Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts

Engineering Nostalgia



Have you ever noticed that a certain song, or a certain smell, or a certain taste invariably brings back vivid memories of a certain period of time from your past? I’ve been aware of this sensation for a long time now, as long as I can even remember. There are still songs and smells and tastes that momentarily invoke such intense memories of childhood or, most profoundly of all, my years spent in the height of my junior high school years where I was most happy with a specific group of friends and adventures. I cherish these tenuous ties with the past, and I’ve come to realize, sadly, that they will only fade with time. My hope is that the most meaningful among them will always persist. Perhaps the most deeply engraved of them will always provide this nostalgic effect, however brief it may be each time, because they’ve managed to dig themselves a burrow some level below the threshold of passing memories. I am convinced that those sensory ties which somehow become attached to individual memories are one of the most powerful links to be utilized in making sure that the most cherished memories of all can be held onto, can be nestled into rightful burrows of their own so as not to ever be lost altogether.

I think one of the problems is that the memories themselves will continue to age as one grows older, persistently crowded out by newer, fresher memories in each moment, and the relevance that the sense which is tied to them has will continue to be spread over more and more more-current experiences. Realizing this, I’ve made efforts to isolate those particular senses which I’ve recognized are linked in this way. A particular Glade air freshener (Hawaiian Breeze, I believe) still never fails to bring me back into my dear friend Dave’s old room in Cheyenne and so I will never  use it myself. I’m afraid that the aroma will begin to attach itself to the present day, and gradually remove itself from those precious memories. But picking it up off the shelf and inhaling its sweet fragrance will always put me back into those cherished times, into that beloved room and into those dear memories and into the fun-filled company of a friend so favored. Left to such few and far between indulgences, the link should remain strong, and I can always rely on it to transport me at my whim.

Another powerful example is any of many songs that I used to listen to consistently for a certain period. But every time I listen to one of these songs now, its relevance shifts at least very slightly into this moment, becoming bit by bit more attached to a more current time frame. Even so, many songs still provide this most enjoyable sensation, even as I continue to enjoy them. Some songs I’ve already realized have lost most of their relevance into the past, yet even so every now and then one of these songs still manages to transport me so vividly into a memory. There must be some subtle factors which continue to play a role, perhaps a certain emotional state or an extra sense such as smell, which still even today invoke the nostalgia at its deepest. And some songs, the ones at the very height of this power, have hardly even faded at all even though I still put them on all the time. They’ve managed to stand the test of time even still, even when I’ve enjoyed them countless times throughout the years, even though I’ve experienced so many new memories in their presence. They still take me back, still hold that original link. I am so grateful for this. These examples are definitely the most deeply held, the ones persistently refusing to be outdone in the present.

Taste is a tougher case; I think this might be (for me, at least) because there are not very many examples of unique-enough tastes that are specific to a narrow time period. There are a few, though. The first that comes to mind is a certain flavor of Doritos (at the time it was a “mystery” flavor, I think it ended up being cheeseburger or something similar) which when I have happened to find them again strikingly reminds me of a certain time period several few years back when I was playing a new game and eating lots of them. Another example is candy corn, which never fails to put me back into the mind of myself as a child enjoying the treasures of a long Halloween trek.

I wonder often whether some of these particularly powerful nostalgic links will continue to persist even as I join the ranks of the elderly. So far some of them seem so much more deeply ingrained into my mind, and I sincerely hope that I can hold on to these fantastically enjoyable experiences. I’ve thought long and hard about where this phenomenon originates, how it’s formed and how it can be retained as best as possible, and I think I’ve gotten a pretty good idea about how to keep them close, and even help to create new ones, most efficiently.

I’ve developed a strategy for willfully creating this phenomenon. I call it “engineering nostalgia.” For me this whole concept has been most powerful in relation to a certain clearly-defined and memorable timeframe of the past (not so easy to anticipate at the time) and, more specifically and controllably, in relation to more trivial things like playing a certain video game or listening to a certain album. If the video game or album is new to your experience, it is for good reason much easier to coordinate complementary senses to go along with them. What I’ve learned to do is this: when you begin playing a new game (or reading a new book, or visiting a new place), also buy a new CD (or at least begin playing one that you haven’t listened much of). The closer they coincide as brand-new experiences, the better the effect. If you can get hold of both a new game and a new CD at the same time, and begin experiencing them simultaneously, this is the ideal situation. For extra effect also buy a new air freshener and a new flavor of some snack, such as Doritos, you’ve never had before and combine them all.

So put in the new CD (and the new air freshener, and open up the bag of chips) as you begin playing this new game. Further down the road, even years and years later, any one of your senses, randomly reminded of any one of these sensations, will bring you back to this time period when you were playing this game and listening to this album and breathing in this aroma and tasting this snack and you can bask in the resulting nostalgia. It is a wonderful thing, made even more wonderful when you can willfully induce it.

Of course, playing a new video game is just one example of a time when you can anticipate a nostalgic bond able to be formed. There are many, many others, if you are careful enough to provide for them, such as a vacation to a new place or moving into a new house or buying a new car or beginning a new hobby. The possibilities are practically endless, because it really comes down to anything that’s new enough in our experience to be so impressionable. And the base act doesn’t even need to be new to you, it just seems easier to me. But maybe the secondary influence is what’s new. You might have been going for nightly walks for months already, but if you have a new album in your mp3 player then further down the road of life those songs are very likely going to bring you back to those walks, to the times when you were just getting to know those songs, and you will miss those times. You will long to be on that very same walk again, wishing you could experience it for the first time all over again.

