It is All Relative

Anyone, even some among us with very little ability to observe or afflicted with the direst form of apathy or have the least amount of curiosity, knows that everything around us can only be perceived relative to everything else.  This will not be a lecture on Albert Einstein’s theory because very few people in the world understand it - I am not one of them – but we can spin something from it to make it more practical or give it worldly relevance, where the stark reality of anyone’s station in life is viewed relative to where everyone else stood.

Just very briefly, let’s pick up just one little bit from how the great scientist actually thought.  He was not brilliantly eccentric if it were not for thinking what at that time, perhaps still true even today, the most far out suppositions and conjectures.  He made us imagine a ball traveling at very high speed through empty space: dark and devoid of anything else; i.e. no stars, hence no light, no air, no dust, just plain void of nothingness, except for the constantly (fixed velocity) speeding ball. Now imagine it is a large transparent ball, like glass, and you’re inside traveling with it.  How can you tell you are actually moving? You cannot. In fact, you will not know how fast you are moving nor can you know what direction you are moving to or from. And get this. You will be oblivious to the surrounding space even if you are traveling at the speed of light – 300,000 km/hr. Come to think of it, you will not even know that you are moving to anywhere at all. [Only way you can is if your speed changes, i.e., you slow down or speed up even more or if you can see other objects around you with which to base an observation]. The same way you can’t tell seated inside a 747 doing 400 mph, except when it picks up speed for takeoff or slows down to land].

Now, back to the real world. As little as we know or understand Einstein’s theory, this we can be sure: Everything is relative. How does a young baby recognize his mother and father? They look and sound different relative to other people.  This is of course started by first recognizing people to be different from the other things around that move – like the pet dog or cat. There is nothing flippant or glib about that. The baby’s brain was an empty slate from birth and it has to learn all the things that stimulate it.  It begins quickly to recognize objects that don’t move from those that do.  Notice how quickly they are bored once there are no movements, sounds or changing colors around them. They’d recognize shapes and the size of the shapes because, well, something is different, larger or smaller, softer or harder, relative to something else.

From then on the baby has grown to be about seven years old.  By now his perception of a lot of things has grown substantially larger over what it was when he was three or four.  He’s bigger now but he must recognize quickly there are bigger boys out there.  He establishes his position relative to the younger, little ones and to those taller and twice his weight.  By his teenage years, he now recognizes not only his own social status but where his family is in the hierarchy by which his parents, their peers, or not-so-peers, stood.  Relativity begins to manifest some of its darker sides.  He cannot have a car even at his junior year in high school when some of his classmates do.  When finally a used car came along by the middle of his senior year, some of the same classmates were getting brand new ones ahead of a graduation gift. It is obvious that relative to his parents some of his classmates’ families have relatively more to spare, which made the difference between a used car and a brand new one.

If only, just before graduating he had widened his perspective to a larger focus.  If only he had done a thought experiment that took him to a neighborhood far, far away. There he would have seen a similarly populated high school, say, in a suburb of Dhaka, Bangladesh, where even the principal of the school drives a car a decade older than his.  There, students from the middle class would be fortunate to own a bicycle, whose father, the bread winner, is still 30 months away from paying off the scooter he drives to work which by now belches smoke as to render it unsuitable to drive through the city streets in a couple of years; or less if the environmental police catches up to him with a citation.

It is all relative.

My son and daughter-in-law traveled to Russia years ago but not to the tourist attractions in Moscow, not even Nizhny or Rostov-on-Don. They went on a church mission to some of the poorest areas in a remote Russian region.  My daughter-in-law who was then a high school teacher had seen her U.S. students come to school in name-branded or sports-emblemized back packs filled with new text books and more than ample school supplies.  In that Russian town they saw young students come to school with their books and school supplies in plastic bags, notably no different from what we see in grocery stores in many parts of the well developed world.  The kids were happy to have those grocery bags to keep their books dry and protected from the elements, with simple hand straps, clutched by tiny fingers to hold on to what momentarily are prized possessions in their young lives.  There were no school buses.  Every student walked to and from school.  We can only imagine what it was like when the weather turned into the famous Russian winter.

It is all relative.

When western tourists go on their yearly sojourn to the Far East or South America, they may think nothing of a $2 or $5 tip but to the waiter or bell hop or driver, it could mean crossing the threshold from a hand-to-mouth existence to an albeit temporary relief from the following day’s worry or uncertainty in case he or she misses work for one reason or another.  The tourists, regardless of their social standing from whence they came, are assured by relativity in a foreign land a place far more special than they can ever imagine, if only they can know how these people who serve and cater to their needs live - in homes these strange but, relatively or seemingly, wealthy visitors will never see.

Back home the same tourists return to the reality of their daily existence in a world so different from the grand but short intermission.  It will take a while for them to re-adjust and realize that the daily stage show they must begin to resume is the actual reality of their lives and the vacation was merely the entr’acte, according to the French among us. Now, in not so frequent a case, which most of us should be grateful for, post vacation seems to bring on more stress than had there been no vacation at all even though such joyous trips are supposed to relieve them of it.  It does not seem to matter that there is a job to go back to, to a home taken for granted in a neighborhood that looks the same.  Well, if they must, they ought to re-imagine what that home in such a neighborhood would look to those folks that catered to their needs and serve them well in that foreign land not too long ago. The seemingly tired, old neighborhood, the house that could use new furnishings even when they’re perfectly fine, would be heaven to those 767 million people of the world’s population in extreme poverty who subsist on a meager $1.90 a day (2016 world survey) or to those 2.1 billion who get by on $3.10 per day.

It is all relative.

Albert Einstein may have inadvertently taught us something else. We can learn from our own personal Special Theory of Relativity.  Treat whatever we have or where we are today, as something special because relative to much of the world - many of whom do not have an electronic device to read this, let alone electricity by which to power it - we live relatively well.