The Long Game ...The Ultimate Perspective

The ultimate perspective for humanity is best portrayed below.  Just so we know our place and time in history, and before we even attempt to revise our most recent past, take a look at the chart.  Just looking at earth's history alone, not the history of the universe, and compressing it into a 24 hour period - a manageable scale for us to grasp - our species did not show up until close to midnight. In fact, it was in just the last minute and seventeen seconds of the total 24 hours when our direct ancestors first emerged, just barely past the age of Neanderthals. Our life time so far is a minuscule sliver, a thin slice of the tip of a finger nail, narrower than a strand of hair, if the entire chart were the human body.

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Then someone or several folks put together a more ambitious scale - the history of the universe compressed into one calendar year of 365 days.  Let's just visit December 31st.

"What happened on December 31 in 24 hours?

December 31, 12 a.m.: 40 million years ago: Dawn of the primates

Whatever we have heard about the history of mankind on Earth happened on December 31st of the cosmic calendar. This truly shows us the insignificance of our time spent here on Earth. The dinosaurs had roamed the Earth for 5 days, and we were still living in trees on the dawn of that final day. Humanity is quite literally a blip on this calendar, as everything that follows happened on the final day of the year. For more specificity, the time has been shown instead of the date.

14:24 hrs – Primitive Humans were born.

22:24 hrs – Stone tools were used by humans and fire was domesticated.

23:59 hrs and 48 seconds – The Pyramids were built by the Egyptians.

23:59 hrs and 54 seconds – Buddha was born and the Roman Empire was formed.

23:59 hrs and 55 seconds – Christ was born, which marked the beginning of the Roman calendar (0 AD).

23:59 hrs and 58 seconds – Christopher Columbus discovered America

23:59 hrs and 59 seconds – The world as we know it… "

That was the last second.

Today, we are talking about our time since the last Presidential election as having occurred only in the last 0.04 second.

There is a point here somewhere in a bit.

Simon Sinek, renowned motivational speaker is popular with both corporate and military organizations for his powerful presentation on business strategy and analyses of short and long term goals from the perspective of "Game Theory".  He often talks about the finite and infinite games that are the two main components in game theory.

Rules in sports compel finite endings like after nine innings in baseball, or when one team scores more that the other after one or more complete extra innings for each.  Competition in sports must end after a finite period.

However, in life, in business, in military conflicts, make note of the difference when rules are played one way or another.

Sinek talked about most recent events, relatively speaking. He often talked about why the U.S. finally got out of Vietnam, and the French before that, or why the Soviets suffered the same fate in Afghanistan that now the U.S. is finding itself in a deadly and costly conflict in over a decade and a half.  The Soviets played the finite games of winning one battle after the next for control while the Afghans were fighting for their lives, fighting for their survival.  Project that to all the conflicts in the last century and that has always been the disparity in the rules of the game.

Here are a few of my own take on the finite and the infinite rules.

The Nazi Party thought they played the long game with their goal for the Third Reich as lasting for a thousand years. They thought that the so called final solution was a permanent one but the Jewish population was fighting for their lives and their existence. A finite ambition losing to an infinite nature that is the survival of a people. Today, Israel is one tiny country surrounded by most other countries that want to extinguish it. The law of the will to survive and the sympathy of its allies that believe similarly is what is keeping it in place.

Alexander the Great cried when he ran out of kingdoms to conquer at age 33 or so.  He had a short term ambition, like all conquerors before him and all dictators who followed, of winning a finite goal framed within just their individual lifetimes,  while the people they subjugated or aimed to control  were playing the long game of surviving for all the generations to follow.

Let's look at our never ending battle with termites, ants, roaches and mosquitoes, etc.  Our aim individually is to win the finite goal of getting rid of them within the confines of and around our homes while these creatures play the infinite game of outlasting us.  These species will still be around even if we successfully mismanage everything else and somehow cause our environments to be un-inhabitable because we play the finite game while they play the infinite game of survival.  Termites, ants and roaches, even scorpions were here from the time of the dinosaurs and likely to inherit what is leftover if we mess it all up.

