Somewhere

"Somewhere" is one of the core iconic songs that came out of the Broadway musical, "West Side Story".  The song even when heard for the first time resonated with everyone who listened to the words and the melody that carried them.  There was something universally meaningful about the song even if it stood alone.  Of course, from the context of the whole story, the message was far deeper and too emotionally laden with loftier wishes and profound longing for a place, "Somewhere", other than where one is when things are not going well.

Instead of Romeo and Juliet, each from the Montague and Capulet families, respectively, we have Antonio (Tony) and Maria from rival New York gangs of the 50's era - the Jets and the Sharks.  Families, gangs in conflict are reflective even of today's societies where players may no longer even understand what the families or gangs quarreled about, or how it all started in the first place.

Tony had just killed Maria's brother in a knife fight during a gang encounter that evening.  Tony, afterwards went to see Maria to tell her.  

That was the backdrop scene that preceded the rendition of the song between the two unfortunate sweethearts.  The song was all about each other's wish and longing to be somewhere else. Somewhere other than where they were:

There's a place for us,

Somewhere a place for us.

Peace and quiet and open air

Wait for us

Somewhere.

Before we go any further, there is something truly worth noting about how the song came about. Leonard Bernstein was already a renowned composer and conductor before the debut of the musical in 1957. The story that was adapted from Romeo and Juliet was actually written by Arthur Laurents.  Stephen Sondheim, who later became famous himself for several Broadway successes, wrote the lyrics.  Bernstein was at that time a busy man and had not quite put together the music to the song. He was traveling worldwide to conduct concerts, and he was working on another Broadway production, Candide.  He was a conductor so he knew practically all the classical pieces.  

According to Edward Barnes, a music critic of some sort, who later dissected the melody of Somewhere, Bernstein had something in mind on how that song would go but had not quite fleshed it out. Actually he took particular chords/notes from three famous composers and compositions and strung them together to make the now familiar tune of the song. Bernstein first took a few notes from Beethoven's Piano Concerto no. 5, then from Richard Strauss's Burlesque and from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. Edwards proved that by playing the melody of Somewhere alongside the three strings of notes. There's really nothing wrong with what Bernstein did.  Aside from the fact that the compositions of the three composers are clearly public domain, then and now (no trademark or publishing rights violation), they were truly just short passages akin to putting together phrases or words from three different speeches and stringing them together to make  entirely complete sentences with different meaning or connotations..

In other words Bernstein bridged the gap between three compositions by three different composers, written centuries earlier decades apart, to make a sensitive message to a society then in the 50's and an enduring resonance.  Fortunately indeed, it still resonates today.

We are all Somewhere at some point in time partly because of the circumstances of our birth, our family's wealth or lack of it, that brought us up, the place on earth where we happen to live, and a host of other factors that happened to be just there by the time we took our first breath of air, our first wail for attention and care.  We are Somewhere because of circumstances of our own making or they were from opportunities that came along that we were able to make something of.  And a host of other reasons. Somewhere is where we are today.  A place and a point in time.

Anyone of us must admit there was a time, even just once of a moment, when we wished we were Somewhere else.  Anywhere but the one where we found ourselves - frozen with fear, overwhelmed by worry, or unsure of what was to happen next.  We just wanted to be Somewhere else.

"West Side Story", "Romeo and Juliet" are both stories of human conflict - prejudices and bias and inexplicable hatred -  even when those presently involved do not even know why or how it all started, except for being at either side of the divide.

Here and everywhere else, Somewhere is a wish, a longing, a quest for an alternative, a refuge from when things go wrong. It is an escape. It is a prayer. But it is not enough to be just wishful.  Nothing will get anybody anything by just merely longing.  Time and effort spent to merely escape are partial solutions - a purchase that will end up costing more. It is not uncommon for one Somewhere to be no better than another. 

In other words it is not enough to be just merely Somewhere. Immigration and the countless stories of immigrants are about people finding their Somewhere but their stories are as varied as how well they strove hard to make the most of the newly found Somewhere.  Some gave up and returned to their original home after finding out that the Somewhere they found themselves in was not what they were looking for.  They went back to the Somewhere they were used to rather than to make good use of the opportunities that were at the new Somewhere. It was not uncommon for new immigrants to have second thoughts.