Nostalgia is a funny thing, I’ve come to find. This feeling of such deep familiarity and longing seems to be not necessarily due to the belief that a certain timeframe was so “good,” but simply because it is gone. It is familiar, we know exactly what came of it, whether good or bad, and there is comfort in this. Even the not-so-good memories sometimes invoke this feeling. There are some periods of time that my rational mind would never even consider revisiting because of how rough I know and remember them to have been—but when some sense is spontaneously stimulated in just the right way to invoke the memory, I cannot deny the nostalgia. Part of me longs to be back in this time despite my avoidance, despite the knowledge deep within myself that I did not enjoy it. But it would be comforting even so, I realize, even if only because I know that things turned out alright, I survived to the present with a healthy grasp of new learning experiences, because this particular memory had its particular impact on the present. On the other hand, both the present and future are perpetually shrouded in mystery and we are always anxious for it to some degree, which I think works to reinforce the longing for the past. We don’t have the comfort of knowing how the future turns out like we do with previous events. But there is beauty in this mystery, as well—the future holds immeasurable possibilities that we humans alone have the ability attempt to foresee rationally and, most importantly, to shape so according to our desires.

Time may flow invariably and without the slightest bit of consideration for us measly human beings, but we can and must fill it with as much as each individual among us possibly can, and achieve the grandest impact as is our power to achieve. By whatever means necessary this must be done to truly make our mark. Impacts can come in so many forms, from a simple smile that influenced someone else in some positive way, to a deep conversation with a friend which helps them see something more clearly, to a bestselling book that millions upon millions of people read and are affected by, to an everlasting friendship that works to profoundly shape the futures that two people share together and independently because of the impacts they have on each other, to so many countless other possibilities. It’s impossible to know what random trivial or heartfelt acts might be the positive influence somebody needed at that moment. The beauty that is life is in our power to influence, at least to some degree—and every single last moment is precious beyond the most poetic words anyone could possibly put to them. Any means that you have in your power to engineer the nostalgia which is so powerful in appreciating the life you have lived is incredibly useful, and I believe should be passionately fought for. This may be as simple as putting forth the effort to realize that recent events are special and unique enough to warrant the extra care in uniting them with a carefully considered added element so that you can utilize this connection farther down the road. You can bring the joyful moments of your past back to you so much more readily if you have attached something special to them at the time.

So many people say that life is short. And I realize that this is generally meant to be inspirational, but how can life be considered short when there is absolutely nothing anyone can experience that is longer and more fundamental? Life encompasses utterly everything that holds physical meaning, everything that means anything! Every thought, every feeling, every joy, every sorrow, every last experience is a product of life in all of its glory in whatever duration each of us happens to “receive.” I feel like this insistence that pursuits should be sought after, and joys should be appreciated, because “life is short” are degrading the truest beauties that could be relished. If life is short then we might be more likely to hastily indulge reckless behavior, or fail to consider the most meaningful pursuits. Life is long. Life is absolutely everything that each of us will experience, and consider, and enjoy, and learn from. Life is absolutely not short.

It could be argued that one life was shorter than another. As a measure of time in its purest form, this is irrefutable. Tragedies happen to the best of us, without warning or meaning. But as a measure of quality, or of impact, it is definitely not so simple. One person’s life at 50 (or at 20) could have twice the lasting memories as another’s at any age, if such a value could somehow be quantified. But it can’t, really. In this sense it’s a matter of content, of perception and of impact. A life lived in fame is obviously favored to appear to have been more impactful, but is there any way to know? I don’t think any span of life will ever seem to be enough, no matter how long it endured, especially if people are compelled to think of it as “short.” This only stresses that the value of a life is not necessarily lessened much by a short timeframe. It is unfortunate, of course, that any life ends any sooner than it might have under ideal circumstances. But it is what it is, and I sincerely hope that the person in each such case had as fulfilling and impactful a life as possible in his/her allotted time. It’s going to seem short no matter what, if you have such an outlook, even for the longest among them.

And yet I can’t argue with the idea that someone who runs around proclaiming that life “is short” and, in turn, motivates themselves (and others) to live it more effectively, is certainly getting something valuable out of it. I just think the same value, and so much more, can be gotten out of life without this nonsense. We don’t need to convince ourselves that our time is “short.” We need to convince ourselves that our time is precious, and long, and we have all this priceless span of life to fill with as much positivity and goodness as we can manage. Do it because it is so long, because there is so much available to fill it with.

I wonder what is even meant by that generic phrase “Life is short?” Broken down to its individual words, the phrase lacks meaning. “Life” is obvious; it is the perception each of us has of our surroundings in the duration that we have them. It is life, it’s self-explanatory. We all know what life is. “Short,” however, is a comparative argument; there is no “short” without acknowledging something that is not. Certainly, in respect to the lifespan of a giant tortoise (reportedly an average of 177 years in captivity), or of a Redwood tree (reportedly 500 to 700 years) or of a star (our own rather “average” star will supposedly have “lived” for 10 billion years by its end), the average human lifespan is but a fraction—a decent fraction of the giant tortoise, but a mere nanosecond of the “cosmic day” compared to the star. But what real relevance does any of this have? We are not giant tortoises and we most certainly are not stars. Their lifetimes apply to them and reflect upon the grand scheme of things from their individual perspectives but need not imply any sort of shortcoming on our part. So what if a giant tortoise lives 177 years? Its life is trivial compared to ours. Nothing against humongous elderly turtles but, come on, their biology is so much simpler and so much more accommodating of their “long” lives. Can a giant tortoise entertain abstract thoughts and shape its environment to its will? Can it even move faster than five miles an hour? Would anyone seriously give up their human inheritance for these extra hundred years? Stars perpetually burn unimaginable amounts of fuel throughout their ridiculously long lifetimes, but they’re not even sentient. They can’t communicate with each other and share in mutual pursuits. They are stars. Any comparison is silly and fruitless. What real meaning does the comparison of years hold in any of these cases, or in any other?

