To Have and Have Not

"That is the question". Just like that, and a bit shamelessly, I managed to borrow from Shakespeare and pretend I've read Hemmingway's book, "To Have and Have Not". So, no, this is neither a review nor critique of "Hamlet" and Hemingway's work.  However, it is almost too easy to correlate the two titles - "To be or not to be" and "To have and Have Not" because what else could conceivably, if not logically, follow but, "That is the question".  I think I got that all cleared away. 

To have - whatever it is we want to possess - is not only a fundamental human trait, but true as well for every living thing. "To have" is as basic  a possessive desire by us as it is for a chimpanzee or chipmunk, or  for an eagle or  egret. 

Furthermore, before we get to the nitty-gritty, the English language being the way that it is, or aside from being the most effective communications tool in modern-day languages, gave us along with "to have" - two other so called auxiliary verbs : "to be" and "to do".

I think it is fascinating - the English language, that is - and by that let's just get to a few examples;

"To have" is a main verb in, "We have a good conversation".

It becomes an auxiliary verb in, "Having said that, let's go to the next subject".

Now even more fascinating, it can be both an active and auxiliary verb in the same sentence, even in consecutive order as in, "We have had these conversations before". Or, "Some of our colleagues though had had a difficult time maintaining a conversation earlier today".

So, aside from its ability to confuse and frustrate a non-English speaker, English can be challenging and fascinating to anyone trying to learn it. And "to have" is one impactful and effective verb the non-native speaker of the language will have learned over time {see, now  it is used as a future perfect tense, another tool for the English student}.

Now, and not a second too soon, let's disentangle ourselves from the methods  and  madness that is English grammar. Let's talk about what it feels like to have and then to have not.

From an earlier blog I wrote then, "No one appreciates what it is to have who does not realize what it is like to have nothing". Indeed, our desire to have may only be equaled by our fear of losing what we just had.  More often than not, those born with the riches their parents worked so hard to have, have little appreciation for it because they do not have the inherent fear that their parents had of losing what may have taken years to have. 

And that could very well be happening to an almost three century-old republic where those who inherited its riches are prone to not appreciate what it is they have until it is no longer there. When Benjamin Franklin was asked if what the founding fathers created was a monarchy or a republic, he replied, "A republic, if you can keep it". History tells us that for hundreds and hundreds of years people -  emperors and kings, benevolent leaders and despots alike - failed to keep kingdoms and governments to continue their intended existence over time. In fact, on average, empires and kingdoms  did not last for more than 250 years. 

Failing to appreciate what it was they had was and will always be the real, if not the only, reason for people's inability to keep what they had until it was no longer there. Unfortunately, for nations and empires, how it happens is imperceptible until they find out that the slow ebbing of the tide of power is realized too late.

Such power this nation attained, economic and military, was purchased with blood and the sacrifices of countless individuals to attain and keep for well over two hundred years. Battles were fought here and abroad in the name of freedom. Young people in the prime of their lives shipped out to foreign shores to defend people they did not know, countries they've never heard before until the time they were called upon to offer themselves at the altar of freedom for those gripped by tyranny and injustice.

Today, we are merely asked to set aside Memorial Day in honor of those men and women.

 

To have and have not are always bookended by honor and sacrifices.  Benjamin Franklin seemed to have warned and worried about whether the young nation then could actually keep what it just had for far longer than many others that preceded it from all corners of the world from centuries past.  

"To have" took a strong moral compass that guided this nation. To not have to rely on that compass any longer is the surest path to losing what it had enjoyed for the last two-and-a half centuries. 

Since I have not read Hemingway's book I have no idea what he had in mind. Of course, he had a knack for book titles that were often intriguing, such as, "Farewell To Arms", "The Sun Also Rises", "For Whom The Bell Tolls, "True At First Light", etc.  

Someday I will read, "To Have and Have Not" but for now it suffices as an encouragement for us to value what we have and be constantly vigilant that for something to have not is easier to attain  than it was to have had it in the first place.

    

The Indomitable Power of Tomorrow

 From the Broadway musical, "Annie", we hear the first two stanzas:

Tomorrow

"The sun'll come out

Tomorrow

Bet your bottom dollar

That tomorrow there'll be sun

Just thinkin' about

Tomorrow

Clears away the cobwebs

And the sorrow 'til there's none"

Later in the song we soon hear not only the inevitability of tomorrow but that it is always just a day away.  What power it has, simply because it keeps coming no matter how today went. No matter how many bad yesterdays there were, tomorrow persistently shows up. We know to expect that no matter how dark the night is, it will soon turn from black to gray as each dawn - like a stage curtain - is drawn by some mysterious force until it is completely tucked away; tomorrow - here it comes.

