Elijah Woods as Frodo Baggins and Sean Astin as Sam Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings: Google

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

CATOCTIN MOUNTAIN, Md. — It’s 79 degrees here in the campground near Camp David, about a mile as the crow flies, and once again, we are breaking down to head back into the suburbs of Washington, D.C. for the weekend.

While disasters strike much of the world, it’s been a glorious summer here camping in the mountains of the mid-Atlantic region this year as much of the heat and humidity in this hemisphere seems to have been trapped in the heat dome out west where the wildfires rage, sucked up into the vortex of the atmosphere over that part of the world.

In between breaking news coverage, we’ve had time to think and write and I’ve managed to come to a few new conclusions about life this year.

For starters, I’ve recently added a component to the formula for success I included in my memoir, Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again, which really needs to be updated to add the Trump and post-Trump eras. I’ll get around to that one day.

Meanwhile, if you are one of the thousand or so people who bought the book and read it, you will recall a formula for success we documented. It went like this: PREPARATION + OPPORTUNITY = SUCCESS. But while I write about luck in the narrative, it really needs to be added to the formula.

So here it is: PREPARATION + OPPORTUNITY + LUCK = SUCCESS.

So I often use the term MoJo to talk about not only Mobile Journalism, but the MoJo of life. It is a form of luck, but not sheer luck. You can set the stage for making your own luck with study, thought and preparation.

But just like the process of evolution itself, things can still go wrong. Mutations happen.

There is also Murphy’s Law: “What can go wrong probably will.”

So you have to be careful out here, while you also sometimes have to take chances. It’s a delicate balancing act, like playing the stock market, poker, black jack or sports for that matter.

Sometimes you have to double down and take a chance against the dealer, or throw the long bomb in a football game, even if the odds are long and the chances of success are slim.

Now I know some people insist on considering a spiritual aspect to this formula. Some believe religion and prayer are necessary. But clearly they are not sufficient. If so, this would be a perfect world without any problems.

Religious fundamentalists may say all this pain and suffering and disasters we suffer are the result of man sinning against a god. But which god?

That is 2,000 year old myth conglomeration from a time before we knew much at all about science. It is of little use to us now, while humans still cling to it for comfort in times of great strife.

Here are the facts. We and everything around us evolved over millions of years in a world mostly guided by chance and natural selection. One day a billion years from now this may evolve into a perfect world — right before the sun burns out and obliterates this part of the universe.

For now we have to try to deal with the world as it is in front of us, and make things work as well as we can with government and commerce. That’s all we can do. Try to regulate our environment and make it work for us and try not to destroy the planet in the process of living a life worth living.

That is not to say that spirituality has no place. But I have come to the conclusion that the place spirit holds for us is in our imagination.

Anyone who has ever written for a living, made a movie or taught for that matter knows that imagination is important.

So imagining spirts could be useful in guiding us to live up to our ideals. Some Native Americans took to using psychedelic substances to communicate with their ancestors. It seems to cause no harm and might even lead to special insights.

Some fiction has always contained insights that are hard to come by in straight, factual reporting.

But you know what they say. “Truth is stranger than fiction.”

I often find myself motivated by fiction, and occasionally return to a series of films full of magic fantasies about how life works and the fight for good over evil, such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.”

Extended versions are now available for streaming online at HBO Max.

When you feel life is too hard and you don’t think you can keep on going, try watching this scene. It sometimes works for me.

Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers: Sam’s inspirational speech

Samwise Gamgee:

“It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy.

“How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.

“Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”

Frodo: “What are we holding on to, Sam?”

Sam: “That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.”

That’s what keeps me going. I hope it helps you keep going and trying too.