Given the choice between going on a
date with super sexy film and TV star Patrick Dempsey or to dinner with a group
of close-knit friends, most of us would probably
choose Mr. McDreamy. (I mean, come on, be honest here. Look at this dude.)
After all, your close friends will
always be there, but imagine how cool it would be to tell them about your one-night
long escapade with a beautiful celebrity. They’d love to hear all the details, and
no doubt it’d be a story to tell over and over again. Even years from now when
we’re 40 years old and our idea of a good time is going out to Texas Roadhouse
for $4.25 sangria margaritas on happy hour… right? (Yes, seriously. One day we
might actually be old and boring. Also, yes, seriously. Sangria margaritas for
$4.25 are a thing.)
Although we all might crave to tell
extraordinarily amazing stories over mediocre steak dinners years from now,
studies actually show that having these types of radical stories is more
detrimental than we might believe. Psychological
Science published an article explaining how amazing experiences like dating
a movie star do not cultivate deeper relationships with those close to us like
friends and family. Instead, they tend to create a chasm between people, making
it harder to connect in interpersonal relationships. This alienation occurs
simply because the friends who gather at Table Mountain Inn for margaritas and
nachos every Wednesday night simply can’t relate to their college friend who makes
red carpet appearances with a boyfriend old enough to be her dad. Conversely, chatting
and laughing about the horrible mechanics professor we used to hate serves as a
shared memory between them. The shared memory nurtures the friendly
relationships even though the memory itself is not out of the ordinary or extravagant
in any way. Naturally, this derives a theory that shared experiences and day-to-dayness
cultivate deep and meaningful relationships with others much better than
elaborate experiences like getting abducted by aliens, winning the lottery, or
dating a former Grey’s Anatomy heartthrob (spoiler alert: McDreamy dies). Okay
I promise I’m done talking about Patrick Dempsey. Point is, shared experiences
are oftentimes more meaningful and worthwhile in regards to building lasting
relationships with friends, friends of friends, and not so friendly friends.
Every week
in class we are given the opportunity to connect with one another and share our
experiences. Earlier this month, however, we were given a unique opportunity that
should be addressed, appreciated, and shared further. We got to experience the
beauty of breathing together. One of the most fundamental, mundane tasks we can
do as human beings brought us together deeper than any virtual reality demo or
5 minutes of silence or 3-scene skit has done this semester. Our oxygen has
been shared through time from our parents and grand parents all the way back to
our ancient sapien ancestors and beyond et cetera ad infinitum. The same oxygen
that fuels harmful protozoa in our bodies is the same oxygen that antibodies
need to protect us. Oxygen is the ultimate shared resource, uniting everything
under our atmosphere in more profound ways than we usually think about.
Furthermore, our breathwork exercise
itself classifies as evidence that we are all united under oxygen. Energy
bounced from one corner of the room to the next through the air which served as
a catalyst for transporting emotions. One second we were quiet, perhaps a
little nervous, as we slid the blindfolds over our eyes. The next, we were
hysterically laughing in unison. Our bellies ached, the tears flowed, all while
we breathed the same life-giving oxygen. Then, only a couple moments later we
were crying, some were sobbing. The energy in the room permeated through each
of us through our individual breaths to create an experience that we can all
cherish and share as our own. Our one experience. Oxygen, such a simple and
necessary molecule, bound us to one another in a beautiful matrimony. What is
even more profound is that after class ended, our connection was not stripped
from us. Our trust and compassion for one another grew through our breath.
Still, we are here, our roots only growing deeper and more tangled. While we
may all study different disciplines, live different lifestyles, and set
different goals, we have shared something that has united us more fundamentally
than others can see or feel. So while our branches and limbs may be growing in opposite
directions, our roots will remain intertwined deeper than anyone else knows.
Who knew that a 1 hour workshop on the most fundamental human instinct could
have such prolific outcomes? It goes to show that a shared experience, no
matter how seemingly menial it may be, can have magnificent and beautiful
consequences.
So next time someone asks the
question about who you would choose to have dinner with, living or not, I urge
you to think about the most meaningful response. Having dinner with Alanis Morissette
or an alien or Abraham Lincoln or God Himself may seem like the best immediate
answer, but the most fulfilling choice may be with your little brother or your
parents or your classmates, where you can gossip about how horrible mechanics
is, was, and always will be.