Perhaps this judgment of shortness is being compared not to the lifetime of another thing, but to the lifetime each of us desires to experience. I think most people probably would like to know that they are going to live well beyond any averaged estimate of their society, or even the record breakers. But this shouldn’t make the life we are living, and whatever life is going to be in store for us, any less incredible or meaningful. It shouldn’t make us feel like it is short.

The average human lifespan is reportedly about 63 years (higher, of course, in first-world countries). As recently as 1796 the average lifespan was around 24 years (again, higher for first-world countries). Some are claiming that, as of today, as many as half of the children born will see their hundredth birthday in good health. And the children of these children may be looking at a reasonable likelihood of living to be 120 or 150! This thrills me to no end. I dearly wish that I had been born in this projected generation that is likely to live to be 120 in good health. The point is, we do have influence on the length of our lives. The evidence seems to suggest there is not some upper limit of barely more than 100 years, like some seem to believe. If life expectancy has been climbing, and continues to climb with appreciable progress, who can say it’s going to stop? Of course there are undeniable biological processes at work; bodies degrade and organs cease to function on their own, but clearly there are means to extend this downfall. We have every reason and every chance to put our unique human potential to work and extend this beautiful and mysterious thing that we call life for as long as we possibly can. Without it there is nothing, and I cannot consider that an acceptable alternative. What is nothing in the face of everything? If there are still more possible ways to advance the average lifespans of our kind, healthily and without significant consequence, then I absolutely believe that we should pursue this. I don’t believe there is some boundary inherently imposed on us by some all-encompassing force, over which we have no “right” to achieve. The boundary is ours to determine, ours to influence and improve upon by whatever means we gain understanding of it and competence to do so.

We tend to live our lives in defiance of the impending doom which is sure to eventually come. We indulge in material things, and in (sometimes foolish) “fun” pursuits, and we shrug off the idea that it’s all temporary. The people who act most recklessly (within reason) seem to be the most highly regarded by others. I mean, I’m all for having a good time, and making the most of my “prime” years, but I also feel like more meaningful pursuits are more advantageous at any age. This trait should not be shunned, but admired and strived for. The generic advice of the elderly is generic for a reason. We’re bound to realize this eventually, so why not as early as possible? We can still be somewhat reckless and have a good time while being considerate of whatever future we are imagining at each moment and efficiently factoring this.

This is all, of course, without consideration of a spiritual afterlife. I need to make that clear. Such a thing is just wildly difficult to mix into an argument (not to mention the number of people who will simply dismiss it). In fact, I respect this viewpoint, the idea of a spiritual eternity, most of all. But even so, even in the face of the promise of the most wonderful, glorious, eternal afterlife, if you believe in this, the physical, worldly life loses none of its significance. My argument does not change at all. Because an eternity of blissful spiritual afterlife is, by definition, going to be fulfilled regardless of the length of the timeframe spent roaming the Earth. What’s another ten, or fifty, or even a couple hundred years in the face of eternity? As a matter of worldly years, it doesn’t matter when you reach this eternity. You won’t even notice. But it makes all the difference here in the physical existence. You will have experiences, and you will impact others, and you will leave some sort of legacy. Another 50 years, if it were ours to be had, holds all the relevance in the world. You’ll never even know, once it’s said and done and you’ve achieved your spiritual afterlife, how long it took, how long you might have had to “suffer” (I disagree) through the physical realm. Any number of years is of no consequence in this regard, but any single year holds unimaginable promise here where the laws of physics bind us and our fellow humans need our help and our communication and companionship.

So give these things while you can. Indulge your passions. Make it count. Life is certainly not short, but it is all we have and the moments will flow by like a raging river if we aren’t careful to always make the best that our individual potential can make, and stay focused. Stay intrigued. Stay curious. And for the love of all that is good and just, be friendly and reasonable and share all that you can share with your fellow humans. What else can we do in this time that we have? Petty disagreements and judgments and ill-feelings in general are just silly. You should be ecstatic with joy any time your eyes fall upon those of another human, any fellow human being, especially when you know them personally and have any sort of memories and experiences together. To paraphrase the great Carl Sagan, you could travel a thousand light-years and never meet another. We should all be the best of friends, every last one of us. We should all be experiencing the joys and fascinations of life, and even the sorrows and pains, with one another. We should all be doing what we can to make sure the memories we have made, and perpetually continue to make, are as impactful and long-lasting as possible. We all have ultimate power over all of these things, including also our hopes and anticipations of the future. The best is yet to come.


Posted by Unknown | at 12:56 AM | 2 comments

The Garden of Forking Paths




There is this theory in quantum mechanics called the "many-worlds" interpretation. To my (limited) understanding--not to attempt to claim that I know practically anything about quantum mechanics--it theorizes that there is no "waveform collapse" when two potential futures are reconciled. Instead of one reality, and only one reality, progressing continuously through each and every decision in your life (and everyone’s lives), one world line path becomes two (or more) at every possibility point, separating into alternate, parallel universes, and this branching happens every time a choice is made. While this description may not be the one a trained quantum physicist would try and explain to you, I’ve gotten the impression that this is the general idea when applied to the everyday world around us. So I’ll just run with that; whether or not this understanding is technically accurate and true, it’s incredibly interesting nonetheless.