What power! But wait. We know to expect tomorrow but do every living thing think the same way? Well, let's see.  Do animals think about tomorrow the way we do? When a robin starts building a nest, it must be thinking about tomorrow, right? Mother robin must know to expect that many tomorrows later she will lay eggs and many tomorrows of uninterrupted incubation after that, they will hatch. And for many more tomorrows the chicks will need to be fed and more tomorrows later they will leave the nest. 

No. Except for us, all other living things do not think about tomorrow.  At least, not in the same way that we do. You see, all biological blueprints upon which all living things depend are exactly just that.  Blueprints. Step-by-each succeeding step plan for a biological system to function and survive. It does require an optimal amount of intelligence, such as those among the higher order of living things, for species to survive and thrive but simple organisms from bacteria to colonies of ants and termites have been around for millions of years of yesterdays without any of them thinking - not even for a single moment - or contemplating about even a single tomorrow.

We do.  The only species that does.  While 99.9% of all living things remember - a prerequisite to survival - we are the only ones who think about what to expect, what to do, and plan for tomorrow. Not only just the typical twenty four hours from now tomorrow but thirty of those, three hundred sixty five, and many more. 

Let's have this hypothetical question to ask ourselves on what we shall choose between two given options. (A) Granted a wish to be anywhere in the world today - Australia, Timbuktu, Paris, or Mt. Everest, anywhere; or, (B) Know everything that will happen tomorrow, today. (A) or (B)?  

It's (B), isn't it? All of (A) anyone can do, when he or she gets to see today what lottery numbers to get for tomorrow's drawing, right?.  Not 100% of all of us will pick (B) for many reasons - perhaps mostly philosophical, even moral - but it  is a good "bet" that most will overwhelmingly pick (B). Hypothetically, of course.

Such is the power of tomorrow.  But like all superpowers - from the legend of Achilles in Greek mythology to Kal-El from the pages of DC comics, every superpower has a kryptonite! We'll get to this but let's first digress for a bit.  Did you know that: 

"Superman's real name is Kal-El, son of Jor-El. The suffix El means “of God” in Hebrew, with Kal-El defined as “Voice of God”. Before Krypton's doom, Kal-El's parents put him in a Moses-like basket, sending him down the Nile of intergalactic space until he landed safely on Earth".

Now, you know. So, today is super important. It is where the action is and we would like to think that it is going according to plan from yesterday. It is important to remember yesterday but not to dwell too much on why and what didn't happen or work today because tomorrow we get another chance. Yesterday was for the record books, today is action time, albeit every present moment is ephemeral, but today is when we get to do anything. It is not to be diminished, naturally, but why should tomorrow have the superpower?

Well, for one thing, we know we started from somewhere - at some finite beginning. Today, as often the case, is quick to become yesterday. Tomorrow we cannot know but it has many, if not infinitely so, possibilities. Yesterday we knew, today we know what to do, at least we think we do, but tomorrow will lead to all kinds of what we would like to think we can do.

Let's for a moment agree with the saying, "Life is a journey".  I suggest that we travel light. We must only have carry-on luggage to a bare minimum. We should not travel with carry-on luggage that challenges the maximum limit but more importantly, never to  have any excess baggage that needs to be checked-in, at all.

Checked-in baggage from our past - usually memories of what could have been, regrets, and remorse - is tomorrow's kryptonite. To be clear, tomorrow is not the kryptonite.  It is what we bring along that could be. In our carry-on luggage are the happy memories, our hopes, our plans and aspirations. Yesterday, all the innumerable yesterdays make up the exposed frames on a spool of film, tomorrow is yet to be filled in. Put another way, yesterday was a  cashed check and spent, tomorrow is a blank check.

That is the indomitable superpower of tomorrow. The options are plenty, but what we write on that check will determine what we can spend. More importantly, it is not so much what we can spend but the choices we will spend it on. Make the superpower of tomorrow count.

Why It's Never The Same River

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”                                                                                                                                                                            -- Heraclitus

Heraclitus lived for the most part of his life during the late 600 B.C. and died in the early part of the following century. He preceded the more famous philosopher named Socrates by over a hundred years. From his one and only known written works only parts and pieces survived.  

Heraclitus believed in  a world that is always constantly changing, hence that famous quote. There was very little anyone could have argued with  then and certainly there is little anyone can do today to disagree with the notion that the only constant is change.  But can one really be a different person from one moment to the next? 