In the event that you read the title of this post and followed the instructions to a T, I will assume that your lungs are now full of revitalizing oxygen and that you have entered the present moment to the best of your ability. I will assume that you are now eerily conscious of every intake and outtake of breath that is coursing through your veins. You may be able to feel your heart pulsating with life now, and your thinking may be crisp and clear, enabling you to criticize my writing with the utmost precision. You are welcome. I am more than happy that I could remind you to ground yourself in a time where frantic fluttering has become the norm. I am more than happy that I could remind you to breathe.
When we enter a state of extreme oxygenation, incredible things are bound to occur. Our vast Human potential is unlocked and a state of enlightenment is guaranteed to arise. However, enlightenment takes on many different forms. It can take the form of abstract, care-free thinking, or it can present itself as a storm of intuitive emotional sobering. Enlightenment is often described as a visual experience; vivid, pulsating lights and benevolent, primordial beings signaling the presence of ubiquitous wisdom to be shared with others. At other times, enlightenment is experienced through a skeptical mindset; while being hopeful, one is flushed with feverish ambivalence which halts naivete in its purest form: judgement. While some people claim to have encountered one or two of these enlightening episodes sporadically, oxygenating your body with intent allows you to experience all of these forms of insight within a 75 minute time span.
Why is it that these forms of enlightenment can only be obtained through extreme conscious oxygenation, and not simple, rhythmic, unconscious breathing? Why is it that there is such a clear advantage to breathing with a purpose, and yet evolution appears to have favored the human who has "forgotten" how to breathe. Prior to participating in a Breath Work Workshop, I thought I understood the phrase "take a deep breath," and now I see that my perception of "deep" was just as shallow as my understanding of the effects and advantages of breathing with intention. In my experience, only through deep oxygenation, can one truly obtain physical, mental, and emotional enlightenment. Assuming this is true, again I ask, why is it that evolution seems to favor those Humans who have forgotten how to breathe? As scientists and engineers of the future, is it feasible that we could integrate a form of deep breathing into our daily regiments, and act as catalysts for a world in which breathing with intent is considered a necessity for living a healthy, balanced lifestyle?
Finally, based on the breath you took prior to reading this, is breathing with intent a necessity for living a healthy, balanced lifestyle?
We live in a society of movement. We strive to constantly be active and moving. We strive for good grades by doing extra work. We try to gather friends by doing more activities. We try to find better jobs by padding our resumes with more and better activities. We even count our steps in hopes of improving our health. Even if we are not physically moving, we are always striving and working for more than we have.
Now this is a great quality. Those of us who move more are able to gain more and are better off for it. As a society we reward the people who try the most with movement. People who work harder get better grades and move further and life for their work ethic. Yet, after the breath workshop I had to ask myself, "is this always for the best?"
For example, after class all I wanted to do was go home and not move. I didn't want to move my muscles, or stimulate my senses, or even think about anything. I simply wanted to lie still and to allow stillness to consume me. Yet I knew I couldn't do this because I had a lab to finish.
I think that as wonderful as the drive to be greater is, it also poses a hindrance. People are so enamored with greatness that we neglect anything that doesn't directly help us in achieving our goals. People forget to breath.
After all of this being said however, I can honestly say that if given a second chance of choosing to do my lab or not, I wouldn't alter my decision. I can recognize the problem but I don't know how to fix it. Over the last couple days I've pondered a lot over this conundrum, and as of yet I still have no answer.
My dreams are never complete visions of my world. They usually follow one thread of a story, not the whole tapestry: I do not dream of the social and political and scientific implications of my dream world, just what happens to me and a few other people. Reading Einstein’s Dreams made me realize this omission of context is what makes the stories seem so dreamy. The vignettes in Einstein’s Dreams do not provide a complete picture of the worlds they live in; instead, they follow the stories of a few people and trace a few consequences out to completion. A man anguishes over a woman in a red hat. A student contemplates whether to move forward in time. A couple searches each other’s eyes for love in a world where time is discontinuous. Never do we explore the full worldly impact of different flows of time. Leaving so much unsaid makes the story seem misty and more powerful. I was struck by how Lightman managed to keep the ‘rules’ of each of the stories so well even as time was jumbled and different: each world seems very real, even though it takes place in a place subject to a different dimension.
On The Occasion Of The Birth Of Lewis Fry Richardson
"He would peek into the curtained windows, or, climbing upon the roof, peer down the black depths of the chimney in vain endeavor to solve the unknown wonders that lay within those strong walls." Edward Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes
I never quite had the sort of undergraduate experience of which great stories of studious behavior might be told. In fact, of all the metrics one might use to evaluate the success of failure of a course of study, there is really only one that I found worth remembering. It was the measure of the number of credit hours attempted.