The most striking disturbance I have with this idea is…what exactly determines when a timeline branches? Does this occur at any conscious decision? Or just those that exceed some somehow-determined boundary of significance? If it's the former there would of course be a truly unfathomable number of such universes, infinite in all practical meaning. And even with the latter, unless the boundary was extremely high, there would be an enormous number of realities still, perhaps virtually infinite as well. There must either be a line or not, and if so, then where is it and how is it determined? And then I wonder, is there a branch for every possible decision one could have made? For instance, if I am asked to pick a number between one and ten, and I pick five, is there a branch for each other answer I could have given, or only one for considering a true-false scenario (I either picked five or didn't play the game)? Technically I could have said anything--one, zero, ten, fifty, rhinoceros… I might not even have spoken a response; maybe I nodded or decided to dance. The Universe shouldn’t know whether or not some potential answer was actually valid within the scope of the question, so I'm intrigued to wonder whether the branching is only done when a choice is made or not made, or if there truly is a branch for every possibility.

My other most striking concern with the theory is that none of this is tangible in any way. Even if one exists in five hundred billion parallel universes, all branched from various moments in one's own and in others' universes, it will go completely and utterly unrealized by each. So does it even matter? Does something you can't possibly hope to demonstrably verify have any meaning whatsoever? While the thoughts of all this bring me some comfort, thinking that there might possibly be versions of myself who made so many of the “right” decisions in life which I only later came to realize in this reality, the impossibility of confirmation prevents most of the comfort I wish I could feel. The excitement mostly fizzles out when I grasp that no possible branching can actually provide any true objective meaning.

Still, I can't help but imagine what this all can imply in the mind, if nothing else, at least at the most significant turning points of my life. I suppose inspiration for self-reflection is worth something, if this theory provides us nothing else to glean. Because there is a garden in your mind, a rich, fertile ground from which any combination of possible thoughts can be planted and grown to whatever lengths and however many branchings you might take them to. All it takes is a thought, a seed, and then some consideration, some nourishment, and your mind is free to wander to your flooded heart’s content, if you just let it bloom. Enjoy the fruits of imagination.

Perhaps the most significant factor of all for the ways in which a person’s world lines might have branched furthest is in the environment one grows up with. Every time my family moved (my mother was active duty Air Force) was certainly a very significant "choice-point." I was born in Maryland and then lived in Washington D.C., Massachusetts, Missouri, Nebraska, Wyoming, and then Missouri again. Any one of these could have ended up being my family's permanent residence under other circumstances. If there is an alternate universe for each of these possibilities, in which I've grown up in a completely different environment, surrounded by utterly unfamiliar landscapes and cityscapes and circles of friends and acquaintances, they would of course have progressed in radically different ways from this one and from each other. I would have grown up with strange people and likely done things I never even dreamed of in this reality. In an alternate universe there could be a version of myself, doing whatever it is he might do, who has lived in Maryland his whole life, who never moved away in the first place. He’s been there all his life. How bizarre that idea is! I mean, I’m trying to imagine and I just don't know…I am utterly biased towards the life I have actually led. It's very difficult to imagine a life that progressed completely differently since a point before I was even two years old. But it could exist, and how interesting would it be to meet him? I wonder what he’s made of his life up to now, what friends he’s chosen, what pursuits he’s held on to, what successes he’s enjoyed, what failures he’s endured and learned from. I wonder what he’s like, how good of a person he is. I wonder if we would be best friends.

This also means that there could be a version of me who never moved from Cheyenne, Wyoming so many years ago. Cheyenne, where I grew up during my most formative years and have retained, even to this day, some of the most powerful friendly bonds I’ve ever made. This is the thought that hits home most of all--that in some unreachable parallel universe may be a version of me who didn't miss out on the Cheyenne life during all these long years since my family moved away. He was there all along, oblivious to the suffering of the “me” who wasn't. Of course, this version wouldn’t have it all good. He would never have met so many of the incredible friends I’ve made since my family moved to Kansas City. For all the memories that I could possibly imagine might have had the chance to have been made if I had been there in Cheyenne all along, there are a comparable number of experiences that I actually did make here where I’ve been. Of course there are pros and cons at every point, which I guess is why I am so struck by this whole idea, but it’s so completely fascinating regardless. This is not regret or despair, but awe and wonder at simple possibilities my mind can fathom.
I just wish I could communicate with him, if he somehow truly exists in some parallel realm. I wish I could ask this incarnation of me how those… wow, eight years, now, as of summer 2012, have been. Were they as wonderful and blissful and full of nonstop joy and appreciation as they've played out in my head countless times? Did the friendships last and stand the test of time even better than they have through my occasional visits? Are we having the time of our lives together anywhere near like we’ve had in so many of my dreams manifested in the deepest sleep? Am I on a bright career path? Did I fall in love? Has it lasted? Am I better off?

I would ask him about all my friends over there. How did things go when I was around all along, as opposed to only briefly during some select summer or winter vacations? Are things as great as I have always imagined they would have been, or have I perhaps been over-projecting my guilt of leaving? Is everyone still good friends with each other? Did I help to provide some sort of social adhesive to people who otherwise would have drifted apart? Do we all still have as much fun in this world as we have when I come to visit from my own? Or are things largely the same, on the grand scale of things, minimally affected by whether I’m actually there or not? It wouldn’t even truly matter what the realities may be, because they are all ruthlessly interesting regardless, no matter how much positive influence I might be projecting into such a reality where I might have actually had a role to play in its overall “success.” Of course I want to have had, and may see myself as having, such an impact. But actually knowing the full truth is its own joy altogether.

