There at the end

For the man, the end is clear. His pensive look might be one of resignation, but there is also an element of hope, if not for this life, then the next.

He is dressed in a suit and tie. Either he is home after a long day at work and did not expect the event that is about to occur, or he is sitting with his dog, dressed such that he will be able to pick in the next life where he left off in this one.

In the background a flag, white, is raised on the mailbox, and the road show signs of activity. One wonders if the flag is raised as a signal of surrender of if the man, ever optimistic, assumes the mailman, through rain and snow, and dark of night, not to mention imminent nuclear annihilation, will keep to his appointed rounds.

Further back still a cross is etched into the side of the mountain. It is a cross that must have been started months in the past since the grass has grown back in and is green. Presumably it is there to remind passing aircraft of the power of love, or a signal to heaven that we’ll all be there soon.  

Why Are We Not As Perfect as a Falling Apple?

Why were we not made perfect? Ever wonder about that? I mean, if a being had what it takes to make us in the first place, why make us as flawed as we are. It would be as if we, with the ability to make a Maserati, made a Flintstone vehicle of stone and wood instead.

It could be, certainly, that we are not yet as perfect as we might someday be, and that the agonizingly slow process of evolution might someday see us reach some pinnacle of perfection. But even then, why the wait? If we are eventually going to be perfect, why not just start out that way and circumvent all those eons of gradual change.

You really have to suspect that we were not meant to be perfect.

And you have to ask yourself why.

The question to be asked next would be this; is there perfection in our world (humans notwithstanding), in our galaxy, in our known universe? If there is, then it follows that we could have been made perfect, but the decision was made to not do so. If there is not perfection anywhere, then perfection for us was never a possibility anyway and this whole discussion is fairly moot.

I submit that there is perfection in the universe, and that because of that, the fact that we are not perfect was because of a conscious decision not to make us so.

I don’t know if you need to be a theologian or a physicist to determine the possibility of perfection in our environment. Maybe all you really need to be is an astute observer.

Newton may or may not have been sitting under a tree when an apple fell on his head and from which he surmised, via the law of universal gravitation, that what goes up must come down. There will never be a time when the simple act of throwing an object into the air will not result in that object falling back to the earth from which it was launched (unless it is unnaturally acted on; someone snatches it out of the air before it has a chance to land). You don’t even have to know anything about Sir Issac Newton or his laws of motion to know and understand this. You just have to throw something up into the air and watch it come down. Newton’s laws just reinforce what you intuitively already knew; no matter how many times you throw that object into the air, it will always come back.

Or consider this. If you take a hot object, a stone heated in a fireplace, say, and drop it in a bucket of ice, the ice will eventually melt and the stone and resulting water made from the ice will be at the same temperature. There will never be a time when the heated stone, when placed in a bucket of ice, will become as cold as the ice, while the ice becomes as hot as the stone.

Laws of thermodynamics will explain this in as much detail as you might like. Or you could simply measure the temperature of the ice and stone and of the resultant water, or easier still, just put your hand in that water. It will be neither freezing nor hot.

Or observe how, when you attempt to slide one object across another object, the objects are subjected to a force, friction, that opposes the movement of those objects.  No matter the objects you choose, no matter how many times you slide those objects against one another, the result will always be the same, friction will impede the motion of those objects.

You could calculate the coefficient of friction for the objects you have chosen to slide against one other, or spend a fruitless lifetime trying to find two objects that would not produce friction when slid against one another. Or you could accept (since others have done the exhaustive math for you) that this is another example of perfection in the universe.

If a thing that happens, must happen that same way, forever, ad infinitum. Surely that is perfection.

A universe that contains these elements of perfection (there are certainly more that could be mentioned, the viscosity of water, perfect for drinking, perfect for its role as a transporter of nutrients in the vascular system; the squirrel, so perfect a creature for tree climbing, but I think you get the point), could also have contained a perfect human being.

Why didn’t it?

