Transfiguration is what allows you to crawl out from under the chaos and fly above it. That’s how I can still do what I do and write the songs I sing and just keep on moving.

— Bob Dylan [1]

In a NYTimes column called The Ethicist … someone asks about putting medications into a family members food, because he will not take meds otherwise.  Applah writes,

“One consideration among many is to avoid “Suddenly, Last Summer” scenarios, where a troublesome family member might be subjected to treatment by kin with complicated motives. Out of justified caution, we now err on the side of putative autonomy, and the heartbreaking story of your damaged brother is a result; when we erred on the side of putative beneficence, other heartbreaking stories resulted. I don’t say that we’ve got the balance right. But the perennial clash between these two ideals can never be perfectly resolved.”

Applah, Kwame A. “The Ethicist.” New York Times, 16 Oct. 2018, (here)

I had to look up the word putative.  (Something commonly thought to be true.)

Seen on a profile in SL…I apologize for not knowing the source, but I include it here because I know it to be true as well (putative)

SL Transcendent
I have known 70 year-olds who can have raunchy sex with 20 year-olds…
I have known persons paralyzed in RL who dance in SL…
The Deaf communicate unhindered with everybody around them…
I have known famous people who cannot interact with ordinary people because their RL fame clouds the perceptions of others… but in SL they can build friendship.
People of unremarkable appearance can have remarkable beauty… persons of great RL beauty can play plain janes.
Two persons can fall in love when oceans separate them.
Men play as women… women as men… People play the parts of animals and monsters and robots made of cardboard…

SL Transcends…
Judge not those you meet by their appearance for it is all ephemeral. Judge them by how they treat you. In SL you must learn to see their hearts.

Yet paradoxically… appearance reveals so much… since we have such easy control over it… Consider… what is that person trying to project about themself through the appearance of their avatar?

This past year nothing is stranger than anything else. So the fact that I can feel comfort from hanging out here while so isolated is not as strange to others as it might have been. Or maybe it is just so familiar now, I don’t care. Sometimes, just being isolated in another place…..on a mountain top or a beach or in the middle of the woods…is enough of an escape. And if you can do it with a friend – even better. I spent two hours this afternoon listening to music and dancing with people I have known in SL for over a decade. There was uniform agreement that it was a comfort.