Should we all remain hopeful? The answer is “yes,” but with a caveat: accept death and defeat as temporary obstacles. But be realistic; if you look at our species with a completely open mind, you will find we have been bred to be selfish and dim-witted. Even when our willful stupidity gets in our way and threatens to overtake all our potential, find work-arounds. Cultivate pop-cycles; once they have matured, use their sticks to build birdhouses.
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If, after a brief period being nursed by forest creatures, I wonder whether we humans would adapt to a harsh and demanding environment? Our morals today argue vehemently against conducting the experiment, of course, but I wonder, anyway. Would we develop our own languages, untethered to the noises our ancestors have left with us to serve as modes of communications? Had we been left free to evolve, would we have adapted to life in the water…able to freely live above, in, and below the water? If the planet continues to claim more of it landmasses for the sea, will our successors have lungs and gills and a taste for reading languages now used only by whales and wolves? Who will be first to replace a human’s spine with a salmon’s? Or vice versa?
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The enormity of change wrought by one’s personal experiences are not directly comparable to transformations caused by cosmic events, but correlations exist between them. For example, witnessing a simultaneous, massive, multi-fatality, high-speed wreck involving two hundred vehicles on an interstate highway arguably would not equate to watching a collision between planets Saturn and one the size of Earth. The larger, more distant event may visually appear less spectacular…but its affects probably would far exceed the one nearer to one’s eyes. Power and distance and the relative masses of involved objects influence the way we perceive—and actually process—disruptions in our experiences. Conversely, though, smaller and temporally less intrusive events that logic argues should have less influence on our experiences can overwhelm the more enormous ones. Time, speed, and our scope of understanding of events (and their relationship to one another) collaborate to influence the way we process events around us. My appreciation of the physics of all these factors, coupled with my admittedly limited understanding of all of them, conspire to provide obstacles to my understanding of “truth.” If I could better understand life and death, I might have a more thorough grasp of how to measure their size and distance in comparison with (and in contrast to) one another. Clearly, life—my life, at least—is too short and the speed with which I collect and absorb facts too slow to reach that understanding.
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Time infatuates me. On one hand, the limited time available to enable me to learn is frustrating. On the other, time seems to recycle itself and to repair everything we break—machinery we make, coastlines we fill with debris, and choking mixtures of petroleum and dust, ruining the air we use so unwisely. Though I condemn our abuse of the planet and all our the time we waste by destroying it, I believe the destruction we leave behind eventually will be recovered and renewed by the very Earth we despoil so wantonly. So, I am not particularly worried about what we are doing to the planet; we’re doing it to ourselves and to some extent to future generations. But the planet and its creatures…except people…will emerge stronger than we are. So what if it takes 20 million years? Why are we in such a worry—and in such a hurry—to achieve perfection? All of us, every creature of every kind, lives for a while and then dies, so we have time to repair the damage we cause and to let the planet repair what we have done to it. And to each other. Oh, I get angry about it…perpetually…but then I realize how worthless anger is. Now, if I could just hang on to that realization and let it guide me and my behavior…
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I sit here at my desk, short of breath, yet taking deep breaths of the serene but worthless rage of understanding—that pointless self-assessment that might have had an impact on me had I conducted the evaluation half a lifetime ago. I see myself as a little above average, intellectually, yet willfully stupid in almost every way. If only I had changed course ages ago, abandoning efforts to prove my intellectual wherewithal and, instead, embracing the reality that I have everything to learn.
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