My efforts began earnestly enough. I had finished High School a year early, and having learned that time spent studying was more a measure of boxes checked, I was motivated to continue that effort forward. I knew that the requirements were graduation were finite. 120 semester hours across a number of predefined categories. A bit of learning here, a bit of focus there. While each path wasn't precisely certain, there was enough commonality amidst the requirements to know that I could begin "checking boxes" as I looked to better define what it was I was interested in doing.
I didn't wait for the formal beginning of what was to be my first fall semester. Instead, I set about fulfilling the requisite coursework in formal reasoning. I sat out to prepare myself for what I had anticipated would become a rigid course load by beginning to rectify the short comings in my own education in Mathematics.
My days that summer came to have a comfortable cadence to them. Each morning I would wake up and begin, almost immediately, to update myself on any new movements in the world of music. I would look for bands releasing new albums. I would look for new work by writers I knew about. After spending an hour or two so engaged, I would devote a block of four hours to my coursework.
When in the course of that work, I stumbled into something worth considering, I would re-balance my efforts so that I could devote as large a portion of time to wrestling with ideas that were new and overwhelming as long at it took to ensure that they weren't. When I found what felt like "a point" or something that I knew would be of use in subsequent seasons of my life, I lost interest in the effort. I would then balance again, as I could feel I was working against a deficit.
The pace was grueling, but I didn't once stop to reflect that the level of engagement I was demonstrating was to run cross-purpose with the performance that is expected of rising learners engaged in formal study. I didn't bother to think about how such a frenzied effort to pursue a path of devotion to reasoning out in one's mind could so easily become the sort of fixation that obfuscates one's ability to engage with many of the other enjoyable things that make up a richly lived (and fittingly examined) life.
Such a level of activity is finite. There is a limit to the number of 16 hour days one can work. As one can feel the close beyond the narrow window of opportunity enjoyed by many a youth, this truth can take on a more and more tyrannical tone. Still, I struggled on.
By the time I had finished my prescribed course of study, I had attempted 240 semester hours--double the requirement for an undergraduate. I came to understand why that number was half as high as what I had tried to achieve--I never wanted to read another thing written by a serious thinking person ever again.
To tell you the truth, I didn't, either--at least not for the space of nearly one solid year.
The trouble was, I couldn't as readily shed the impact that attempt had on my lifestyle. I had a home full of books. Wall to wall shelves in a dining room that, save a table and a simple set of speakers was otherwise entirely empty. I had collected a great cross-section of humanity, and all who entered my home would have to pass through this room to get to anything else. My past interests were so prominently displayed, that I could no more hide it than I might suppress the many plain and precious truths I had gleaned from my examination of lives lived throughout time.
I would get questions from friends and visitors that would require me to reflect on what I had learned. Sometimes, they were questions about technical things like how one might measure this or isolate that. Other times, they were questions of detailed and methodical process. Of the history of process. On rare and cherished occasions, they were long conversations about a feeling.
On these and many other topics, I was dutiful participant, offering up what I could to point someone in the direction of something they may find of benefit. On rare occasion, I would note with a tinge of envy the enthusiasm for an idea each person I interacted with seemed to have.
I could match that enthusiasm in my mind. I could understand it. I had seen it once, and I had read about others who had seen it before. I could readily explain when one thing happened, what impact it had on a selection of acolytes and how an idea was reacted to by those who were reacting to it. If the topic were one in which I had amassed a bit of breadth, I could even anticipate what a reaction or objection would likely be. By reflecting a bit on the probability of any one reaction, I could predict with a good measure of certainty what input I should make to keep an interaction moving forward.
I could understand all sorts of reactions, but I couldn't feel it.
I knew I couldn't go on in that way. I knew that the fruits of such an effort would be an empty and a barren life. I knew I didn't want that.
As such, learning to decide to react to a development in my own voice, readily became a chief focus of mine. It became a new focus. I stepped back, and in an effort to determine what had been lost, I asked myself what had changed between the time I last felt as though I were able to accomplish such a thing and now.
I remembered that I had spent a tremendous amount of time consuming cultural material in my youth.
As a middle-schooler, I and a few close associates would leave school as quickly as we could and spend six or seven hours an evening practicing guitar. In High School, I had replaced that level of fervor with a study of reading and writing, which had in turn lead me to where I began my undergraduate studies. In the time I wasn't working on those efforts, I was consuming in earnest catalogs across the world's great libraries of film and television. Towards the end of those studies, I had turned the same level of attention to identifying the sourcing of each product I consumed in my daily life.