One answer might be that perfection can only be attained over the course of many lifetimes, an infinite number of life times maybe. The problem I have with this option is simply that it would seem unlikely that you would ever know where you are on the path to that perfection. I’m pretty sure none of us are aware of any previous lives we might have lived, and we probably have no idea how much farther along the perfection gradient we are in this life as compared to the one we left last.

If you have no way to contrast and compare lives so you can be certain to continue in the right direction towards perfection, I again ask, what is the point? Why the multitude of lives if there is nothing linking those lives you have already lived with those you have yet to live?

Without that connection, without that knowledge of past and future lives, how can perfection be possible? It would then be nothing but blind luck that keeps you on, or points you toward, that elusive path to perfection.

How can that be accepted as a reasonable means to achieve the perfection that the majestic and orderly universe has known, doubtless since the instant after the Big Bang?

OK, so maybe you play the faith card. You pick up a King and add it to the two you already have. You spread your cards on the table and say “Praise God! Perfection is in the eye of the beholder!”

Since we are the children of God and God made a universe which has perfect things in it, then we must also be perfect (even if we don’t exactly understand how), exactly because we have been molded by the hand of a perfect (and let us not forget merciful) God.

But how can you compare a man to Newton’s laws of motion and not come to the inescapable conclusion that one is perfect and one is not, that we come up severely lacking in that comparison.

An apple when thrown up into the air will always fall back to earth. A man will not always do the right thing. If he did, we would all be immersed in the perpetually warm glow of peace and contentment, instead of dodging the perilous fallout from endless wars, penury, and hate.

Faith may sustain us, it may allow us to endure the endless ailments we mostly foist upon ourselves, but it does not explain why we put ourselves in those untenable positions to begin with. And if we expect a better result the next time around I’m pretty sure we’re going to sadly disappointed.

So, God could have made us as perfect as a falling apple, but didn’t. Why not?

I want to say it’s because we keep him amused; our foibles tickle his funny bone; that we are to him like a puppy chasing its tail. I would like to say that, except, really, how long are we amused by the antics of a puppy? And even if God’s timeline is, like, infinite, there would be an unGodlike element of cruelty to that suspicion.

No harm comes from a puppy chasing its tail. The same cannot be said of men flying planes into skyscrapers. How could God be amused by that wanton act of barbarity?

Then I thought maybe God is bored. Perfection would have its drawbacks would it not? Everything you do would be perfect; every thought you have would be perfect; your dreams would be perfect, and come perfectly true.

What would you have to strive for?

Maybe we remind God of what it’s like to want.

And I think that comes close to the truth. Maybe as close to the truth as an imperfect man can get.

We were not made perfect, because if we were made perfect that would be an ending, not a beginning.

And maybe, just maybe, since God is so good at creating cycles (satellites cycling around planets, planets cycling around stars) the cycle we all are a part of is a cycle in which we do get better after each life we live. Maybe we don’t need to know how to get better, to get closer and closer to perfection with each life we live, we just do. And maybe, after enough of these lives, in which we are getting closer to being perfect and better at not creating war, and poverty, and hate, we do finally become perfect. And it is not just us, here on planet Earth, but beings on all the habitable planets in all the known and unknown universes. We all gradually become perfect. And when we do? when we all, all of us, live enough lives of continually increasing perfection, maybe then we become God, or we become a piece of God, a single, sentient, symbiotic cell in the structure of God.

That’s an appealing thought. Beats the Hell (pun absolutely intended) out of the dichotomy of Heaven and Hell, and it brings universes of sentient beings into the eventual fold, or embrace, of God. There is no positive proof of this option, obviously. If there were you could just slack off and still end up a little more perfect in the next life. Since you don’t know for sure if my alternative afterlife is correct, you will, presumably, simply continue with your, mostly, good life for as long as you are granted the joy of living and worry about what comes next when you get there.

No, God didn’t make us perfect, but he just might have given us the means to become perfect, eventually. 

