Intersection

One drizzly morning, a few years ago, a very dear friend of ours was walking, with umbrella in hand and over her head, to catch a bus a couple of blocks away to go to work.  She crossed the street just across from their home where her retired husband was just cleaning up after breakfast.  As she had done many times before she walked by the same tall pine tree when suddenly at that one instant lightning struck.  The bolt of heavily charged static electricity ran from the gently swirling clouds a mile or two above to the top of the tree down its upright trunk, leaped into our friend’s umbrella, and passed through her body before dissipating into the ground.  Her death was as instantaneous as the thunderbolt.

Had she been a minute late in leaving the house or one minute sooner she would have missed the strike without even a slight injury, except perhaps for a temporary hearing loss from the deafening boom of the thunderclap as masses of air surged back to re-occupy the vacuum created by trillions and trillions of electrons jumping from the upper atmosphere to the ground below.  Her life story and that of her family would have taken a different path.  Instead, just a few days later we all gathered together to see her for the last time.  To assuage their grief, friends recalled stories of happier times to lighten the heavy burden of mourning and lift everybody’s spirits at a time of one such tragic and sudden loss.  Then invariably each conversation would turn into everyone asking, “Why”? Why, indeed?  Why didn’t the lighting strike somewhere else?  What if she decided to stay home that morning?  It is the many “could haves, should haves” that make the question so difficult to answer.

Actuaries, whose job it is to assess risks and probabilities of these kind of events primarily for insurance companies, use science and mathematics to make their predictions, in terms ordinary people would not delve into in the normal course of their lives.  While we are asking, “why”, actuaries just know it will happen though not necessarily when, how or to whom.

Are we to feel helpless against the whims of probabilities and the maddening randomness of events in our lives?  Are we caught in the utter futility or senselessness of it all and resign ourselves and sigh, “These things happen”?  These are not just difficult questions, they are impossible to answer.  We can, of course, know the when, what, for the most part how, but not why.  Even in cases where injury or death is intentionally caused by another human being, we may still not know why.

“Every doorway, every intersection has a story.”

---- Katherine Dunn

The intersection of space and time, where ever we are, where ever anything is, makes an event.  In the universe that we know, the very one that we have, nothing ever stays put.  So, as every moment passes, intersections happen as time and space collide whether we are aware of it or not. Something is always happening whether one sits motionless in a darkened room waiting for dawn to break, or when one is hurrying up to catch the last train, or when a mother is not able to sleep until her two teenage daughters come home from the movies.  Actuaries can run all the algorithms in the world but they will not read the thoughts that go through in a woman’s head as she contemplates this morning’s visit to her doctor about that lump in her breast as she prepares herself on that one dark morning waiting but not wanting for the sun to come up; or the working single mom who had to work so late almost every night but catching that train is the difference between money spent on a cab or extra music lesson for a gifted child; or all the dreadful scenarios a mother has to go through in her head each Friday or Saturday night her daughters go out and are late for their curfew.

The lightning and our friend met at that intersection that fateful morning because she had to go to work and nature had to run its course.  Every day around the world about three million lightning strikes occur. Several millions of people go to work – a good many of them toil in the fields and open spaces in good and bad weather.  Millions of children go to school, only a fraction of them on school buses while a vast majority go on foot.  They walk in good or bad weather.

Actuarial science and the mathematics that go along with it can run calculations on all kinds of risk conditions.  Lightning strikes are one of those entered into computer databases to calculate risks involved with lightning striking passenger planes and boats, golf courses, sporting events and community swimming pools, etc.   What it does not calculate is the philosophical equivalence of pain and grief suffered by families and community had the lightning hit a group of school children huddled together at an intersection two blocks away that same fateful morning waiting for the school bus to arrive; or the pregnant housewife who came out to retrieve the morning’s newspaper at her front yard.

One asks, “Why hadn’t that lightning hit a vacant lot instead?”