I assume all the readers have heard of Block Buster Video.  At one time, for a few years, they were the only game in town on video rentals. They thought, even believed perhaps, that they were playing the long game, with a customer base that will remain infinitely loyal.  Block Buster played the short game of making money on late returns, including charging for un-rewound tapes and for believing that they will have an infinite hold on the market.  Until Netflix came around with their flat monthly rate, zero late fees, unlimited movies, based on a simple 2-DVD-at-a-time turn around.  The rest is history. However, Netflix is playing a much longer game by using new technologies, such as when streaming came along.  They also went into producing their own  video content so as not to rely solely on Hollywood and third party producers and film makers.  Their constant innovations and market reach are based on the infinite game of competing indefinitely.

If Amazon had not kept up by constantly innovating and improving their services they will have been outpaced by Walmart, Target and others who are  not only fighting back, they are capitalizing on their brick and mortar facilities for quicker delivery.  Competition is well played only when one aims for the long game, best if planned and executed for the infinite, always exploiting every opportunity. Failed shopping malls due mainly to online, free return, free shipping competition, are being looked at by Amazon - irony of all irony - for acquisition as fulfillment centers, making Amazon's equivalent of a local presence as ubiquitous as Walmart. And the competition continues.

Dictators, throughout history, have all failed because they played the short game  of a mere lifetime - just their own.  The Roman Empire lasted for a while because it planned for succession with a series of Caesars, and the practice of an earlier version of democracy.  But like all empires it lasted for about ten generations.

Socialism, with many versions of it in the course of history, failed and will always fail because redistributing wealth is playing the finite game of satisfying the people for the short run as socialists try to win their support for the short-term gain for power.  But a far larger failure is when people fail to see the glaring and inherent defect of socialism, but keep subscribing to it anyway.

Succession is what keeps the free market system going and the key that is always ignored is that succession goes to those willing to work harder than the next person or competitor and innovating to keep the lead. 

It seems then that whether we like it or not, we are always presented with the finite or the infinite, when it comes to what rules we want to go by.

When someone finds out after checkout that the cashier failed to ring up one item but ignores to go back and pay for it is playing the short game. If that someone only sees the insignificance of the item as not hurting the grocery store, practically victimless, is playing the short game against the infinite landscape of morality, however seemingly trivial it is.  Cheating on a test, shoplifting a piece of candy, one little infraction - if an individual allows one little thing and another and another to continue throughout one's life - the "victimless" offense in reality victimizes that individual in the end.  One finite game, or so it seems, but then how is it being accounted for in the scheme of the human experience?

We can scour the entire landscape of morality through religion and philosophy and we may find answers as varied as every principle there is available.  We can take a pick.  Hinduism has dealt with it one way.  The principle of  karma is complicated but I found one simple explanation  for the reader, with a quote below:

"A common theme to theories of karma is its principle of causality. One of the earliest association of karma to causality occurs in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad of Hinduism. For example, it states:

Now as a man is like this or like that,

according as he acts and according as he behaves, so will he be;

a man of good acts will become good, a man of bad acts, bad;

he becomes pure by pure deeds, bad by bad deeds;

And here they say that a person consists of desires,

and as is his desire, so is his will;

and as is his will, so is his deed;

and whatever deed he does, that he will reap."

— Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 7th Century 

That is one view but note that in general every religion preaches in that manner.  The reader chooses or elect not to choose (which is a choice in itself) but it is widely believed by all that choice has consequences. 

So, where do the finite and the infinite  rules apply in a human lifetime?  A murderer executed after trial was punished within the confines of a finite time and that is the end of it.

Now, here is where Hinduism found its answer. Karma becomes the infinite enforcer in a world where re-birth, or just simply the idea of re-incarnation is applied. The reach of consequences goes beyond one's lifetime all the way to the next one and to the next, until one reaches Nirvana.  In much of western religion, the consequence is enforced upon the afterlife immediately - destination: eternal hell or heaven based on a single lifetime.  When we get down to it both preaches the same except that in one  the individual gets one chance to get it right or wrong; the other allows the individual several, or perhaps an infinite period of re-births until he or she gets it right. The re-birth system for adherents to Hinduism allows, for example, for young children, even new born, another chance at a full life if they passed away early in their childhood.  It only seems "fair" to the children who were never given a chance to live to be good or bad and be judged for the consequences of their choices throughout a fuller lifetime.