Our first December in the U.S. was the saddest month any family was put through.  We were at a new city, no friends, living in an apartment with fellow strangers keeping to themselves and no car in a city that was meant for families to have a car to go anywhere. I went to work relying on public transportation the first three months from October to December. I rented a car only on a few certain weekends if we wanted to go Somewhere as a family.  My wife begun to show some regrets. She used to have her own car while working in Manila.  This new Somewhere denied her what she used to take for granted.  I told her that we were going to make the most of this new Somewhere.  It was full of hope, filled with unlimited promise and lofty dreams when we boarded that 747 earlier that year. That Somewhere was still there.  We had to make the most of it.

Sure enough we did.  From where we came from to where we are today are not just separated by distant seas.  It can only be measured by however dreams can be measured by the realities of a life fulfilled.  Yes, indeed, we found our Somewhere. We found that it was a lot more than what was provided for by mere  wishful thoughts or extravagant longing.

Today there are millions more, where ever they are from and where ever they wish to be, and we can only wish them well and pray that they find their Somewhere.

To anyone who at this moment is filled with despair and longing to be Somewhere else, I hope he or she will find hope in a song that is only sixteen lines long but filled with hope:

There's a time for us,

Some day a time for us,

Time together with time to spare,

Time to learn, time to care,

Some day!

Somewhere.

We'll find a new way of living,

We'll find a way of forgiving

Somewhere . . .

There's a place for us,

A time and place for us.

Hold my hand and we're halfway there.

Hold my hand and I'll take you there

Somehow,

Some day,

Somewhere!

It Just So Happened ..

Her day does not really start until the sixteen-year-old Honda Accord sputters into action, belching dark gray smoke through the rusted tailpipe, but somehow it eagerly growls to go one more time. She dreads the day, which she knows will come one day, when the car will no longer respond to the turn of the key. That day looms ahead but she can’t worry about that for now. She has two places to go this Wednesday. The trip will not be too far and each home is close to each other. It’s not something she plans as a matter of routine. It just happened to be so today. For someone who used to plan everything this is something that just happened. While she should be grateful, it frustrates her that her life is now distilled into, “it just so happens”. She doesn't want her life to be one giant shrug but it is now. She shifted to drive. She’s on her way. Back in the days her friends and everyone who knew her indeed  used to say, “She’s on her way”, but it had a different meaning then. Much too different. Today, “she’s on her way” simply means she might get to her first appointment without a hitch.

I wrote the above as opening paragraph to a short story that went as far as five standard printed pages of single space but never got around to finishing it.  Just recently I was going through some old files when I saw the manuscript I started years ago that came to an abrupt end, inexplicably it seems, because to this day I have no explanation for it. In fact I quit at mid sentence on the fifth page and  apparently had forgotten about it over time. And it had what I thought was an intriguing plot in progress, yet to unravel. 

Well, I might as well try to put the above paragraph to good use. If the reader has time to spare, I'll try to meander from that into something else.

Life, as it goes on, presents us occasionally with what seems like it gets going because "it just so happened" and the hope is that more of it is good than the not so good. Then, there is also about life unfolding for anyone of us  on our way to doing and achieving something or going somewhere on purpose and it gets us there, as hoped for. We would like to think that much of it is/was planned to go a certain way and not that it may go the way we didn't expect, let alone hoped for.  Are the odds of 50-50 fair?

Obviously, we would never settle for 50-50 odds of things happening to us for the good and bad, would we? But these things do happen. At a minimum we all would prefer that things happen North of the 50-50 odds. Sadly, for some, it is south of it, tragically deep southerly and downwards, for others.

If we each review our individual lives today - young, middle age, retired - we find that indeed there were strings of "it so happened" instances that may not have been part of the "plan".  Some were good and perhaps some not so. I will venture to say that for most of those among my readers good happenstances outnumber the not-so-good overwhelmingly for their lives to be that of or close to the fabled Island of Serendip.

Was it just serendipity that I started my career with a multinational company but stayed there only for three years - enough time for me to meet my wife who happened to work for the bank that the company used? I ended up leaving that company and spent the rest of my career for another multinational corporation that spanned a 12,000 mile move across the globe. I tease my wife that the only reason I started working at the first company was so I will get the chance to meet her.  The most pivotal one is that of her application to come to the U.S. long before I met her. She did not act on it when we met after it was approved.  Ten years later somebody at the U.S. Embassy in Manila resurrected her application and wrote to her about it. It so happened that her parents home address had not changed where the letter was addressed. Did it "just so happen"  made it possible for her and her family - husband, two sons, five grandchildren - to be at a place where much good than bad happened.  Our entire lives would have been completely different if not for the fact that my wife completed that application and for someone at the U.S. embassy to have chanced upon a forgotten paperwork. There were many other happenstances that occurred - too long to enumerate here.  The thing is we were put at a place in far better circumstances had it not been for many, many things to happen just right.