I would then ask him about Dave, unquestionably the deepest, most profound, intertwined and enjoyable friendship I have ever had. How is Dave? What is he like, having had me there all this time? As things are, Dave and I have taken, in some ways, very different paths since we parted ways in 2004. There are some things that we don't quite see eye to eye on now, but many, many that we still do… but these differences are trivial, and the floodgates inevitably open so wide when we reunite. And all the long years and all the daunting miles that have haunted our separation are swept away as all the memories and all the connections we have ever formed come flooding back in like a raging river, unstoppable and undeniable. Then it's almost as if those years and miles were never even in the way to begin with, and we can enjoy the shared glory of our friendship for whatever time we have. At best, usually, I get this for two weeks of each year. But how different might it have been if we had remained neighbors perpetually? How much positive influence might I have had for him and him for me? It's difficult to say, to say the obvious. I get chilled just putting serious thought to it. My mind gets a bit cloudy; there are far too many variables. But I imagine, with all the honesty I can muster, that it would be an incredibly beautiful thing, for each of us and in each other. I feel like it would outshine any downside to having remained there all along by enormous degree. Such is this single connection.

So it ends up being a little awkward, this longing to be in both places at once. If it were somehow possible to combine the best of both worlds it would solve so much. If only I could just cut Cheyenne out of the earth (people, power, plumbing, everything) and fly it over to Missouri and lay it down in some nearby open area, some already-prepared jigsaw puzzle piece of an empty space to drop it in. If I could incorporate the friends from both sides into my current everyday life, if I could have all of my deepest friendships right here, each and every one of them within the reasonable means of each and every other one of them to connect with, I would be hard-pressed to desire anything else in this world.

And then I wonder what if each romantic relationship had not ended? This is another huge significance, assuming that each relationship was aimed at the long run, if it had gotten far enough to be established as such, as they should be. Inside alternate branching realities, based on different sums of decisions and factors, each case could have progressed onto some wildly different path. So perhaps these are still going strong in some alternate universes, where whatever it is that messed them up was somehow avoided by some pivotal decision unrealized in this one. The ability to observe the results would be most interesting in these cases, as well. How far would they have gone by now? Would there be a marriage on the way? Might I have a family yet? Could things have been worked out effectively, or was it doomed no matter what? Was the outcome I’m familiar with inevitable? These curiosities are impossible to determine, ultimately, sitting here surrounded by the perpetual flow of a single course of history… and that frustrates me. Unknowns are so frustrating, and I now realize this is one of the reasons why this whole theory is so captivating to my mind. It provides for me a means to ponder on what could possibly have gone differently, and produce an outcome entirely separate from the one which I’m so fundamentally familiar with. It doesn’t need to imply that you wish this imagined outcome to have been the case, it only means that the alternative is interesting in that it never came to be but you know it had even the slightest chance to. Because the willful mind is such an incredibly wondrous thing, providing for us the limitless possibilities to imagine countless realities as suits our whim, and consider what certain outcomes might have come about given alternate circumstances. And perhaps we might even learn something useful for this objective reality which we actually have control over.

What if my father had not left ten years ago? That would be another extremely different reality, another one I can hardly comprehend--the impact would be huge and profound. It’s amazing how some things become so normalized, so ingrained into our minds simply because it’s all we know, because we can only experience one single timespan, because that’s how the world around us works, apparently. It becomes hard to imagine things any other way. And when you try, you get this vague idea that it would have been so nice, but…getting more than that out of it seems difficult. It's hazy, like there is some general sense of how things would be, but... the data is just simply insufficient. There are far too many variables, again. You can only wonder, and imagine what that version of you is experiencing in the world that you project for them in your mind.

And what if I had picked a different college, or a different degree program, or not moved out with my brother several years ago, or even not written this? There are so many possibilities for things to have gone differently. And of course there would be unfavorable parallel universes, as well. There would be one in which I dropped out of high school (since the thought crossed my mind), or never went to college, or never bought my current vehicle, or never had that very first conversation with Dave, or for that matter any other person who’s ever been in my life.

The fascinating thing is that any, or, really, all, of these twists and turns throughout the garden of forking paths might be true realities of other representations of me. And of you, and of everyone, with some details changed. I suppose this is why they say the past is so dangerous. Not completely, of course--everything can be seen favorably, at least constructively, in some way. The good memories are, of course, positive reinforcements, and the more the better. The bad ones, however, are useful in their own ways—they can be warnings, lessons, and points of comparison. They can be things to avoid, experience to pass on. Optimism is a very, very powerful thing.

So it's all a profoundly interesting thought experiment, really, this little introspective here. It’s a daydream session, a trip down nostalgia lane with a fun twist. I'm sure everybody is aware of various moments where their lives took a decisive turn in some direction. Does it interest others that those choices might have spawned their own realities? Even if you can only ever attempt to imagine their implications, this can still provide some valuable insight for you if you can relate to it effectively. And hopefully you can shape those insights into positive applications for what you actually do have knowledge and control over.

I'll say this: if I could somehow verify that these alternate realities do indeed exist, and if I could somehow determine their locations in space-time, I would do everything in my power to tear a wormhole in the fabric of space-time right here in front of me with my bare hands. I would figure out how to navigate myself through them in any direction that I choose and give myself free reign to visit some of these other possibilities. Just to see for myself. I wonder how some of those other realities have turned out. And even if I come across a particularly beautiful one, I'll come back, for sure…

at least to say goodbye.