We, of course, do not know, we cannot know, and only by faith can we profess what we believe but where there is agreement is that doing what is good, allowing for righteousness to prevail in our lives are consistent with living for the infinite life versus the finite, far shorter existence. This is all to the reader to decide.

It Just So Happens...

Do we live in a world of "it just so happens...?" 

Let me share with the reader the following true episodes.

In 1971 I joined a multi-national corporation.  This was in the Philippines so we were just one of many of its worldwide semi-independently run companies in the region.  In that year, as a new marketing employee, I was assigned a task, just for the week, to host one of the potentially up and coming leaders in the Asian region who was one of many attending a week-long conference in Manila. He was with the Vietnam division based in Saigon. I took him around for a quick tour of my assigned territory of responsibility- a section of Manila - and to meet some of our local dealers.  I will use only his first name - Dai An. An means gracious in Vietnamese, I was told.

We bid our goodbyes when I saw him again after their week's conference was over before he left for the airport.  Later that year I was getting married.  A week or so before that date I received a package delivered to me by one of the flight attendants of Air Vietnam. It was from Dai An.  He remembered my coming wedding and that was his wedding gift.

Fast forward to four years later.  We all saw on TV on April 30 as Saigon was overran by the North Vietnamese Army in 1975.   Needless to say, the Vietnam division of the multinational corporation, like all other companies in Vietnam, was gone. It was tragic to witness it all as the whole country unraveled and turned into an information black hole. Over the next few years that followed I kept wondering what happened to Dai An.  

Fast forward to five years or so later.  My family and I immigrated to the U.S. I was fortunate to have been accepted to work in the U.S. company that was and still is part of that group  of multinational corporations. My second year assignment in 1981 was coordinating our asphalt shipments to various plants in the Midwest. One day I visited our plant at Pekin, Illinois.  I met with the plant manager and after we had lunch, on an after thought before leaving, I went to look one more time at the dock where our barges would come in to unload the asphalt.  It so happened that the tank foreman who oversaw the tank farm was there as well.  During our conversation he revealed that he used to work in Saigon for the same multinational corporation I worked for in the Philippines.   He was Vietnamese and it so happened that his boss there, way several rungs above him, was Dai An, who had since leaped-frog into the Managing Director of aviation supply and distribution after the Manila conference.  And the most pleasant surprise of all was what the foreman revealed. Dai An is not only in the U.S., he works for the same company we both worked for. Dai An was in marketing.

The first thing I did back in Houston was to find Dai An - one of, at that time, 35,000 employees spread out over the U.S. and its territories (only), excluding the worldwide companies that make up the total multinational group that was perhaps five times or more that number.  We talked over the phone and caught up with some of each other's life.  Then a few weeks later on another "it so happened" turn of events he was transferred to Houston on a new assignment. We had more time to catch up over many lunches since we worked in the same building (different floors).  

What Dai An went through is worth re-telling here.

Just before Saigon fell when a U.S. retreat was imminently near, Dai An was asked to remain until the last minute of evacuation to insure that U.S. planes were fueled. Meanwhile, the U.S. consulate flew Dai An's wife and daughter ahead to the U.S. and for Dai An to follow later as soon as all the planes had been fueled.  Unfortunately, as evacuation came to its chaotic end Dai An did not make it out.  He and some members of his family hid and moved from place to place for months and months, using what money and valuables they saved. 

One day just when much of their resources were about gone he and some of his family were able to secure passage on a ship. They were smuggled out like so many boat people we kept hearing on the news and TV. After so many harrowing days at sea, including the rape of his sister by fellow passengers, and near abject starvation,  the ship was intercepted by the U.S. Navy.  Like all so called "boat people" they became refugees, some of whom were brought to the U.S.  

Meanwhile, his wife, like so many separated family members, kept calling the State Dept. to search for Dai An. As we can all imagine there were thousands of displaced individuals for the State Dept. to attend to.  Meanwhile, she also kept calling the U.S. corporate office to help with the search.  The company actually did have HR staff and the services of outside personnel engaged to comb through every refugee camp to search for war-displaced Vietnamese employees of the Vietnam division.  Then one day, they found Dai An. He was at an Arkansas refugee camp. 

After reuniting with his family the company had him go to graduate school at company's expense to earn an MBA degree with a promise of employment after that. He joined the marketing department later and that was where I reconnected with him.

Dai An was a changed man since I last saw him in Manila a decade earlier for reasons that hardly need explaining.  You see, Dai An had all the upper class upbringing, a Paris education and fluency in French like a first language,  He was destined to the upper echelon in the organization and his position even then gave him enough clout to have a Vietnamese Air flight attendant personally deliver his wedding gift to us.  It so happened that the turn of events made him come down from the perch of the upper crust privilege to becoming one of the boat people. We cannot imagine what that was like. His sister never recovered from the physical and psychological trauma that shortly after arriving in the U.S. she committed suicide. Dai An was not a broken man but the struggle to survive took its toll. The effortless smile that I remember was now a struggle between suppressing a pleasant emotion against bitterness and helpless incomprehension of the fate he was dealt.

In early 2000, the exact year I could not recall, he took a Mideast assignment.  We lost track of each other again as I too moved to various assignments within the company.  I retired in 2007.

Fast forward to thirteen years later in 2020, just a month ago.  The gym where I used to swim has never re-opened to this date.  As Covid-19 lock down restrictions eased up a bit the Homeowner's Association Aquatic Center opened the 50 meter pool to the resident-members.  I started swimming there. The lanes were reconfigured to  25 yard lengths cross-wise to accommodate more swimmers and better social distancing for a total of 25 lanes versus just 8, lengthwise.

One afternoon after a few laps I took a break and struck up a conversation with the gentleman at the next adjacent lane who was also taking a break.  It so happened that he was also a retiree from the same company I worked for except that he worked at our Houston refinery.  He too was a Vietnamese refugee who worked for the same multinational corporation while he was in Vietnam.  He was fortunate to have come just a bit sooner than 1975.  And he knew Dai An!  

The sad news, he told me, was that Dai An passed away in 2012. Sadness gripped me once more.

I never had a chance to reconnect just one more time.

In case you haven't noticed there were a series of "it just so happened" episodes.  I visited our Pekin, IL. plant only once - just that one time - and had moved on to other assignments later. It just happened I went to look at the dock one more time before leaving.  Had I not done that I would not have met the tank foreman.  The 50-meter pool's reconfigured 25 lanes, shown in photo, is a large area but it so happened that I took that lane adjacent to that particular one where the gentleman was already swimming.  By the way,  so far in over a month I did not see the gentleman again.

I took this photo during a distant thunder alert when everyone had to get out of the water to wait until the warning was lifted. Note the size of the pool area is not trivial, by any means. Though the odds were not too overwhelmingly minuscule the  "it just so happens" event when taken together with the other previous ones was quite something to behold.

The law of causality didn't seem to be at work here.  The causality principle is meant for one happenstance to cause another to happen and after a long chain of causal events we have history. Here, "it just so happened" had linked certain events to come together, albeit over expanse of years in between. Let me back up for a bit.

Dai An and I even if we had lived in the same country our paths would not have crossed. I came from a very poor family. He came from the upper crust, more at home among the elite national and international luminaries and bureaucrats. Our social circles, our communities, our friends, would have been too far distant from each other for any hope of intersecting.  Even if we, say, worked for the same multinational corporation in the same country, our paths would still not have  crossed had I not been picked to give him that  tour.  In our company at that time, I never crossed path socially or even casually with the senior executives - vice presidents and up. 

I would like to go back to the first sentence above.  Is the universe made up of "it just so happened" events.

Our world - a tiny speck that is a particle of dust in a swirling sea of a hundred billion stars that is part of billions, if not a trillion, galaxies - is home to all who've ever lived and it will be the home for every generation of living things to follow. We limit that to the kind of life we know because to speculate on anything else outside of our planet will  make it an overwhelmingly impossible task to contemplate, let alone  understand.

It just so happens that our sun is a medium size one because any larger and the energy and radiation it puts out might not allow the life we know to develop.  Any smaller and there might not be the kind of energy to sustain life (again, the kind of life we know). It so happens that it is a second or third generation star because as such it was born from a supernovae explosion.  Only a supernova explosion from which other stars are born will produce the heavy elements, like potassium, iron, even oxygen, etc. that are necessary for life to emerge. Only a supernova could have produced silver and gold, etc. for no other event will produce the extreme heat and pressure to make all the heavy elements beyond carbon.

It just so happens that there was a third planet to orbit that medium-size star that was formed 4.5 billion years ago, that is in a zone that is neither too hot nor too cold.  A second planet, Venus, is much too hot for a habitable atmosphere, the fourth planet, Mars, is way too cold for water to naturally exist as a liquid.  It just so happens that earth was the place for the recipe for life to work.  But even when life was fully developed for over many millions of years, it just so happened that a Mount Everest size asteroid hit earth 67 million years ago to cause the extinction of the then super dominant species of dinosaurs so that mammals could emerge to dominate the landscape and bring about the species from which we came. Lest we forget the dinosaurs ruled for about 160 million years.  

It just so happened that it would take that long for a lot of other things to develop so that we are able to live like we do today.  It so happened that there was enough time before we showed up for all the decaying vegetation over millions of years to be buried deep under tremendous pressure for conversion into  hydrocarbon to occur.  Along with that by the way was how diamonds were made.

It so happens that we only have one moon but that it is the right size and distance and orbital speed to cause the gradual rising and ebbing of the tides - its effect on the gravitational pull it exerts but only enough to move the sea level.    So many "it just so happens" that actually boggles anyone's mind.  Did you wonder too that the moon happens to not only be this particular size but to be at a distance between the earth and the sun to make total eclipse possible. But what is really significant is that only a total perfect eclipse, the moon's superposably covering the sun  for Einstein's theory of general relativity to be proven for the first time.  

Just way too many "it just so happened" to get us here today.  As we examine our lives from near or far distant past the number of "it just so happened" events were far too many in a single lifetime. Go ahead, make a list.  The seemingly endless string of "it just so happened" events seem to dictate our overall experience.  Either the universe had been conspiring all along to make it all seem like "it just so happens" or ...

I leave it to anyone with faith of every persuasion to continue thinking and re-thinking this because in so doing you will have realized that it took an endless "it just so happens" to get you here and there will be more to get you to whatever destination awaits you. 



Personal Footnote: When we first arrived in the U.S. I did not immediately apply to work for the same multinational corporation I worked for in the Philippines. It was about three months later that I wrote a letter.  A week after I mailed my application I came across an article in the Oil and Gas Journal at the Brooklyn Business Library (We were in New York and stayed with my wife's sister's family), where I spent some time to read up on business news.  It was pre-internet era. In that article was a featured story on the Gen. Manager for Distribution in that multinational company.  I wrote him a personal letter where I attached the same resume I sent out earlier.  A day after I mailed it, I got the dreaded rejection letter from the company.  It was obviously a response to the application I sent a week earlier.  Had that letter arrived just a day earlier I would not have sent the second one, recognizig the futility of it. But "it so happened" I already mailed the second one but only after I had chanced upon that O&J article, another "it so happened" event.  Two weeks later I received a telegram (again, this was before internet) from the same person at personnel who signed the rejection letter, asking me to call collect for a phone interview and potential trip to Houston. After a month they sent me a plane ticket for an interview.  The rest is history. Clearly, the "it so happened" was quite crucial to how things turned out for me and my family.

Of course, and I say this without any reservation that along with all of those, I also happened to pray a lot, more than I had ever prayed before.

And then ...

My daughter in law with whom my son has two children came to the U.S. with her family on a boat out of Vietnam via the Philippines under similar circumstances that were true for thousands of refugees, many of whom came to the U.S.  Lives unconnected until she and my son met  under "it so happened" circumstances decades after Dai An's and mine intersected in 1971.

The Wonders, The Joy of Re-Learning

We, of a certain age, may often hearken to the days of childhood and youth when the unstoppable delight of learning was only matched by the boundless desire to learn more and more at each passing day.  We had the exuberant capacity then and a brain to match the ability of a sponge. We observed, we learned, we remembered, we did and enjoyed all the processes associated with growing up. Of course, farthest from our thoughts then was that  the ticket price for growing up was growing old. And now we, again of a certain age, and you know who you are, are constantly reminded of the adage we used to ignore or deny.  We knew too that, "Old dogs can't learn new tricks" was never an allusion to dogs.  Who ever first coined it, he or she knew what it meant.  More of us today are realizing we could not keep  up with the daily barrage of new technology and the ever changing ways to deal with them.  We sometimes worry but the question is, "Why?" Indeed, why do we and why should we?

If you, again of a certain age, is reading this, has the time for it, comfortably enjoying the rewards and bliss of retirement and the freedom to not have to wake up to the blaring alarm or soothing music or heavy metal wake up call, or whatever gets folks these days to get out of bed at a certain time to go to work each morning, then you are fortunate. What you have, I will tell you, is copious amounts of time to  experience once more the joys of learning.  Actually, it is the joy of re-learning. I will explain.

Covid-19 has opened a door.  Instead of focusing on the glass being half empty we knew we could look at it too  as being half full. Here's one suggested way to do it.

Scrolling through YouTube one day I paused at a topic, "Sine, Cosine, and Tangents Explained", or something like that. The host's presentation, according to him, was going to make his audience understand in simple and easy steps everything they needed to know about the subject in less than half an hour.

Wow! I thought excitedly. Not because the subject matter was new but that for the first time in so many decades I remember it and when I first encountered them. It propelled me back to Engineering freshman year, second semester trigonometry preparatory to differential calculus next semester. Calculus was not taught in high school where I grew up. College was over fifty years ago and since after graduating not once in my entire  career had I ever had to use or apply the practical uses of sine, cosine and tangents, specifically.  I even completely forgot how they worked and what for. I was excited to re-learn the whole thing. It turned out it didn't take longer than a few seconds to bring them all back.  But I was still excited.  Then everything made so much more sense, or I was able to think in terms of how these sine, cosine and tangents have their influences in everyday stuff we take for granted today. 

Re-learning, while not the same as learning, shines a different light.  Sine cosine and tangent have their finger prints all around me, I just realized. How screws and bolts work, propellers and turbines, gradients along curves on highways and race tracks, land surveys that determine your property lines or why your GPS can take you to where you want to go, etc.

It opened doors to re-learn but more importantly the brain is suddenly re-acquainted with long lost chapters in your life, long forgotten challenges and sources of delight. Above is just a mere sliver of an example of things forgotten that are now worth re-visiting.  Every now and then we may want to remember the things that were exciting when we first learned them but more significantly for some of them to mean differently now or that the light they shine presently may reveal perspectives you may never have thought about.

I remember hearing someone talking about the movie, "Groundhog Day".  She was talking about watching it several times over a period of many years at different stages of her life.  She said that each time she watched it, her perspective changed each time. We know what the movie was about, right?  The main character spent his days over and over again in an eternal loop of deja vu. But what she observed was that each time she watched the movie, after having gone through her own life's experiences over time, the movie's message for her changed from the last time she saw it to the time she saw it again.

Indeed, learning and re-learning, even if it is the same subject matter, brings back one different perspective or another.  Answering why is actually the key to understanding ourselves and others in our own circle and beyond.  But that is far too deep, much too cerebral for re-learning to be delightful.

Not ignoring the English majors among my readers, no offense is intended or ascribed, one may find new delight in remembering the differences in poetic style, rhyming mechanisms involved from the simplicity of the children's favorite - acrostics - to the humor of limericks, to the stanzas of sonnets and epic poetry to the 5-7-5 syllable structures of haiku, etc.  Or, why "Don Quixote" may have a different message now from what it had in high school. The music majors of yesteryear or fans of Broadway or opera (two distinct camps that don't often mix) may learn, from re-learning, that "West Side Story" is based on "Romeo and Juliet", "Miss Saigon" from "Madame Butterfly", "Rent" from "La Boheme", "Pygmalion" gave us "My Fair Lady" and on and on.  In fact, some of the stories can be re-examined as to give us pause. For example, one may now frown at the way Henry Higgins treated Eliza Doolittle in "My Fair Lady".  New Perspective, new thoughts that today we could re-examine.