Now, dear reader, if you look back you will see that your life, despite twists and turns, is what it is today because things just so happened. We are all somewhere at some point in time partly because it just so happened. Not to be minimized is the fact that sometimes, if not more so, for some of us some things happen almost, if not truly, providentially like a dream.  We commonly refer to them as lucky breaks.  Or, are they? And why do others have the lucky breaks while others do not?

Two of the most popularly read of my musings I wrote almost four years ago, months apart are: "Everything Happens for a Reason?" and "Ancestry, Fredericksburg, Texas". Both, written in 2018, encapsulated what I believe are the complexities of the "it just so happened" phenomenon in the unfolding of everybody's story.  We can see that it is a mix of serendipity (something good happened unexpectedly), something good comes out of adversity, truly good things do happen to those who strive to make them happen and there is truth in the idea that something truly providential just happens to many of us that are beyond reasonable expectations.

From all of these we try and find answers for why certain things happen. However, we also find that it is not so much that things happen but what it is  that we do to make the most of it, if it were good; and how we responded when it wasn't? We find easy answers sometimes, and we search for reasons why on others.

One thing we cannot do, of course, is to turn our lives into one giant shrug. I guess I did meander back to the paragraph above afterall.  I would like to finish that story.  Sometime.

https://abreloth.blogspot.com/2018/05/ancestry-fredericksburg-texas.html

https://abreloth.blogspot.com/2018/02/everything-happens-for-reason.html

2022 & Managing Our Fears (Happy New Year!)

It is a lazy afternoon, January 1, 2002. Do you describe yourself as portrayed by the drawing below? Worried, fearful, concerned about what's in store for the new year?

Or, are you like the one in the photo below?

We would like to think we're right about in-between the two, right?

I thought about it a few years back. It may have been a year or two after I retired when I mused about how best to manage fears about this and that. Below is the updated version.

We, as a species, who claim to have the only rational mind are also capable of harboring the most irrational fear over anything and everything. We have a list of phobias and we would inevitably create one if something we feel just now is not on it. While fear is a necessary survival instinct for our species, we accessorized it with worry and turned the latter into a cottage industry. It is ironic that as concerns over the most basic of human needs - food, clothing and shelter - may have diminished for those of us living in the industrialized world, our capacity to worry has expanded exponentially. Now imagine what it is like when those basic needs are constantly in the minds of those less fortunate, whether living in either developed or underdeveloped economies of the world. But, worry we do. So, aside from worrying about keeping the proverbial new year's resolutions, 2022, like all previous years is fraught with our real and imagined concerns, not the least of which is the current worry about the scourge of Covid and its variants.

With worry is our inability to discern the likelihood of an event and its consequence to us when it happens. We worry about low probability, high catastrophic impact events versus those that are likely to affect us, which we actually ignore. Here is a list as a way to help us manage our fears. It is more than just a list because I hope it will shape our attitude as we ponder each of them.

1.) Airline crashes worry us so much that quite a number will never want to travel by air, or we are just simply mortified when we do. In billions of passenger miles the airline is by far the safest mode of transportation by multiple factors versus land transportation. The Vietnam War went on for ten years and almost fifty thousand American soldiers died. During that same period of ten years, almost half a million Americans died on its freeways and city streets - men, women, young and old, children, professionals and blue collar workers, many in the prime of their lives. The low probability event of an airline crash catches our attention but a relatively high probability event of a traffic accident, especially among teenagers and drunk drivers, do not make it to the list of irrational fears we had managed to compile in our head. Meanwhile, do you still want to travel by air as we witness on TV the sad manifestations of human nature in how a few passengers are coping with what the pandemic has done to their behavior? However rare those unfortunate incidents are we no longer look forward to flying.

2.) The death of professional mountain climbers and errant hikers - some perhaps ignored warning signs of impending dangers - makes headlines. What does not is the fact that more people die or get injured from falling off ladders at home doing mundane weekend chores. By multiple factors over those so called "risk-taking" adventurers. Be careful this year before you tackle the mundane chores at home.

3.) Overly enthusiastic golfers who played through a misty, overcast afternoon are hit by lightning. It's in the news; it stokes our deep-seated fear of lightning. More people die, however, from electrical accidents at home while, again, doing mundane chores like fixing a light fixture, working with electric power tools outside on the same misty afternoon as those golfers did; in fact, it's worst for those who fixed light fixtures using ladders on misty afternoons. But we fear lightning more - statistically a very low probability event versus being electrocuted by a faulty wiring system at home. A housewife in Nebraska or Idaho will be fearful of a shark attack although the likelihood of her ever even dipping her toes into a gentle surf is infinitely small compared to the many times she will drive her car to the grocery store or to visit relatives fifty miles away. Shark attacks and bites from rattlesnakes are rarer than death from choking over food but we worry more about fangs and serrated teeth than biting off more than we can chew.

