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The trolley problem is one of the most famous thought experiments in ethics. You are asked to imagine that there’s a runaway trolley racing down the line. It’s headed toward a group of five people who are tied to the tracks with no prospect of escape. From your vantage point in the trolly yard you have access to a lever that can divert the trolley onto another set of tracks, on which a single person is tied. The question is, would you pull the lever? Numerous surveys have found that about 90% of people would do so.

In a variant of the trolly problem, you’re on a bridge watching the trolley barrel down toward those five tied-up people. Standing next to you is a man. You know that if you push him off the bridge, his bulk will stop the trolley, saving the people bound to the tracks. Not surprisingly, even though the outcome is identical to the first instance–sacrificing one life to save five others–far fewer people would push the man off the bridge.

We’ve got mice in our garage. Lots of them. They gnaw into bags of stored food, poop everywhere, and for all I know promiscuously spread hantavirus. They’ve got to go. But the idea of poisoning them, or even setting up kill traps, is abhorrent to me—they’re simply cute, furry innocents doing what mice are supposed to do. So, I’m using a “live trap.” The critters are lured by peanut butter into a little plastic cage, which captures them without harm. Each morning I check the trap. If a mouse has been caught, I drive it to a nearby forest and release it beside a decaying tree stump. Most often, little Mickey frisks out of the trap, sniffs the air right and left, then rushes right into a hole in the base of the stump. I’ve been very pleased with myself for this arrangement.

For confirmation that I was doing the right thing, I Googled ‘the most humane way to rid your house of mice’. I was startled to read that, overwhelmingly, the advice from animal advocacy groups is that quick and certain death with an old-fashioned snap trap was the way to go. How could that be? Well, it turns out that the kind of mice that end up infesting houses don’t do well in the wild, especially when transplanted far from where they were trapped. They can’t adapt to the new environment and perish due to starvation, disease, or predation. Yikes!

Even so, after reading this thoughtful advice I’ve persisted in “humanely” trapping the mice and transporting them to what is apparently certain sylvan death. In other words, I’ve continued to pull the lever rather than push the man off the bridge, thus distancing myself from directly causing their demise. Even worse, as opposed to the trolley problem, where the two modes of death are equally sudden, it appears that out of cowardice I’m opting for the more inhumane mode of exit.

Well, of course, the rationalizations came flooding in: Maybe the forest wasn’t all that far from our house, or maybe these particular woods harbored plenty of rodent-friendly food and water. Maybe the previous releasees had been able to set up house in the hole in the stump, so the new arrivals would be welcomed into a thriving colony of their former housemates. Maybe these environs weren’t rife with rodential predators. But on the other hand, if there were predators, and the mouse was going to die anyway, wouldn’t it be better that it served as nourishment for the resident eagles and foxes and owls rather than being thrown in the trash after getting whacked by a snap trap? Finally, in any case, even if the released mice had only a slim chance of living a full woodsy life, wouldn’t that be a better alternative than certain death in our garage?

And yet… All the organizations associated with animal welfare were clear: they strongly advocate a quick and painless death as the most humane alternative–my rationalizations were fooling only me. But, I must admit, I still haven’t changed my practice. The fact is, it’s so much easier to pull a lever than to push someone off a bridge. So, so sorry, my little furry friends.

My parents’ passions were pretty much all in their heads. My father’s life was science. Making new discoveries and getting them published was his highest aspiration. Based on the time he spent with each, it seemed clear to me that he loved his lab more than his family. As for my mother, she wanted to “have it all” decades before that became a term. Having children was part of it, but mothering seemed less important than the work part of “all”. She ran a social work agency. She was president of the local Hadassah chapter. She was a university professor. As I was growing up, she got a PhD. In fact, my recollection is that she nurtured her thesis more than she nurtured her sons. When I was ten she required me to help her proofread her dissertation, a long and agonizing undertaking. My reward was a complicated game called Brainiac that never seemed to work right, and that I never enjoyed.

Such cerebral passions were hard for a kid, even a nerdy one like me, to accept. But I vividly remember two instances of physical passions, each of which made a deep impression because they seemed so out of character. One time, armed with plastic pails, we were all gathering blackberries. The pails quickly filled with shiny, jewel-like fruit. Except for my father’s. Why not? He put virtually every berry he picked into his mouth. Soon his hands were stained purple, as was his white shirt (he almost always wore white shirts). He had a goofy grin and vocalized crudely—mostly “umm, umm, umm!” I found his visual and audible display of blackberry passion more upsetting than endearing.