God Bless You

There was a time, centuries, mayhap millennial ago, when the poor ignorant folk of the world either cringed in fear or threw their weary arms to the heavens when they witnessed what they believed were Godly events.

 It would take all those centuries, all those millennial, for those poor folk to realize that some of those events, most, all of those events, were Godly only to the extent that they were set in motion by some Godly entity. 

The eventual realization that these events followed a predictable, repeatable pattern led to a method of observing the environment that depended more on science than on either superstition or faith.

One can understand then, how the unexpected tilting back of the head, the sudden snapping of the head forward, and the resultant explosion that spewed the inner body outward, might have seemed like the expulsion of demons from the body.  

One can imagine how that might have seemed like a job well done, a Godly event nearly concluded. 

    

One can imagine then that the event could truly be concluded only by recognizing that now that the demons had been expelled, the body could now be properly blessed.

God Bless You.

But since we now know how various, concerted muscle contractions cause the expulsion of irritants from the body in the form of a sneeze, and that it is Godly only to the extent that it is a natural bodily function programmed into the body by that same mysterious entity, there is really no longer any need that the event be concluded with an obligatory “God Bless You.”

Unless, of course, that same blessing is available for other natural bodily functions; the hic cup, the cough, and best of all, the fart.

Memory

Every year I have to remind myself that I have allergies. Or maybe it’s a single allergy, I don’t really know. All I know for certain is that every April my nose starts to itch, my throat gets a little scratchy, and my eyes water like a leaky kitchen faucet.

My wife tells me every year that I should see someone about it; a doctor, obviously, someone to poke me with pins until my skin blisters, and he says, “That’s it then. I’d stay away from pinecones, cat dander, and bad jokes. That last one was just a joke. Ha!”

Bad jokes aside I would take my wife up on her offer except that by the time my allergies becomes an issue they are already becoming a non issue. The season is over, for me, not long after it begins. My symptoms disappear like a drop of water on a hot stove.

Maybe they’re not allergies, I tell myself. Maybe I’m experiencing a kind of sympathy pain for the truly afflicted, the way a mother might do for a sick child. Except that I’m not like that. I don’t have that kind of symbiotic relationship with the world at large. What I do have, however, is a bad memory;  not like a sieve, as my mother used to say, but like an unstoppered drain, the old fashioned kind, with the rubber plug attached to a silver chain. Pull the plug and the water flows directly down the drain.

My memory is like that, never collecting like water in a sink, but spilling out of me through watery eyes and a runny nose.

What Good is a Tree

What good is a tree? Except to the extent that it pleases me to look at it, of what value is it? Beyond the cool shade it offers me on a hot summer day why does it even exist? Were it not for the fact that I breathe in the oxygen it produces would not the space it takes up be equally suitable to that of a rock?

I might say a similar thing about elephants, gerbils, and robins; about tulips, bumblebees, and alligators, about daylilies, caterpillars, and whales. Indeed I might repeat myself endlessly for all living things (except for flies; flies obviously have no value, they are merely a colossal evolutionary mistake). Of what good are these various living things beyond the fact that I might gaze upon them and judge them as worthy or not of my attention?

It is not difficult for me to accept the premise of some religions that the whole of life on our little blue green planet (and possibly the Universe as well, although they seem less specific the farther out in space the circumference of this topic is allowed to expand) is designed for the pleasure of mankind and that we should have dominion over all of the Earth’s lesser creatures.

There will certainly be those of you who suggest that the planet was around for billions and billions of years before Homo sapiens came to dominate the planet. That is certainly true, but it seems equally true to me that, as in our own pitiful lives, it is mostly the case that the end result of a thing seldom occurs without a certain amount of tweaking from beginning to end to make the thing, whatever it is, what it ultimately becomes.

So too with the creation of life and our place in it; the Powers That Be obviously had a few dozen fitful starts before deciding on the end product. Us.

Evolutionists among us (and who really, is not) will offer the argument that just as Home sapiens ultimately evolved from Homo habilis and he from Australopithecus afarensis  suggests that there will ultimately be a being who will evolve from us and who will put us on the same relative evolutionary scale to him that Homo habilis was to us.

