spit-take can be many.  Roll around some of these possibilities in your mind's eye, while swirling around some pleasant liquid or other in your figurative -- or literal -- mouth:

When there are more years behind than ahead, contemplative stewing and meditative mulling is the operative daily mode.  That process clicks into place and idles away unaided.  It's sneaky, this mental program, having automatically installed itself at some point or other, perhaps when a certain number of breaths has been taken, or something similar.

It's very much like a perpetual motion machine you never knew you had -- one that kicks into gear suddenly and without warning, slipping any and all restraints, unexpectedly puttering and pottering around all by itself.  This latent skill is an intriguing discovery at any age, but especially when you think you've already got yourself fairly well figured out.  By now, you've sort of thought of yourself as pretty well knowing how to be -- and being -- you.

It's a chicken-and-egg sort of a situation, wondering how much language determines thought, and the amount that's the other way around.  Maybe there's no way to know which came first, or whether it's at all relevant -- or if "both" is the correct answer.

Somehow, I find it easy to get distracted by such chicken-and-egg considerations, especially whenever the feathers really get flying at the Congressional chicken coop, and when every besotted member of that prideful roost feels the urgent, imperious need to crow, squawk, cry, or flail around in the dirt and mud.

While it is not useful behavior, it does provide backers, constituents, and media a puffed-up show of Big Foul's power, I suppose.  (Although just why it is these chicken-hawks, chicken-hearts, and youngsters-playing-chicken would want to advertise such empty, boneheaded actions is anyone's guess.)

These periodic explosions of feathers and eruptions of busy-beaked cacophony are also twin signals that the adults have left the room, leaving the children to govern.  Thing is, all of these children are hitting the full stride of their Terrible Twos all at once, en masse, as a terrorizing group.

Scribbles on a page are just placeholders for errant thoughts and daydreams, drifting here and there, looking for anchor points of purchase.  These symbols and squiggles we call writing are feeble things, unable to hold a candle to personal observation.  It is a shame we haven't evolved the ability to directly share our observations with one another, whether singly or a few million at a time.

In a science fiction film, there would have to be wires, connections, and a massive control panel choked and jammed with clusters of lights and switches.  In my version, it would be accomplished without machines or equipment, but be done by a simple thought process one could learn early in life -- and be about as complex and demanding of you as having the inspiration to move across the room in order to get a drink of water, and then doing so.

Perhaps that broadcasted-direct-empathy ability would make the Game we all play, the one we typically call Life -- and Our Lives -- just too easy for a species on our particular trajectory. That ability, if we had it, would allow us to communicate too much, too deeply, and too fast:  It could blow out all our circuits.