Whatever the task, when I would find a thing, I would devour it in earnest. I would look at it in its own rules and try and decide how it worked. When I would find a pattern (whether in a system or in work of the arts,) I would decide how it could best be applied. This reflection was no different.
Working along that process, I wondered if there wasn't something to the sorts of content I had been consuming. When I would engage with a thing simply, because it brought me enjoyment and for no other reason, I would often learn a great number of things.
I set out to test this.
I still remember my first book. I began, by reading Garrison Keillor's Homegrown Democrat. It was simple. It was conversational. It was about a serious thing and written with none of the gravity oh so many ascribe to such topics.
And, when I finished it, I made sure to find a copy of every spoken word bit of story telling he had released. I noted the deceptive simplicity in the structure of weaving a story together from a bunch of disparate threads.
When I had finished with it, I again faced my earlier problem. Knowing I needed to keep my efforts, but not knowing where, when and how to go about it.
I found a collection online of Ian Fleming's early Bond books, and danced my way through the poorly OCR'd words--only ever pausing occasionally to reconstruct a badly garbled sentence. The words were light and the visuals were not overly wrought.
The content was readily digestible.
I should spare you the full accounting, but from here, I dove deeper into the pulp crime and science fiction genres. I read what only few short seasons earlier, I would have decried as trash.
As I worked from bit of pulp to even pulpier pulp, I didn't stop to worry about deeper messages or 'problematics.' In fact, I worked to consciously silence that impulse, as I had found that the voice one uses to critique a thing, all too often reveals what one was coming to that thing with the expectation of finding in the first place. I was interested in what Aaron Copland called "the sheer pleasure of the musical sound itself."
I have long wondered about what series of events might need to conspire to write a seminal text like "Weather Prediction By Numerical Process." To collect an array of insights like:
"W. V. Ekman in 1905 pointed out, with reference to the sea when a steady state has been attained, that the total momentum, produced by a tangential stress on the surface, is directed at right angles to the stress, and is equal in magnitude to the stress divided by 2w sin(f). Thus the momentum produced by the stress is quite independent of the value of the viscosity or of its variation with height. This is true provided that the quadratic terms in the dynamical equations produce only a negligible disturbance, and that will be so if we take, as our standard of what the momentum would be in the absence of stress, not the wind deduced from the isobaric map, but the actual upper wind."
and to reassemble them, considered as parts of a functioning whole.
I had occasion to return to this work this morning, prompted in part by a reminder that it would take more than thirty years for Lewis Richardson's work to become actionable. The computing power simply wasn't there to work through the necessary calculations in a time that could produce actionable projections for the people who might find such a thing useful.
Why might someone then set out to create such a thing? A thing that could only ever service the horizon of progress. Such techniques weren't novel. They had been employed in the past by scores of early meteorologists including Cleveland Abbe, who Wikipedia tells me had come to be known as "Old Probability," no doubt in large part due to his ability to utilize patterns others found difficult to engage with in sum. It was likely these very calculations that lead to Robert C. Miller's efforts to organize a warning system for tornadoes--an effort that no doubt was responsible for the saving of an untold number of lives.
I have come to observe that such a problem is commonplace--particularly in our current times of hyper-exposure to information. Some are able to digest these large expanses of knowledge. They are able to discern trends and from those trends derive principles that help them to accomplish things that to many are entirely inaccessible--and in some respects, I am certain, downright magical.
The practice, of course, is often anything but.
It was that simple truth that lead me to rediscover a fondness for what many would dismiss as "bad" writing. To some, many of what have become my favorite texts wouldn't even be called "writing" at all. I think that's something delightful.
From time to time these little complexities, so brilliantly couched in simplicity are discovered only to be quickly forgotten, as the work goes on. Two commonly cited examples of this might be re-reading the Alice series against the backdrop of a critique of the culture of Oxford or recognizing that Izzak Walton's The Compleat Angler is more than a book on the simple joys of fishing.
When we work in ways that are ordered, it is easy to identify what job needs to be accomplished. We spend so much time obsessing about the things that we do not know that one can quickly reduce life to a finite window of time with which one can check a certain number of boxes. We can do what we can make space for, and no more or no less.
There are other things.
Some of those things are far more engaging than all but an astute observer (be it one prone to describing in numbers or in words, in tones or against a backdrop of experimentation) might have occasion to react to.