My mother’s physical passion also involved eating. She loved corn on the cob. She would slather it with butter, then shake pepper over it until it nearly turned black; the corn looked like it was crawling with ants. But what impressed–and disturbed–me most was not the peppery excess, but the intensity with which she applied it, and the lust with which she consumed the corn.

Although it didn’t increase my sense of being nurtured, seeing my parents experience such pleasure from food reassured me that they were at least somewhat normal. But at the same time these behaviors seemed undignified and embarrassing, in fact almost carnal. My reaction recalled the time, while rummaging through the top shelf in my parents’ bedroom closet (they were, of course, both at work), I discovered a big red box of Trojans. Yikes, my parents actually did it! How unexpected, and how gross!

My childish feelings toward my parents are an example of how we tend to reduce people to a few salient features. In other words, we make them into cartoons. This can be useful since it gives us a handle on who they are. But it’s way too simple: though my parents were indeed in their heads much of the time, they were more complicated than that. Their heads were connected to their bodies. And these bodies were passionate about certain foods, almost certainly enjoyed other sensory experiences, and yes, even made love.

If we can avoid reductionistic views of people, we can more fully appreciate them in all their contradictions and complexity. I aim to try to do so in all my relationships. Enjoy those berries, dad, and have another ear of corn, mom!

As I write this, our island, and much of the west coast, is being heavily infused with smoke. It’s coming from massive wildfires in California and Oregon, blown north by the prevailing winds.

It’s high noon, and everything is a dreary brown. The world looks like one of those old sepia prints with all the joy and life sucked out. Our windows are closed tight, and the air purifier is striving mightily to collect all the smoke particles that have managed to burrow their way into the house.

While out walking the dog with my N95 strapped on, I marvel at how dense and pervasive the smoke is. It must take gazillions of tiny products of combustion to block so much of the sunlight and foul the air. I think about how each of these smoke particles made the epic journey north. For example, as it crashed to the charred ground, an immolated Douglas fir deep in the Klamath National Forest in northern California sloughed off a chip of ash from a high branch. It was then carried aloft by a swirl of hot air, rose higher and higher, and spun out individual particles.

I imagine tracing one of those smoke particles on a 3-D map: Up, down, spinning around, going out to sea, then being pushed back to land as it travelled as part of an enormous pulsing pack. It back-tracked, zigged and zagged, then slowly lost altitude over Bainbridge Island. Drifting downward, it daintily settled on the visor of my hat. Then, right next to that minute fragment of the Doug fir may have settled a particle of smoke originating from the roof joist of a barn near Clackamas, Oregon.

After hundreds of miles of mixing, it’s clear that the pall of particles blocking the sunlight is actually a motley collection of bits thrown together from the residual of burned trees, buildings, animals, and grass from dozens of fires hundreds of miles apart. Thus, this smoke is a profound reordering of the pre-fire relationship of matter from forests and towns all over the northwest.

But then, I think, this massive mixing of matter isn’t confined to cataclysmic events; it happens all the time. For example, though I think of my body as a single unit, it’s made up of a vast number of widely sourced components. Consider the keratin forming the tip of the leftmost eyelash of my left eye. One of the carbon atoms making up part of that polypeptide chain may have come from the Bocca Burger that had for lunch with chipotle mayonnaise and a pickle a few weeks ago. And another part of that chain might have been derived from a bit of an epithelial cell from my tonsil that sloughed off, was swallowed, re-digested and reabsorbed by my small intestine. And for all I know, even before it was part of my tonsil it came from the crust of the fabulous pizza I had at Roberta’s in Brooklyn before covid, when it was still possible to eat out.

And so on, for the entire complex assemblage of my physical body—the noodle soup we ate after our arrival in Shanghai, a drop of sea water that landed on my upper lip as I paddled my kayak in our little cove, the awful bagel we had at that restaurant in Victoria, the mustard greens from the stir fry made entirely from the bounty of our garden last summer. Such diverse sources of matter are incorporated into my vagus nerve, and my right atrium, and the lining of my pancreatic duct.

So, like the huge mass of smoke swirling around me now, we’re all composed of ever-changing material from disparate sources, temporarily joined together. But as Carl Sagan famously said, the ultimate origin of all the shifting components of the smoke, of me, and of everything on earth unites everything together again: “We’re made of star stuff.”