John Boucha

An untold number of school children have gazed idly out of classroom windows, their small thoughts arrested by the magic of clouds billowing in the skies above. The loss of attention can’t be helped. We feel taken in, charmed, even mesmerized by the fluffy drama unfolding from nature’s most captivating phenomena. The best days of summer are those spent watching the skies come alive with the pl...

The story goes something like this. One day in the summer of 1898, an immigrant farmer named Olof Ohman was out clearing his land from trees and stumps near Kensington, Minnesota when he uncovered a 200-pound stone tablet containing what appeared to be ancient Scandinavian runes. The inscription told of an ill-fated excursion led by Viking explorers westward from Vinland, and chiseled at the end o...

I can say with all certainty that the best collection of words ever strung together on the royal and ancient game of chess, and I mean the very best, is found in a marvelous little pocket novella titled A Chess Story, written by the brilliant Stefan Zweig in 1941. It’s a story that draws together two grandmasters through situational ...

Behind the congenial face of every human being lies the cumbersome burden of great expectation. For within the dreamscape of our creative imagination is a vision of the future, a pleasant rendering of how things will, or ought, to be. We expect success over failure, wealth over poverty, love over rejection, and good vanquishing evil. Yet, the more we expect from life the more we fall prey to the c...

The pedestrian, even in his ambling speed, is of the most undaunted and dignified of people — gentlemen of the road searching for nothing but enjoyment in their deliberate wanderings. They walk for pleasure, never in a hurry and are completely happy in the company of their own mind. People in this age are too distracted with obligatory engagement to acknowledge, or even remember, how life once m...

In America, and elsewhere, there is the belief that hard work, duty, and self-sacrifice are the noblest of human characteristics. Children are beaten with the idea that if they work hard enough, anything is possible. And so they grow up with visions of stratospheric success, like becoming presidents, astronauts, and professional baseball players. But if these same children and adults were at all c...

At the ready age of 22, Charles Darwin set sail on what would become the most important event of his life, an epic adventure circumnavigating the globe as the HMS Beagle’s tag-along naturalist, to study the flora and fauna of places largely unknown to the developed world. The five-year plan was tremendously opportunistic for the young scholar as those experiences became the origins of his profou...

Bill Shakespeare once wrote of life’s most bothersome quandary, “To be, or not to be?”, the well-known, but often misunderstood, imperative to living that begets compounding influence over our future self. The Laws of Reality, it would seem, have bound us to the dichotomy of decision trees and forced us to choose between life's diverging paths. To fight or flight, to swim for a goal or to fl...

Some people think baseball is boring, as if nothing were more wretched than spending an afternoon watching a professional sport where doping was so widespread yet the only physical contact deemed necessary were the congratulatory butt slaps. So I wonder what would make the game more exciting, more bedazz...

The shape-shifting morals of every society evolve with the behavior of its individual members. Through the choice of action and non-action we cast votes in a twisted sort of election to nominate the variable truths and virtues that we submit to. But however honest our intentions might be, humans are not without bias and this shoddy conventionalism surrenders poignant examples of skewed principles ...