It isn't always simple to know where you'll find something that makes you feel alive, but what I learned as I came back to "pulp," was that it was more important to spend the time looking for it.
What you find won't always be immediately useful, but the path you'll take to get there will help to put your experiences back into the context of all the other sorts of experiences people have had over the span of history. It gives you a language to go back too--and that is near universally accessible.
I have a poster on my wall. In it, a portion of the text of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot is shaped as an arrow and overlaid on the photo of earth taken by Voyager 1 for which the book was named. I have transcribed the text below.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot 1994
I bought this poster when I moved out of my parent’s house and into my college dorm. It served as a comfort to me. When seemingly everything was changing, when I was leaving everything I had known behind, I would go over to that poster and I would read it. It’s always had a way of bending time for me. Of making every hard time seem a little bit shorter, and making those magical times in life when everything seems perfect all the more precious. After every hard test, bad day, or week when I just needed something to go my way I would wander over to that poster and read it, and revel in the knowledge that my problems were, in reality, oh so very small. On the days when I don’t feel like enough, I read it and revel in just being, beholden to nothing to aside from my own insignificance.
But on a day like today, I read it in a different way. I read it and realize how incredibly small we are. And for what a short blink of time we have actually been on this planet. On a cosmic scale, every sweeping decision we have made, every law, every cultural development, every border a passing fad. Precedent that seems set in stone is really a brave new experiment, so young that no one can deliver a clear verdict on its outcome.
From this perspective, it becomes deeply saddening that a large group of people in this country cling to a privilege. A group of people who claim unalienable right to access a technology by virtue of the wisdom of a long dead group of white men who have been enshrouded in the infallible veil of history and patriotism. A technology still in such cosmic infancy that we, let alone our ancestors, cannot begin to understand its true place in our society. And who, by claiming the right to this technology and supporting its presence, willingly sacrifice the lives of tens of thousands of people every year.
The reality is that life is terrifying. Not in the way the news suggests. Not terrorism, gun violence, or natural disasters. But in that realization, looking back at the pale blue dot, of how fragile this all is. Of how small we really are. I think every young person transitioning into adulthood has a realization. One day you wake up and realize that everyone is just as confused as you are. They may have figured out the little stuff that seems beguiling at times. They may have figured out how to pay their bills on time and keep food in the refrigerator, or mastered some difficult technical skill or shown a particular aptitude for an art. But they haven’t figured out the big stuff. They don’t know the meaning of life, they don’t know what comes after it, and they don’t know what may lead to a more verdant and peaceful society. So we turn to others. We hope that they are different than us. That they aren’t hamstrung with our doubts and insecurities and are instead endowed with leadership skills and great wisdom. We place these select few into positions of power and cultural significance, and at times an entire society’s hopes and fears rest on their shoulders.
The best of these leaders bear this burden. They hide their fear and doubt, or perhaps candidly and often charmingly acknowledge it, and press on regardless, doing their best to better their fellow man. But in the far more dangerous case, a chosen figurehead may mistake the power thrust upon them as a sign of infallibility, and gain unwarranted confidence in their every thought. The underlying premise in both cases is the same: we are all colossally, cosmically ignorant children fumbling in around in the dark, trying to find a light switch. We can either sit down and discuss how one might find the switch, or instead insist that we’ve found it, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
The most telling line in Sagan’s piece is this: “there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves”. That means no one is coming from those far off galaxies to help us. But it also means no one from the past is going to save us. They’ve left their writings, papers, and art as a guide, but it is by no means infallible. It’s riddled with the same mistakes and missteps that our history, and our present, is. Instead, we can find comfort somewhere else. We can look around at the world that surrounds us and see the great structures, achievements, humanitarian triumphs, and emblems of love and passion that fill our society. We can recognize that humans, as flawed and insecure as ourselves made these things, not out of infinite wisdom but in spite of it. With this recognition we can take a leap of faith and make a change that is unprecedented in our society. We can jump into the unknown. Not because we are certain of the outcome, but because we know that those who are still alive on this planet are the only ones that can make decisions for us. Because we know that those that came before us took the same leaps of faith and found solid ground. We must make the sobering realization that nothing about the whole of human society has ever truly been great. We must redefine patriotism not as the preservation of an ideal but as the pursuit of one. We must continue to build a society that holds as it highest ideal the preservation of what, to the best of our knowledge, is the most rarified and beautiful thing in all existence: life, the universe’s only way of knowing itself.