Wouldn’t that then crush this argument to dust and toss it to the furthest reaches of the globe on a strong wind? It might, except for one small thing that I borrow from investment prospectuses you may be familiar with; past performances are no guarantee of future results. We do not know, and will never know, that we are not the best there can ever be in the evolution of a species. In Science fiction it is usually the case that the evolutionary process continues until even our physical bodies become superfluous and we become sentient energy. Any of you who have watched Star Trek know how that scenario ends.

But imagine that evolution is like the United States, a process losing its inventiveness, losing its drive and ambition, coasting on the glory and accomplishments of the past. If that were the case, and Homo sapiens are truly the end result of the long evolutionary process then it follows, does it not, that all of life, from a sightless amoeba at the bottom of the ocean to the majestic eagle, exists for our benefit, and our benefit alone.

Otherwise, I would suggest, why bother.

 All of life, except for mankind, exists solely to procreate and die. How sad is that? How meaningless. At least if we acknowledge them, we give credence to their existence. We give it meaning. We give it a purpose.

And of the millions, if not billions, of species of life we have yet to discover? How are these for our benefit if we are not even aware of their existence? It gives us something to do, to discover them. It gives us a reason to get up in the morning.

And if you take nothing else from this little discourse, certainly you would agree that we all need a reason to get up in the morning.

Porches Are So Passe

Porches are so passé.

They were once as necessary to any home as a bathroom, but for at least the last thirty years they have been completely forgotten, or reinvented in the back yard as a deck. They are like the Jitterbug, which though it is just about the most fun you can have standing up, is still, to most of us, little more than a piece of our parent’s history. 

There is sadness in that my friends.

I blame the relentless advancement of technology for this. Porches were once the only place one could go to escape the hot, sticky dog days of summer. Once Willis Haviland Carrier determined that warm air blown over cold coils could control the temperature and humidity of an enclosed room, however, the only people left sitting on their front porches were smokers. Those who, having been ignominiously ejected from that cool, air conditioned space, were left to watch the wisps of gray smoke from their cigarettes dissipate in the stagnant air.

Sitting on the porch not only cooled you off (as much as that was possible), but it also gave you an opportunity to palaver with your neighbors. But if air conditioning had not already been in the process of ending that particular habit of nocturnal nattering, then radio was certainly doing its best to sever its jocular jugular. After David Sarnoff of RCA popularized radio and made it possible for most families to own at least one of those console behemoths, and both you and your neighbor had one, his infantile babbling suddenly became something you could turn off by turning on the radio.

And of course the more affordable radio became, the more radios a home had, the more splintered families became as individual tastes were given individual expression on individual radios.

Good bye dinner conversation, hello Fibber McGee and Molly.

Television followed the same general path of technological skullduggery as radio. If radio brought the family inside to the air conditioned comfort of their living room, thereby abandoning the breathless banter of their neighbors on front porches across the way, then TV did the same thing to the movie industry. Replicated across the breadth and depth of America, it pulled those same people, and hundreds of thousands of people just like them, from the congenial confines of a darkened movie theater to that same air conditioned room. Now, instead of listening to the static drone of “The Shadow” they watched the ludicrous lamentations of a fiery redhead in “I Love Lucy.”

The desertion of these movie goers did little more to the movie industry than to compel it to innovate and to attempt to improve upon the product it offered to its no longer adoring public. More importantly was what television did to those who traded the movie theater, with its throngs of popcorn munchers, for the darkened privacy or their living room, and later their bedrooms, as the number of TVs grew like the population of China. It splintered the larger public group of movie goers into smaller and smaller nuggets of TV watching humanity. 

In short it did what radio did, only better. It isolated people from other people.