Lightning does hit more empty land and water than people, animals and property by a huge margin.  The three million lightning strikes a day around the world have a purpose.  Nitrogen makes up 78 % of the atmosphere and with every breath we take the same percentage of it, along with oxygen and carbon, goes through our respiratory system.  The nitrogen in the air though exists as a molecule of two atoms (N2) bound with a triple bond between them.  That’s a good thing because this inorganic form of nitrogen makes it usable for breathing and it is quite an inert gas.  When lightning strikes, however, the temperature of the air around the spark can go up tremendously in a fraction of a second, followed by extreme pressure as the lightning bolt pushes the surrounding air apart rapidly.  High temperature and extreme pressure developing instantaneously in such a short period of just 30 microseconds are the conditions needed to break the bonds that hold the two nitrogen atoms.  At that point single nitrogen atoms will seek and combine with hydrogen, oxygen and carbon in the air.  The process creates compounds of nitrates, ammonia and urea – vital components of fertilizer.  They’re absorbed into the ground through rain water so grass, vegetables and fruit trees can flourish.  Livestock will eat the grass; poultry will consume grain, converting some of what they ate into protein. Additionally, vegetables and fruit trees will recycle the same compounds to produce carbohydrates and other nutrients.  Legumes will have protein as well.

Our life cycle and those of every living thing is thus intertwined with the endless intersections of recycled material with time.  These recycling processes go back to the dawn of time.  Early on when life first begun whether one believes in the Creator or not the first amino acids, or at least much of them, were produced through lightning. The image of sparks coming down from the heavens was an awe inspiring spectacle that made any doubters then to think deeply about where all that power comes from and how these processes all begun. Greek mythology was one of the ways early civilization coped with the phenomenon so Zeus was invariably portrayed wielding a lightning bolt. One thing we can be certain of is that eons before man had learned to make fertilizer lightning has been doing it for the past few billion years.

The pictures of three million lightning strikes every day around the globe when fast forwarded as film makers do in time lapse photography mimic the firing of electrical signals between neurons through the synapses in our brains where billions and billions of intersections occur endlessly.  Our thought processes, how and when we make decisions, our aspirations and our dreams even as we sleep are a result of those intersecting and interconnecting  neurons firing and dissipating to no end.  In fact, our life experiences from the day we made first sense of the world around us to the day we learned to talk or ride a bike, encountered our first moral lesson, meet friends, formed relationships, etc., all came about from the never ending series of intersections.  Our daily mundane activities from the time we wake up to preparing and going to work, to what we talk about at work, who we go to lunch with, the trip back home, etc. make an unbroken series of intersecting collisions.

Why a gentle person like our dear friend who spoke barely above a whisper, who was so generous to her family and friends and on several occasions showed so much kindness to strangers, who took care to have a healthy lifestyle was at that fateful intersection of time and space is unanswerable.  Synapses and neurons could go on over drive to grapple with the question, but the quandary is still impossible to answer.  There are countless similar stories, of course, some even more tragic and sadder.  Then there are accidents at home and in highways, being at the wrong place at the wrong time to be a victim of crime, etc.  We can contemplate, we can struggle to keep looking for answers but that is all we can do but an explanation will always evade us.

Then there is the story of McKenzie Morgan, the 17 year old pilot from Wyoming whose plane crashed into the side of a 12,000 foot high mountain while trying to complete a solo-three-airport-qualifying flight.  Search planes looked for her all afternoon of that same day but didn’t see the wrecked plane because she flew off course from her designated flight plan.  The area where her plane crashed was so isolated that even hunters barely go there.  But on that particular day it just so happened that two hunters on horseback were there scouting for game animals when they saw the plane go down.  One went for help and the other went down to the crash site.  It could have been tragic because in those mountains at that elevation temperature would turn frigid quickly into the night and she had no warm clothing or food or fire. The events, first, that she survived the crash and second, that hunters just happened to be nearby, made for a much happier intersection.

Actually, there are far more happy intersections than there are tragic ones, just as far more lightning strikes hit empty uninhabited areas than people and property.  There are millions of air miles flown by commercial airlines every year, ribbons of intersecting and heavily traveled highways and other transportation arteries, doctors doing major surgeries, missionaries and volunteers going to dangerous places, and so on and on.  Fortunately, every night billions of people go home safely to their families and many are comforted in many places after natural disasters had struck or human conflict had taken its toll.  By an overwhelming number, there are far more positive intersections of people helping people than those who mean harm to others.  Despite the horrors of many wars, atrocities committed by ruthless rulers, calamities of plagues and natural disasters, population flourished and civilization has advanced.

The World we live in, our very existence, in fact, depend on endless moments of intersections.  There are more happy events than tragic ones. There are far more good people than evil ones.  There are far more questions we are able to answer than we can’t.  The ones we can’t may remain unanswered but perhaps those are the ones we should stop asking.