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"

Today Is Yesterday's Tomorrow

"Today Is Yesterday's Tomorrow" is, in my opinion, one of the least popular renditions by Michael Bublé, not that I am an authority on his songs. The title seems straight forward enough. Or, is it?  Someone analyzed it this way. Technically, "today is the day that was yesterday's tomorrow".  So, shouldn't it be, "Today was yesterday's tomorrow"? I am not a grammarian either, so we leave it at that.  Meanwhile, someone made a riddle out of it:

A teacher enters class and says, “If only yesterday was tomorrow then today would be Saturday." What day of the week did the teacher speak of?

A logician/grammarian had one idea.  First, he thought there were two answers - Either today is Thursday or Monday - depending on what "proper" grammar were used.  Here is the quote:

 "Both answers are correct, because the grammatically incorrect use of the word “was” introduces ambiguity. The two versions of the question that lead respectively and unambiguously to the two different answers are “yesterday had been tomorrow” and “yesterday were to be tomorrow.”

"Edit: Today is Thursday. Tomorrow is Friday. If yesterday had been tomorrow (Friday) then today would be Saturday

Today is Monday. Yesterday was Sunday. If yesterday (Sunday) were to be tomorrow then today would be Saturday".

Did you get all that?

Well, wait until you hear what others had to say.

"In our system, tonight's midnight is the first moment of tomorrow. But as for the rest of us – there's no official answer and the military use a system in which midnight is 0 hours. In that system, tonight’s midnight is the first moment of tomorrow. But as for the rest of us – there’s no official answer.. Blah, blah, blah ..

And a few other off-the-grid ideas.  Then, we have this to ponder ..

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow went into a bar.

Yesterday: Be thankful my friends for if it were not for me how else would you have gotten here?

Today : Listen.  If not for me, how are y'all going to enjoy this?

Tomorrow: Now, now, without me what do you two have to look forward to?

That in a nutshell tells us what life is really all about.  When we think about it our lives can be summed up in three elements.  Whatever it is we do at the present moment is archived instantly as memories of the past. Every dream, each aspiration, every plan all reside in every tomorrow that is yet to happen.  Today is all we have to do anything because yesterday is gone forever and tomorrow is yet our best hope that our dreams may still come true.

However, let's be aware of the quote below:

We crucify ourselves between two thieves: regret for yesterday and fear of tomorrow.         --- Fulton Oursler

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.