Posted by Unknown | at 10:15 PM | 4 comments

Defining Our Past And Shaping Our Future



 




The world seems to be advancing technologically so rapidly that even some of the devices which were at the pinnacle of consumer luxury a couple decades ago are now some of the most rudimentary and perhaps sometimes not even recognizable by the younger generations. I myself am relatively young at 24, and yet I've had the opportunity to witness the incredible advancements of quite a few branches of technology in my time so far. There must have been a time when record players, to give a simple example, were such amazing devices, and then cassette players became so much smaller and portable, and then CDs offered so much more space and quality, and then the digital era offered even better quality and eliminated the frustrations of skips and scratches and misplacing and limited storage. I remember listening to cassette tapes as a kid, and buying my very first CDs as a young teenager, and then buying my very first mp3 player a few years later, and being so utterly fascinated at every step along the way.

The first mp3 player I ever bought, sometime around 2004, seemed so wildly incredible at the time. For the hefty price of $70 or so I could fit 40-some songs on a 128 megabyte device, which was more than twice what I had grown so accustomed to fitting on a mix CD. And on top of that there was no concern over tracks skipping on a jog, or ever having to buy new blank CDs when I wanted to make a new mix. This was the most profound appreciation of mine at the time; I didn't need piles of mix CDs anymore. I didn't need to toss a disc every time I wanted even one single new song to be included on the current mix. The digital contents could simply be updated. And now, for the same price or less, you can easily get 8 gigabytes of space or more and the capacity for thousands upon thousands of songs and any combination of separate playlists. The sum of the contents of dozens and dozens of mix CDs can be enjoyed by a few touches on a handheld digital media player with sufficient size.

Similarly, video media has gone from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray (not even considering all of the varieties of digital file types able to be shared online) with the quality and cost improving all along the way. Of course, when a new format and new devices to play them with are developed, across all medias, the prices start higher, but they quickly decline and before long a device vastly more powerful than the one you purchased several years before is even cheaper. Today I could buy an mp3 player with 16 times the storage capacity than that first one I ever purchased for a mere ten dollars. And you would probably face difficulty in even finding a place that will take your old VHS tapes or even DVDs from you for a fraction of what you paid for them back in the day. Their demand has almost entirely vanished, for good reason, in the wake of so much vast improvement.

This digital age has certainly disrupted things, and not only in the music and video industries. The high technologies of even a few decades ago not only lose their popular use and their monetary value, but you can hardly even give them away sometimes. They just become so utterly outdated by the perpetual advancement of newer devices and ideas, and eventually only the vintage or nostalgia-seeking collectors see any use whatsoever in their ownership. But they will always serve as healthy reminders of how far we've come, and tantalizing hints at where we're still going.

Not too long ago I bought a shiny new printer. And the other day I needed to scan a document so that I could attach it to an email. And so I did; I put the paper on the tray, pressed the scan button, and selected its destination. And it struck me right then, considering for the first time this option that was now available to me to send it directly into a folder on my PC, how absolutely incredible technology is. This was all done wirelessly--the printer has no tangible link with my computer. And yet, when I place a piece of paper onto its tray and command it to scan it for me, suddenly an exact digitized replica of it exists as parts of the 1s and 0s navigable within the depths of my computer. And I can send this data to anyone else on the planet if I wanted to, and they could have it, see it, even print it out for themselves, and no physical link was ever made between us. It's like exactly how magic would be if magic were a real thing, but this is real and we can understand it and we can manipulate it to our will.

Arthur C. Clarke said that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I think this holds some deep insights, considering so much of what we have at our disposal in today's world that would probably send a person from a thousand years ago screaming away in terror and condemning us as demons. Who could have thought, at the time, that we'd be able to almost effortlessly communicate with people anywhere else on the planet without even any physical link? Or even see them on video monitors? Or fly across the oceans? Or film movies? Or cover so much of the planet with artificial light? Or find the answers to so many questions with just a few keystrokes into an online search engine? Sometimes I wonder if the entire concept of magic has really been all along just the inexorable progression of our thoughts and understandings of the world transformed into the fanciful dreams of what we wish we had the power to do.

And then the day comes when we do have that power. Have you noticed how so many things are becoming more and more automated and touch-free?  Oftentimes doors will open for you as you approach, lights will turn themselves on as you enter a room, toilets will flush for you as you leave, faucets and soap dispensers and hand dryers will dispense for you as you place your hands under them, and devices will even operate by spoken command and turn themselves off after an idle period. Increasingly often you don’t even have to touch a doorknob, or a light switch, or a toilet or faucet handle, or a paper towel dispenser (or even a paper towel). You can walk into a bathroom, use the facilities (well, a guy, at least), wash and dry your hands, and leave, all without ever touching anything.

You don't even have to touch your hard-earned cash anymore. I handle cash less and less often even as I continue to make more money and purchase more things. I rarely have more than twenty dollars in hard cash in my wallet; more often than not I have none at all. It strikes me sometimes that this is a really incredible thing, this ability to accumulate and spend money without ever actually touching the tangible pieces of paper and cotton and linen we’re so used to thinking of it as.