4.) And it must come to this - global warming! You know it was coming. Global warming will cause all kinds of disasters, the destruction of our environments, the dying off of species that would include us, the California field mice, the snail darter fish (remember, it was responsible for the delay in building a dam for hydroelectric power), etc. I have news for the extinction-mongers. Of all the species that had ever lived throughout earth's long history, 95% have become extinct over eons. The 5% surviving species that you see today, including the diversity of the human population, are thriving and are the results of constantly evolving with the changes in environment and conditions - the fluctuations between cooling and warming of the earth. The world we inhabit today had seesawed between several ice ages and global warming over millions of years. And that's not counting changes in earth's magnetic poles and the occasional asteroid hit (which killed off the mighty dinosaurs which brought about the emergence of mammals, and then us, of course).

The dinosaurs were the top species during160 million years of their existence. They had experienced, as one would imagine, countless environmental changes throughout. Imagine further, the supreme council of dinosaurs meeting over the concerns on the increase in volcanic activities and rising sea levels, small mammals multiplying to fill a small niche, and the oceans were producing all kinds of creatures the dinosaurs could not control. They all worried and called for measures to regulate all of that. Every concern they can think of was duly noted. Then one day an errant asteroid, perhaps the size of Mt. Everest, wandered into the solar system and hit what is now the Gulf of Mexico. All that reptilian worrying by the council of dinosaurs was all for naught. The good news - other species emerged and survived. A particular one became dominant. Endowed with great intelligence and capacity to organize, it is now the dominant species. With an intelligent mind came an incredible ability to solve problems. However, we also developed an irresistible capacity to worry. And worry a lot we do (by the way, that's Yoda speak for you Star Wars fans).

We did thrive with great success and diversity. The Masai grew tall and lean and developed darker pigments to deal with the oppressive heat of the equatorial sun and protection from excessive ultraviolet rays ; the diminutive bush people (pygmies, if you will) became shorter and smaller to easily navigate the thick vegetation of the forest floors; citizens of the tropics didn't need too much dark skin so they opted for brown though for those closer to the temperate zone became paler and those in the upper northern regions just simply lost pigmentation, except for the occasional freckles, but allowing for the desired absorption of Vitamin D from the sun. So the differences in skin color and physical stature are marvels of adaptation and not reasons for discriminating one race over another.

Here's the lesson from the dinosaurs. They had a long list of things to worry about. The one that was not on the list happened. Let's assume for a moment that global warming is for real. Actually it is - every summer. We all long for Winter to be over, harken to Spring to watch flowers bloom and for many to see the sun for the first time in months. Then the lovely golden days of Summer. If not for global warming of the earth, we would still be covered with body hair - it would be called fur - to stay warm. Instead, the warming up has led to the invention of the Frisbee, baseball as America's pastime and Spring gets the young and not so young men to eagerly await the latest Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition to hit the stands or their mailboxes. If not for warm days, lazy afternoons will make no sense at all and the expression, "go fly a kite", may not have been coined to serve as an irreverent retort by someone who had just lost an argument.

So you ask, "should we not be fearful or worry at all?". Fear is good, worry is not so. Try this. Make a list of what you worried about from a year ago, last month, last week, yesterday even. How many did actually happen? Probably none. That's not to say that nothing bad ever does happen in our lives. It's just not the ones we spent nights worrying about. Global warming did not cause the plague that wiped out 25% of Europe, nor the flu of 1914-17 (or whenever that was in the early 1900s). In fact, flu disappears in the summer because people are not cooped up indoors during the cold months because they are up and about enjoying the warm days. Some of us don't like fossil fuels (oil in other words) for producing electricity to run our refrigerators to preserve and keep our foods safer, nor for refineries to process the very bottom of crude to produce asphalt that pave roads at the cheapest cost so transportation can get to the most isolated areas of human communities or for ambulances to get to the sick and the injured more quickly.

Then you ask. How then should we manage our fears? We don't. We use fear to stay vigilant and careful, to instill discipline and to avoid doing stupid things. And Yoda would say, "Worry, however, we should not". Worrying is like treading water. You could expend a lot of energy doing it but it gets you nowhere. So, you might as well swim and go somewhere.

Still anxious over anything and everything? I have four words, "Don't Worry About It"