The technological advances of radios and TVs laid the groundwork for future generations of portable electrical whiz bang devices that allowed, yet again, the splintering of society. We all know what they were; 8 track tapes, cassette players, VHS tapes, DVDs. But, when compared to the glittering dome of the ubiquitous Internet, they were all like children constructing buildings with sticky popsicle sticks while envisioning the towering spire of an Empire State Building.

 The Internet of course is the preeminent culprit responsible for the splintering of society. It has taken the technology of Radio and Television and added virtually every other communicative technology currently known and rolled it up in one convenient package. It is now possible to live, and some would say thrive, without benefit of human contact.

To those of you out there who even now are grabbing their computer monitors and throttling them as though it was my scrawny neck, let me just say this: chill.

I can’t be the only one who recognizes the difference between manipulating electrons to scroll text across a computer screen and a handshake, a pat on the back, or the faint brushing of cheeks to say, “It’s been awhile, so what have you been up to?”

Certainly that’s better than nothing, though, right? Better to scan the text scrolling across a computer screen than to remember, faintly, that last hello of so many years ago.

Maybe. Maybe not. The point of all this tripe is to suggest that over time it will become easier, even preferable, to manipulate those electrons than it will be to reach out and shake that hand.

I am almost certainly an alarmist. I do not want to be without the advances in technology I have spent these last minutes haranguing, but it would not take a monumental leap of the imagination to speculate that a future is possible in which human interaction becomes as mysterious a thing as the Jitterbug. It is not the stuff of Science Fiction, but probably where we will ultimately find ourselves.

I am as solitary an individual as most of you will probably ever meet, but even I do not want to be a part of that world.

Coincidences: More Than Mere Happenstance

I am listening to my MP3 player, a book called Bloodroot in which women from a given family are blessed, or cursed, with unusual powers, when the narrator says the word ‘focus’ at the exact same time that I look at the rear of the Ford in front of me and my eyes land on the word Focus.

I have spent the better part of two days trying to decipher the meaning and purpose behind this oddly intriguing coincidence. It reminded me of another coincidence that happened a number of years ago when my wife and I met my niece in a restaurant we frequented in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts. My niece lived in Southwick, Massachusetts, a good twenty miles away. Admittedly she had her own life and there could have been any number of reasons she would be in the same restaurant at the same time as my wife and me. It turns out that the restaurant was in a small mall with seating in a promenade and she was there to pick up a resized engagement ring she had dropped off some time previously at a local jeweler.

Coincidences , by their very definition, are events that happen by chance, but seem to have some connection. We’ve all experienced them, I’m sure, but most people, maybe all people, maybe everyone in the known world and universe but me, shrugs them off as, well, coincidences; of no more significance than finding something a week after you thought you had lost it.

But maybe there is more to it than that. Maybe these coincidences are really nodes, critical points of decision that propel an incredibly convoluted and complicated process in one direction or another. And perhaps knowing this, knowing of the existence of these nodes and the associated process, allows one to consciously and significantly affect that process, even if the ultimate purpose of the process is unknown.

So my niece shows up at a restaurant in East Longmeadow, twenty miles from home, ostensibly to get an engagement ring resized. In the end it turns out the engagement is called off, so her whole trip to East Longmeadow was for naught. But perhaps there was another reason for our meeting. Perhaps at this particular node we were destined to make certain choices, which we did, and those choices propelled the process in directions it would otherwise never have considered going and toward an end which had now caused it to deviate significantly from what it was just minutes before.

And perhaps my unique mental acuity has allowed me to recognize these coincidences, these nodes for what they are, and the apparently innocuous intersection of the word ‘focus’ spoken in an MP3 book at the same time I glance at a Ford Focus in front of me is really a message, an instruction, a warning to, obviously, focus.

Focus on what you might reasonably ask? Any answer might do here I suppose, but it seems pretty obvious to me that the instruction was to focus on honing the ability to recognize the nodes and to take decisive action when one is presented.

The next obvious step, of course, would be to know with certainty what would be the ramifications of decisions made or not made at these particular nodes, and their effect on the process.

But that way certainly leads to madness.