Like most, I imagine, I work a job and have funds automatically deposited to a bank account with every paycheck. I never actually see it. I don’t bring a check to a bank, and my wallet doesn’t grow fat with bills. The money just shows up as if a fundamental part of my being. So long as I utilize only that amount of money, debit purchases are like the simple returns on that labor, to be acquired at will. Each time it deposits it’s like I just became worth that many more dollars, and it’s almost as if I can just walk into places and visit websites and help myself to my desires, as if my presence holds an intrinsic worth only requiring verification by a small piece of plastic and a few numbers. With the simple swipe of a card I can walk out with a cart full of food, or appliances, or video games, or any combination of things I wish to own, or even have them delivered to me. And that little piece of plastic, that card which represents my monetary worth, doesn’t change. It remains safely in my wallet and yet represents so much of what is laid before me to enjoy. I only have to go out and acquire it. Sometimes it feels like I’m not actually purchasing something, I’m just going and grabbing a thing that I want and it’s now mine and later I go and perform some tasks that I enjoy doing and the cycle repeats and the world is just mine to appreciate as I please.

Social media has become a truly massive force in the world. In a few seconds you can create a profile on any of several major websites, add some  pictures and some interests and some history, and continuously present yourself to the world through public postings. Some reports say that as much as 25% of all Internet page views are on social media sites alone. You've probably heard some of the generic complaints such as "people used to actually know their neighbors" and yet today's society has been shaped so that you can know any number of people all over the world. Of course there is some concern over still maintaining actual physical relationships with people, but sometimes it seems as if the simple new wave of potential is making it seem like so much of the physical is gone. Such a phenomenon has never been known before, so it's no surprise that the controversies abound. I don't believe this is the case; I still see people hanging out outside with each other all the time. I still spend as much time as I can get with my dear friends around town. I still cherish face-to-face communication more than any other, and I can only assume that this is generally the case universally. It's just that we have so many more opportunities now. If not for social media I would have lost the majority of the connections I've been able to maintain despite the major moves I, and others, have made. Never before has a person from, say, the U.S. been able to randomly become acquainted with a person from, say, Australia, and share thoughts and feelings with each other without ever having actually been closer to each other than a few thousand miles. A healthy mix of digital and physical communication is arguably more valuable than any other combination has ever been. You can even share your physical relationships with your digital ones, and vice versa. You can connect with more people around the planet than you can likely even comprehend. Thus cultural hurdles are so much more easily avoided. The world seems like a much more fitting, opportunistic, shared place when people have social access to others around the globe. I don't see how that's a bad thing if you look past the minor issues.

If you're curious about something, you can find almost anything to your heart's desire with a brief Google search. The amount of information available to us just sort of "floating" around on the internet (also in textbooks and the like) is truly staggering. A person can get at least a basic understanding of such topics that took the prodigious minds of Newton, Darwin, Bohr, Einstein, and the like an entire lifetime to puzzle out…using nothing but a keyboard and a few keystrokes, and/or some page turning, and some reading. As a certain telescope manufacturer, Meade, proclaims on their website, with even a cheap telescope and the knowledge of how to find certain celestial objects one "will see more objects in one night than Galileo saw in a lifetime."

For so much of history a person's skill set has been almost exclusively utilized for monetary gain. That was how you made your living. But today, with this tremendous advent of social connectivity through the internet most of all, people are willing to share their expertise on a subject, with their own precious time and resources, for no other gain than the near-selfless enjoyment of doing just that. Of course, some gain fame and fortunes still, but so many remain virtually anonymous despite their thorough investigations into insightful questions or the development of popular apps or wiki articles or software or independent music or film or artwork or writing or general advice or practically anything one could desire to seek out. There seems to be a profound movement in the use of spare time and skills for the betterment of the general public even if this means that the contributor does not receive specific recognition. Perhaps such people just simply treasure the enjoyment of doing something worthwhile even if it's not relevant to their personal career. I find this incredibly beautiful.

And there are always still people out there making discoveries, even at this very moment, and our descendents will, in turn, be able to seek out and understand their contributions in the same way (probably even more efficiently) that we are entitled today. You don't have to be an employed astrophysicist, or personally know  someone who is, to share in the current times of such a field. Each generation has the advantage over the previous of having access to the accumulation of all of recorded history in their grasp, and today more than ever (and tomorrow even more so) this unimaginably deep well of knowledge, this collection of our incessant desire to understand the deepest workings of the world around us, can only continue to provide us with more understanding, which in turn leads to more probing questions, which in turn leads to more insightful answers, which in turn leads to more understanding, which in turn leads to more probing questions…

The world is certainly changing, shaping, progressing ever-onward. We have at our disposal things that were probably never even dreamed about in the wildest fantasies of our distant ancestors… feats that they may have never even imagined the grandest wizard could perform. The boundaries of our knowledge are, at every new moment, always pushing the frontiers of our thoughts in new directions. The most fantastic, magical ideas in the minds of those living today could very well be the simple play-things of the children of a few generations to come. This all just makes me so prideful to be here—part of humanity. I look forward to every other new advancement, every improvement on our quality of life, for as long as I can enjoy them. The best is yet to come. It's going to be so fascinating.


Posted by Unknown | at 12:28 AM | 13 comments

Starlit Blackness

(December 11th, 2011)

 
Life gets so very busy at times. A week can go by, sometimes even a month or two, and you suddenly realize that some event that you once considered to be immediately recent is now almost entirely lost into the past, sometimes inconclusively muddled into the rest of the surrounding depths. You might have trouble recalling what day some remembered event happened on, or what other events of the same timeframe were. They become a blur, now mixing with ever-more-recent events continuing to confuse things. You lose track of the individual moments, of the complicated mesh of factors which constantly work to make you who you are, make your decisions what they are, make your life what it is. But we must realize that our existence in this world is due entirely to the ever-playing-out unfolding of the sum of all of the moments of our past. Every single intertwining thread of your personal history, unimaginably complicated in its interweaving with those of every person you’ve ever had influence with, imposes its role on the present. The being you are is utterly, fundamentally made up by the being you have been, and this being you have been is entirely abstract, compounded by the passing of each and every single moment as they pass by ever-fleetingly into the perpetually growing collection of your memories.
 
