Several years ago, I made a brief trip to Beijing, China to attend a conference for one of my client associations. My stay in Beijing was short, but interesting. On the way home, I had a one-night layover and stayed in the Hilton Tokyo Narita Airport. The morning of my continuing flight, I had a fairly typical Japanese breakfast in the hotel; rice, broiled salmon, miso soup, cucumber, and some colorful splashes of edible somethings (I do not remember what). I’m relatively sure I drank tea with my food. There was something inherently peaceful about that meal—something quiet and calming and so very soothing. The size of the meal was very small, but utterly satisfying. I’ve written about this experience before, I’m afraid; forgive me. Something about it changed my thinking about Japanese culture. The gentleness. The civility. The attention paid to good manners and person-to-person tenderness. The apparent absence of harshness…compared to day-by-day interactions in the United States. Much of what I’ve read about Japan, since then, has enhanced my appreciative perspective on what strikes me as highly honorable Japanese culture. All of that from a one-night stay at an airport hotel…and a little reading. Admittedly, my exposure to Japanese culture has been far too limited to make informed judgments about it. But even with my limited experience, I felt—and still feel—a kinship of sorts with what I perceived as a cultural gentleness; I think the term in Japanese is Yasashi-sa. I read somewhere that Yasashi-sa describes both a behavior and a state of being. If such a state of being ever graced the American cultural and psychological landscape, it has long since been so completely eroded and crushed into powdered rock that it is unrecoverable. Our culture is too deeply imbued with harshness and meanness to retrieve what may have once been gentleness. That notwithstanding, on those exceedingly rare occasions when I prepare a Japanese breakfast, I think I hear a soothing, pleasing echo of Yasashi-sa.
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The clock on my computer registered 4:01 a.m. a few minutes ago. I could not stay in bed past 2:45 this morning, thanks to getting so much sleep over the past few days, but I already feel a growing sleepy fatigue that may allow me to drift off again if I try. Several times during the last couple of days I have awakened in confusion, not sure what part of the day I am encountering…morning, afternoon, dead of night? That is what happens, I suppose, when one sleeps through multiple “normal” sleep cycles. Time becomes a confusing elastic cage that hides clues about hours of the day and days of the week. I imagine even longer sleep cycles could introduce chaos to uncertainty about weeks of the month or months of the year.
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The Super Bowl is to take place today. I watched the game a few years ago and was surprised that I actually enjoyed it. I have no interest in becoming a fan, so I will not watch it again. Instead, I will challenge humans’ common belief/assumption that life requires oxygen and water. Perhaps water and oxygen are required of life as we know it, but does the possibility exist that life might take a completely different form, one that requires neither of those substances? My answer is “YES.” The mere fact that we have not been exposed to life that does not require them does not prove that they are required for life to exist. Yet even the definitions we use to explain what life is presume that our assumptions are correct…that oxygen and water are necessary for life to exist. Why, I wonder, are we so damn certain about something so fundamentally unknowable in the context of our current experience? Our uncertainty extends to almost everything else (if we’re honest about it), but LIFE…we are POSITIVE that is an exception to our general uncertainties. What if we discovered, on a distant planet, that life existed there only in the presence of molybdenum and lead, super-heated to temperatures of at least 13,649°F? Would we even recognize life in that form? Would the circumstances permit us to understand such a completely different form of life? Or would we insist on calling it something else? So many questions remain unanswered. So many have not even been asked.
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This week’s schedule: a visit with the radiologist tomorrow morning, a blood draw and one-week-in injection tomorrow afternoon, and a PET-scan on Thursday afternoon. The costs associated with these treatments and tests are beyond obscenely expensive. If I had no insurance, I would long since have been bankrupted and living in extreme poverty. I pity people who need care and cannot afford it.
