Every once in a while, if you're lucky, you discover someone—perhaps an artist, an author, poet, musician, philosopher, or just a friend—who really speaks to you, or for you.  Someone who makes you think, "Exactly right!"  Or just someone who makes you think.  And when you do, you feel you're life is a little bit richer.

I have been lucky that way, many times.  And recently I felt that way again when I discovered (via a recent interview on the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast) the enlightened, intelligent, and enormously talented Australian musician, songwriter, poet, and comedian, Tim Minchin.

Tim's podcast interview opened with a recording of the brief (but not briefly titled), If You Open Your Mind Too Much, Your Brain Will Fall Out.  My reaction was, "Wow, who is this guy?  He gets it and he's good."  After the podcast I spent some time on timminchin.com and on You Tube perusing his various works and found that If You Open Your Mind… is my second favorite work, right behind Storm.

Storm is a 9-minute poem set to musical accompaniment that tells the story of a dinner party where Tim and his wife are invited to the home of another couple, close friends with whom they have dined and partied many times.  But there is a fifth guest, a beautiful young woman named, Storm, who does not share Tim's world view.  The conversation is priceless.

By being so darn entertaining, Tim can fill a theater—physical or virtual—with folks that just want a great show.  And they'll get one.  But they'll also get, if only by osmosis, something else.  They'll get a little injection of reality, of critical thinking, that may, if we are all lucky, ever so slightly raise their immunity to memes of dogmatic blindness.

And that's a good thing, for everyone.  The sooner everyone understands that this life we all share is… well, just what it is and it is fantastic and wonderful and should not be wasted believing fairy tales, the better off we all will be.  We're the lucky ones.  We have all this.  Just this.