But you cannot look upon the past as a meaningfully continuous, unbroken assessment of influences on the present. Your past is fragmented, broken and scattered (unless you are an exceedingly rare case who can seemingly remember everything) across your notion of time so much that it’s often difficult even to gauge the time difference between two events you know (for whatever that’s worth) must have occurred in close proximity. So many of them get twisted up among themselves, and it may take a directed, powerful conscious effort to recall enough details to place a meaningful correlation upon one such event in respect to any others.


Rather than a reel or stream of video able to be accessed at your leisure, the influences of your past make up a sort of collection of discrete luminous points against otherwise utter black nothingness. Because you won’t remember everything... black nothingness reaches out to swallow up everything that is not somehow committed to permanent recallable memory. This is what’s behind you, if you were to consider yourself as a point on a sort of lifelong timeline. These discrete, luminous points against the all-encompassing blackness are your memories of the past, some nearer to the “present” and some much more clear and distinct than the rest despite their varying time-distances, and therefore brighter, more distinguishable. Around you, then, everything in clear focus beside you is your present—unhindered by distance, at least within the extreme recent past, and able to be viewed in all of its immediately considerable glory. And in front of you are mere projections, ultimately indistinguishable in their haziness, exponentially more so as the projections increase in forward-time-distance, but sometimes clear enough to grasp a future you may have considerable control over bringing about.

You stand at the center of this thought experiment. Time is a river, ever-flowing past your rooted position, forever working to glide each moment smoothly past you into the swallowing blackness of the past. Yet because you possess this remarkable faculty to recall events, those which flow behind your immediate vicinity are not necessarily lost forever—they may become luminous points, positioned somewhere behind you among all of the complexity that is your past experience, and are then able to be recalled at will. But not all—not even an appreciable fraction of all—of the events which flow behind you take on such a form. Most of them flow right past and meld into the utter blackness so fully that they will likely never be recalled again. Those that do not share this fate, those that take on their luminous positions against this encroaching blackness, are usually those which are most worthy of this honor. They were somehow more meaningful than the rest which failed to attain such status, most likely because of an emotional tie or any number of such personal significances. Perhaps all memories, every single moment, is assigned a space into this blackness, but might be so vanishingly faint that no amount of effort will ever fully recall. Regardless, those which take their place above the threshold of conscious recollection, bright enough to be seen when you turn around to look, are by definition those which will have the power to remind you of where you came from, what being you have been and therefore what being you are and what being you have the power to become.

Filtered in this way, those memories which somehow survive the passage into meaningful luminescence will take their place amidst the surrounding blackness and other such “survivors”. Some will even work further; they will constellate themselves into meaningful groupings which will then yield even further insights, multiplied by their cooperation. Negative memories will provide for you recollections of mistakes or other such reinforcements of an event which could hopefully have some sort of insight gleaned from them. You can use them to avoid similar recurrences. Positive memories will remind you of things you did right, or things that happened to play out favorably, and in turn will help to shape your present attitude so as to create more such favorable points. Ultimately, you want each moment to flow by you on its way to take its place as a brightly shining, positively reinforcing memory to be recalled when its relevance will serve you positively.

They say it’s dangerous to dwell on the past… doing so hinders your progress, eats up your focus which could be better spent dealing with the ever-present present and planning for an effective future. But an effective future is, in all likelihood, going to be achieved through an effective understanding of the past. Those luminous points shining so brightly behind you are forever there for you to analyze. They most likely hold the most profitable keys to a successful future, especially if you can see them for the ways in which they may relate to a current situation, how they might be constellated into a collective meaning, but even when this is not obvious the more happy memories among them will always work to remind you of fortunes you once held within your grasp, times which were once being experienced in a long-lost present. They may yet hold secrets to blissful fortunes you would otherwise overlook in constant consideration of the present/future. The goal, clearly, is to develop an effective balance of past, present and future considerations. But it often seems to me to be the case (and I hope I’m wrong!) that the past is the first one consciously dropped, unfortunately, in favor of the alternatives.

A busy life is not unlike a massively populated city, so crowded with people and buildings and lights that most of the incredible starry night sky is shrouded in its own produced glare. People go about their lives, of course living, physically, entirely within the present, but their probing minds may not reach far in any other direction because of this convoluted mess always stealing away their attention. The vast majority of the bright points of light standing out among the rest of the mind-numbingly black sky are drowned out entirely and people don’t even stop to realize that there are countless more beautiful stars lighting up the blackness, staring them in the face if they would only take some time to separate themselves from such unrelenting focus on the present and just take in some of the wonder that is just outside the reach of their typical lifestyles.

If you’ve ever looked at the sky far enough away from any electrically populated area then you probably noticed the utter, almost indescribable vastness of the night sky as practically uncountable numbers of stars were made apparent to your unaccustomed eyes. It’s absolutely incredible, I believe, as few times as I’ve seen such a sight myself (and I certainly hope to see it many more times in the future!), and yet is almost entirely overlooked within the daily routines of the vast majority of the people on (largely civilized portions of) the planet today. