What Kind of a Story is That?

"Peanuts", the widely syndicated cartoon strip written and illustrated by Charles Schulz, ran for 50 years (1950-2000). It was "among the most popular and influential in the history of comic strips, with 17,897 strips published in all,[1] making it "arguably the longest story ever told by one human being".[2][3] At the time of Schulz's death in 2000, Peanuts ran in over 2,600 newspapers, with a readership of around 355 million in 75 countries, and was translated into 21 languages".

There was one strip that I can't forget the gist but not the dialogue exactly. Charlie was telling Lucy a story and since I can't really recall how it went I will make one up.

Charlie: "The Halloween monster was running after me. I knew it was because I too was running.  I ran as fast as I could. And it ran just as fast".

Lucy: "What kind of a story is that?"

Okay, but I do recall Lucy's question exactly.  "Peanuts focuses entirely on a social circle of young children, where adults exist but are never seen and rarely heard". 

Charlie Brown's little story above is not as uncommon as in our real world. I recall someone telling me this little snippet:

"I don't know about the breadfruit.  It's not bread and I wouldn't call it a fruit either. I mean a fruit is something you can pick from a tree branch that you can eat outright, right?  I wouldn't say that about the breadfruit. So, who named it that way?"

When someone says something like that, we can't add anything much to it or care to, assuming we know much about breadfruit, except perhaps, as a rejoinder, we can  ask, "Well, how about the grapefruit.  Clearly, it is not a grape .."  Then you realize you find yourself in the same position because you don't really know where to go with it. 

Now, how often do we find that the stories and behavior of the Peanuts characters do mimic adulthood, sometimes in funny ways and in some cases, we find awkwardly more embarrassing or lacking as much sense that the "Lucys" of our world find pleasure in putting down with the suddenness and acerbic wit that the Peanut character manages with so much sarcasm and pain.

Yes, that's right. We know a Charlie Brown, a Linus, even a Snoopy. Sadly, we know a Lucy too. At work, among family and friends, and in society , in general. She or He is that innocent looking face, naturally quick witted but there is not one ounce of gentleness when they so choose.  They are notoriously of little use as a co-equal at work, and terribly more so as a boss.

But, Lucy!

Well, by the time we were born there was not much choice but to go by what stories there were already before we arrived. In fact, your story, mine and everyone else's begin with prologues of what were before ours could begin. Then we live it and soon there is the epilogue.

Lucy actually had a probing question to ask all of us. What kind of a story have we written for ourselves.  Or, what kind of story do we want to tell. Life is after all a story. Come to think of it, life is every moment a story.

Anyone who has ever applied for a job - who hasn't? - has to tell a story about who he or she is, what they've accomplished and what they have to offer.  The interviewer or hiring manager tells a story about the company, about the business and the applicant must have a convincing story worthy of a job offer.  Lucy had a point.  The interviewer, the decision maker, and ultimately the company has the right to know what kind of a story do you have.

Readers of Peanuts know to ignore the advice Lucy dispenses because they are invariably useless. However, the reader is not able to dismiss Lucy's put downs or her outbursts.

Courtship, like friendship, also begins with a story. Marriages begin with a story.  How it survives and flourishes depends on how consistently each in the partnership had kept to the story they told in the beginning.  

The strip-episode above, while it is more about the coming season, we learn from it that every relationship, friendships and marriage in particular, must be more about giving.       Wow, indeed!

Inevitably, each of our life's epilogue will then be about, "What kind of story do we want to be remembered by?"

Life's Traffic Camera

A man, a "conscientious driver", just went through a traffic signal when he noticed that the traffic camera just flashed.  He knew that he drove at the posted speed limit so he was furious at being photographed for a possible violation.  He turned around to make a U-turn to go through the light again.  He made doubly sure he was running at the exact speed limit, even slowing a bit right at where he thought the camera was. The camera flashed again.

He said to himself, "I hope they send me a citation or ticket in the mail. They don't know what's coming from one irate citizen and taxpayer.  Oh, yes, they will hear from me all right." 

Two weeks later his wife called him at work.  "Hey, John, guess what was in the mail today? You got two traffic citations and  fines to boot".

John was gleeful, "Oh, yeah, that's great because I have the letter prepared already.  You want me to read it to you over the phone?"

His wife replied, "Why don't I first read to you what the citations say. The Department of Public Safety cited you for not wearing your seatbelt.  You  were photographed twice at seven minutes, thirty seconds between each offense."

That, in a nutshell, bitter humor aside, describes one of humanity's many pitfalls.  It is our ability to look at everything around us through the "clouded" lenses of our eyes, and through our eyes only.  It is a disability actually that can lead us to make assumptions, suppositions, and misjudgments that can lead to stereotyping what we see around us that can lead to one of the most common side effects of a clouded lens in our mind's eye.

In a divided society, a disunified country, a population segregated by politics, religion, custom and culture, a flash from an imaginary traffic camera is enough to trigger emotions, from an imaginary source followed by reactions and profound hatred  towards situations and conditions that ultimately lead directly against our fellow human beings because we assume too much, we jump to conclusions too soon and before long the chasm is way too wide beyond mending.

On a personal basis, life's traffic cameras are everywhere too.  Unfortunately, often it is not what we thought it was flashing for, because we saw what went through our clouded lenses.  Arguments start that way because we thought we heard something but the other person meant something else. Like the "conscientious driver" who thought about speeding while the camera flashed for an unworn seatbelt, we heard one thing while we form a rebuttal for another.  Soon, we are talking past each other.  Then we wonder how we drifted away from one another over something that we don't even remember what it was to begin with. 

In the U.S. today, Thanksgiving Day is a special celebration for the right reasons. The week is the most traveled time of the year, perhaps equally if not more so than Christmas week but it can also be one occasion for life's traffic camera to flash, often merely perceived when it wasn't.  

If there is a time to put our blinders on, this is the day to do it; so, we do not see the imaginary flashes from our defective peripheral visions. This is the time too for life's traffic camera to be turned off. By everyone.

Enjoy the food, the conversation, football for those inclined to sit on the couch for the rest of the day, or compare notes for those whose eyes are focused on the best deals tomorrow.

Happy Thanksgiving to All!!!

We Are All Eternals

This is a fantastic universe we live in. We can say it is magical, even. How can it be otherwise? We inhabit it. Is it an inconceivable supposition that some of its magic, its attributes of wonder, may have rubbed off on us? Fair question? Are we not endowed with the Creator's purpose? Too fantastic? Too unrealistic? Too improbable in a universe of several trillion galaxies, each galaxy with 100 to 200 billion stars - one of them we call our sun, a mere particle of sand in a swirling dune where the number of stars exceeds all the sand in  all the earthly beaches our imagination will allow us to comprehend?  

Even though we merely occupy an incomprehensibly miniscule corner, a relatively mere dimensionless point of dust revolving around one starlit flotsam - one of 200 to 300 billion flotsams - swirling around an average galaxy that one early human observer fondly described as a freshly stirred milky concoction.  Yes, relative to the entire Milky Way galaxy our home is less than an invisible point filled with over seven billion other even more miniscule points and you are one of those reading this - pondering as I do with many others thinking the same way.  However, thinkers and wonderers that we are, why is one lifetime allotted to each one merely an average of less than seventy years, some longer or shorter, and it ends. Then, that is all there is?

Well, it is a fantastical world when we get right down to it. So, let's get deeper into the meaning of our existence. For this to work we need to unshackle the limits of our imagination, go past the stop sign of what we are used to believe and go beyond the boundaries of human philosophy, sociology, even its physiology.  

It is highly unlikely I will go to the theater to watch the movie - Eternals - based on another set of Marvel comics characters of that title. "In the film, the Eternals, an immortal alien race, emerge from hiding after thousands of years to protect Earth from their ancient counterparts, the Deviants".

Obviously this musing will not be about that. I will venture that based on the above one sentence plot description, it seems to be just another frequently used storyline of the universal tug of war between good and evil.  This will not be about that either.

Then why phrase the title of my musing, "We Are All Eternals"?  It is a hopeful provocation. But let's not get ahead of the punch line.

Physiologically, every part of your body has been around for far longer than since your first birthday. These elements had been recycled for millions of years, most of it for billions and billions of years.  You are practically made of stardusts, figuratively and literally, you are.  Your physical body, that is.  We'll get to what is beyond your physical structure later.

Every iron element in your body, in your red blood cells and cells in your muscles, was at one time in the belly of a huge star that exploded into a supernova.  Every star ultimately will run out of its fuel - hydrogen - and when that happens the extreme gravity will implode the entire star the moment iron is formed at its core from the intense pressure. Almost instantaneously the implosion will be followed by a huge explosion, hurling all the material outward into empty space, causing shock waves along the way that created all the other heavy elements like gold, potassium, etc. The exploded remnants after many millions of years will recombine with other debris in the vastness of space to be reborn into another star.  One of those stars became our sun.  

Actual image after a supernova explosion millions of years ago

With that sun were several swirling spheres of hot gasses, half of them cooled to form rocky structures on their surfaces - Mercury, Mars, Pluto (if you still consider it a planet), asteroids, moons, and of course, our dear earth.

You are therefore a physically recycled material. The oxygen you inhaled just now, may have been through the nostrils of one extinct dinosaur a long time ago, which may have been part of an exchange made possible by an ancient Jurassic fern when it took one molecule of carbon dioxide exhaled by some other air breathing creature, now extinct, when it stripped the carbon and expelled the oxygen.  The process repeated many trillions of times before your lungs processed it.

The long and short of it is that we are part of a series of universal recycling processes long before recycling aluminum cans and plastics became part of our social conscience. This majestic universe of ours is one great recycler extraordinaire.

So, we know our bodies came from recycled material. Soon, as we pass on, our bodies, together with cut grass, banana peels, gray whales, racoons, wildebeests, wet cardboards, eels, algae, innumerable luminaries, unknown homeless people, warriors and civilians, saints and politicians will be recycled too.  

Death in the end equalizes everything that perished.  Is that it then?

To quote Werner Herzog, a filmmaker whose "films often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams,[2] people with unique talents in obscure fields, or individuals who are in conflict with nature.[3]", one might be led to believe not only in our insignificance but that ..

"The universe is monstrously indifferent to the presence of man". 

On the other hand, a noted physicist, Michio Kaku, had this to say,

"The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10 thousand other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe".

Suppose you were the Creator, would you let that creature live only for so long and then cast it into oblivion?  You are not expected to answer that because, one, you are not the Creator, and two, you, I and everyone else, are not equipped with all the fantastical and magical powers of the entire universe. However, those 100 billion neurons and the trillions of connections they are capable of making are enough to make us ponder, contemplate and wonder.  The universe, therefore, may have rubbed off some of its magical powers on us, after all.

That magical power,  that we are allowed to have, however weak, gave us consciousness. The latter is no trivial matter.  It is what makes us human. It is what differentiates us from one another. Why then do we have it? What purpose is consciousness if it must exist only within the confines of one lifetime? A mere nanosecond out of an eternal universe?

We think not.  Well, going back to unshackling the limits of our imagination, is it not possible consciousness will live on forever?  If every physical element that gave it a home - the 3.5 pounds of tissue with 100 billion neurons that Michio Kaku referred to, sitting atop our shoulders, are recyclable, why not for the stream of consciousness to flow forever?

Let's try another analogy. Recorded music in a reel of master tape, grooves on a vinyl record, pits on a CD, once heard, appreciated, memorized by those who liked it, will live on long after the reels of tape, vinyl and plastic discs have been destroyed.  There is a universe of people on whom the music of Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Elvis, Michael Jackson live on; likewise, why can't this universe accommodate every consciousness that had ever existed?

Is it possible, our consciousness has existed all along, for billions of years, and will continue on for the next billions of years?  Just asking. 

Like I said when I started this musing, "For this to work we need to unshackle the limits of our imagination, go past the stop sign of what we are used to believe and go beyond the boundaries of human philosophy, sociology, even its physiology".  

I close with why I write these musings, as premised at the top:  

When you find yourself having to take a break from those that keep you on edge and stressed out, you can take the time to ponder with me some of the un-ponderable and the whimsical and lightly thought provoking issues you did not have the time to consider but now you may want to look into because you have a moment or two to spare or you just want some of your brain cells to be tickled out of slumber.

The Wabanaki Loop: It is Going to be A Very Cold Winter

A new chief was chosen to lead a confederation of Native Americans, collectively called the Wabanakis.  One day he was asked by the tribal leaders if it is going to be a cold winter.  Being a modern college educated man, the new chief had no idea about the traditional native weather forecasting that his elders were accustomed to. Wanting to appear strong and resolute, he stood quick on his feet and told the tribal leaders that it was going to be a cold one. He then declared, as a show of statesmanship,  that the people should gather firewood to prepare for the coming winter. The people (the Wabanakis) gathered as told.

As a hedge, he called the weather service a week later, without revealing his true identity, as a way to double check his decision and see if he needed to recalibrate.  The weather man told him that it was going to be a cold winter - a re-affirmation of what initially was a wild and slightly flippant guess on his part.  The chief summoned his tribal leaders again and told them that the winter weather will really be severe so the people should gather more firewood.  Again, the Wabanakis did as told, doubling their efforts even more.

Another week went by and the chief, still unsure and not too confident about his leadership role, he again anonymously called the weather service for the latest update.  The weather man said, "It is going to be a really, really severe winter".  

The chief then asked, "How can you be so sure?"

The weatherman replied, "I am 100% confident  it is going to be a really severe winter because we've observed that the Wabanakis  had been gathering firewood at a blistering pace these last two weeks".

That, of course, in this day and age, describes how information coming from a single source can spread and oftentimes doubles up on itself.  It is sort of a perversion of a feedback loop. It gets worse when viewed from the proliferation of information - true or false, real or fake - along the loopy corridors of social media, political punditry and society's short attention span. Both sides of the political aisles suffer from a phenomenon which I define now as the "Wabanaki Loop".  You read it here first - a new phrase soon to be in the annual "new lexicon for 2021" (just kidding).

Before I move on I intend to redeem myself later, at the bottom of this blog, if some of the readers find the story to be one of irreverence and disrespect for The Wabanaki Confederation, which is a real organization of Native Americans.

Many of the readers would be familiar with the telephone game, known by one other name, as quoted below:

"Chinese whispers (Commonwealth English) or telephone (American English)[1] is an internationally popular children's game.[2]

Players form a line or circle, and the first player comes up with a message and whispers it to the ear of the second person in the line. The second player repeats the message to the third player, and so on. When the last player is reached, they announce the message they heard to the entire group. The first person then compares the original message with the final version. Although the objective is to pass around the message without it becoming garbled along the way, part of the enjoyment is that, regardless, this usually ends up happening. Errors typically accumulate in the retellings, so the statement announced by the last player differs significantly from that of the first player, usually with amusing or humorous effect."

Another idea comes along:

"Our social media newsfeeds are often so full that many of us can view only the top few items, from which we choose to re-share or retweet."

"Information that passes from person to person along a chain becomes negative and more resistant to correction."

                                                --- Scientific American (December2020)

 {Note: This is the last time I will pick a quote from Scientific American; in fact, this is the last time I will read this magazine (ever). I only found out recently, the above quotes notwithstanding, that the magazine, for the first time in its 175 year history endorsed one presidential candidate over the other in the last 2020 election. It was stunning to find out from reading the back issue of Oct. 2020 that the editors of this highly esteemed scientific journal would stoop to blatant partisanship.}

That is the irony of it all because the quotes above were from their Dec. 2020 issue, after the endorsement in October.  Soon enough upon more careful re-reading, I noticed that their views on racism, climate change and Covid 19, were all slanted only one way.

That, among so many things going on, is one reason this country may remain divided for a very long time, if not irreversibly so, forever.  With the division comes the danger of one side feeding only on the information from within the one side and only that one side. It becomes the Wabanaki Loop. The country must get out of that loop or it will ultimately get caught by a self-feeding vortex it may never be able to climb out from.

The atonement part:

"The Wabanaki Confederacy (Wabenaki, Wobanaki, translated to "People of the Dawn" or "Easterner") is a North American First Nations and Native American confederation of four principal Eastern Algonquian nations: the Miꞌkmaq, Maliseet (Wolastoqey), Passamaquoddy (Peskotomahkati) and Penobscot. The Western Abenaki are also considered members, being a loose identity for a number of allied tribal peoples such as the Sokoki, Cowasuck, Missiquoi, and Arsigantegok, among others".

The original farce that I heard - a very short one at that - used politically incorrect generalization using a term to describe Native Americans in its non-PC form.  I remain sensitive to the idea that for a good part of over two centuries a significant slice of the U.S. population  had been maligned via an antiquated grouping of  people.  I do apologize. However, the humor will not have worked had a different story line was used, except that I then expanded the humorous little story with more descriptive words and an elaborately spun plot line.  I therefore apologize to the Wabanakis.  I encourage the readers to read up a bit more about them because their domain used to be that of Northeastern U.S. and the eastern coastal areas of Canada. They, like most indigenous people in the past, had suffered through a lot.

I must also mention that years ago in my career working for an oil company I worked with a true gentleman  named George G. He was Navajo, college educated with an engineering degree, who worked at our strategic planning group.  He and I had played doubles tennis a few times but diabetes later put an end to his mobility when one leg was amputated. Less than five years later he passed away.  George was a brilliant example of the strides taken by indigenous minorities who excelled to rise above the stereotyping generalization used to put certain groups in a segregated box of society. George had a very gentle demeanor who spoke softly and coherently when he was making a point.  He was  one of those "unforgettable characters" I met and knew well.  

There, I hope I have more than made up  for what some readers might consider irreverent humor about the winter and firewood story.