An English major may still cringe at hearing the phrase "different than" when it should really be "different from".  He or she may still be unforgiving because "different than" does not make any sense at all, not ever, because nothing or nobody can be "different than" anything or anybody, except to be "different from". But he or she is re-learning when realizing that common usage makes almost anything universally acceptable.  When "Star Trek" debuted in 1966, hardly anyone noticed, except the English majors of that era, that "to boldly go" was actually improper grammar - splitting an infinitive.  But today, almost everyone is guilty of breaking that rule.  However, re-learning how these things develop over time will open up new doorways for the brain to look into when there is nothing good on TV. Seems corny or insignificant but that is a form of brain stimulation that involves re-examining the once familiar but viewed from a different light today.

Re-learning becomes an undiscovered avenue to actually learn some things for the first time, except that these are stuff one is not only already familiar with but that he or she once had the unbridled enthusiasm for it. I am talking about music lovers who once could tell a Vivaldi composition from Ravel or Strauss (father and son).  The modern enthusiast may brag about distinguishing immediately any John Williams compositions even when he or she only knows the composer from "Superman" or "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and several others.  Ennio Morricone has a cult like following from his famed soundtrack for spaghetti westerns topped by "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly". I mention these because one will be surprised that many of a certain age are re-learning as they hearken to the days of their youthful education.  We must accept the fact that not everyone was enamored with the classics, Greek Mythology, or Shakespeare.  All I'm saying is that re-learning is a way to recapture not just what anything meant to anyone then but how everything has changed or nuanced toward the ever changing views we develop or experience. 

Re-learning is also a way to look back at subjects we may have struggled with but now that there is no longer the sword of a mid-term grade over our heads, we may realize why your high school teacher wanted you to learn algebra or geometry.  Now, you will know the method to the madness except that presently you realize there is a way to distill arguments of today in an orderly fashion as easily as one would assign a value to unknown x, y, etc. in a manner that makes sense.

John Nash "who was awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economics for his landmark work" and whose life was featured in the movie "A Beautiful Mind", was foremost a top notch mathematician who introduced us to "game theory".  I had a glancing encounter with the subject way back in college but lost interest. Re-learning it now is less intimidating but more significantly it comes with the realization of its relevance today when dealing with how or why people take on one view or the other in dealing with social justice, socioeconomic travails and all the political posturing or understanding both sides of the debate that involves society and human behavior.  The thing is we do not need to learn everything about game theory. Perhaps, we only focus on the "prisoner's dilemma" which is one interesting feature of the theory.  Look it up and you'd be surprised at how interesting, even intriguing the simple scenario presented by the "prisoner's dilemma". 

I am just putting all of these out there because in re-learning you may find hidden gems you may have missed back then.  You may be a retired doctor now and you remember how you struggled with chemistry in premed.  Now you can go back and revisit valences or valency of an element that "is a measure of its combining power with other atoms when it forms chemical compounds or molecules".  Biology was more interesting to you then but now here is a chance for re-learning what you dreaded the most but not have to worry about a passing grade.  You could be a retired accountant now and you realize there used to be something about industrial or engineering accounting you did not care for but now you know there was a reason for it.  I can't obviously go into all the possible ways to re-learn anything but it is something to get into when binge watching anything needs a break in this Covid episode of our lives.

Re-learning is like riding a bicycle but now there is a chance to do it with a variety of choices you never once had.  It is like riding a mountain or off road bike and know you may only want to go a few feet or at least make only part of a long ride and that you can get off anytime without anyone to judge you or suffer any consequence from not continuing.  And the good news is that you can do all of these in the comfort of your living room.

You take the good with the bad in social media or consider the good Google and YouTube have to offer. There is a ton of re-learning opportunities from both.  Now, with voice-activated command that comes with almost all new TV, "everything at your fingertips" is now passe.  Just say, "prisoner's dilemma" or "General Relativity for dummies" and suddenly the doors to learning and re-learning are opened up for us, of a certain age, and anyone of a certain inclination to once again re-discover the hidden gems or confront everything that you used to dread in your early education.  

Let x, let y and you know there are a's and b's out there.