The river Heraclitus referred to had to have been the river of time.  Even if only a second had passed, the water flowing by and the contents of every unit volume passing through changes any portion of the river where one steps into; having aged even by a second, changes the man whose thoughts, even  what he feels, too are always changing. That is, of course, open to debate about how largely or how minutely the change is, from one unit of time to the next, which now makes it a philosophical, if not a sociological complexity - best avoided than discussing it any further. 

Where we may find  less complicated, though least well known or debated over, was that of  Heraclitus'  insistence on the "unity of opposites" - much less debatable, at least, in those days through much of modern history. 

Simply put, if we look around us today, we see the coincidence of opposites that prevail over the nature of almost everything.  We know about light and darkness, the South and North orientations in magnets, pain and relief, sorrow and happiness, etc.  Heraclitus thought seriously about the universe as a place where if there is one thing, it has a coinciding opposite. Day has a coinciding night which unifies both.  He must have believed that that was how best to explain the universe. If there was land, there was water, if there was war, there was peace, if people cried, people laughed,  etc.

If we cut the bar magnet (shown below) exactly in half, we will not have one north and one south magnets.

Both halves will still have north and south poles like the original longer bar.  In fact, even if we cut the magnet into smithereens to the size of  grains of sand, each speck will have a north and south pole. Positive and negative charges remain opposites down to a single atom - a positively charged proton and a negatively charged electron. It's the universal duality of the coincidence of opposites.

Heraclitus saw the human conditions of his time. It was no different from what we see today. However, today we are witnessing the great blurring of the pages of opposites. We see subtle and not so subtle leveling of opposites. The highs of achievements and lows of failure are to be no more. The honors accorded to those who achieved through sheer effort and determination shall be no more of value over those who did not put the efforts to achieve. 

Today, it seems the trend, the unity of opposites must be broken apart. Unity of opposites must be blurred with the veil of Equity. 

Today, there is an attempt to alter the conditions that for millennia was the prevailing rule.  

Long before Heraclitus, pages were written up in The Book of Genesis,  chapter 1,

4  And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

We do not know if Heraclitus had read the Old Testament but we can say that the idea of the "unity of opposites" was not his alone.  Whether one sees the story of creation as allegorical or not, the idea of the "unity of opposites" preceded Heraclitus by many centuries. The opposing poles of morality - good and evil - had long been exemplified, far longer than the establishment of law and order against lawlessness. But today we are confronted with the great blurring of what used to be fundamentally a simple "what is right and what is wrong".

It seemed so simple then that human aspiration towards  the ecstasy of victory was a self-driven motivation because the alternative is the agony of defeat. Achievement was preferred over failure; we savor relief because we know what it was like to deal with pain.  But today, society is forced to face the slow degradation of achievement by eliminating what honors and accolades that come with it.  Participation trophies in sports become synonymous with attendance, honors classes eliminated, homework is not mandatory, requirements for graduation are not so clear cut anymore.

Modern socio-economic conditions are stratified between the haves and the have-nots, or split between the rich and the poor. But, lest we forget, in this universe, there is no such thing as a free lunch. 

Astronomers tell us that wherever they train their observation, the universe looks the same - as if matter is distributed evenly. Against the backdrop of dark empty space are sparkles of flickering lights. Each light a star or farther away a bundle of  swirling stars but the universe is mostly dark and seemingly empty.  In every star each photon of light is produced at the expense of  destroying elements of hydrogen, turning them into helium, and in the process energy is produced.  It is the same manner that fire is produced by burning wood, at the expense of turning it into ashes. No free lunch.

Out of the thousands of aspiring athletes only a handful become stars in their sports.  But it always comes with a price and sacrifices - hours and hours of training and practice that each individual athlete was willing to put in, the sacrifices of missing out on other activities, and the discipline of repetitive workouts.  Businesses are built up that way. Often at the expense of personal and even family sacrifices that we had the Henry Fords, the Steve Jobs, etc. 

The "unity of opposites" is the rule. No one appreciates what it is to have who does not realize what it is like to have nothing. Against that rule is  the "equity of distribution" (versus the "equality of opportunity").  Only those who strive harder than the many will achieve the most. 

And so it is that we go back to Heraclitus's river. Opportunities always come along that river. One must make the most as he or she steps into one because it will not be the same river as he or she is not the same person at each passing moment.  It is never the same river because the universe does not allow going back, it does not favor regrets but it smiles at those willing to try again and again. That is because, the universe allows for however many times a person is willing to step into the river.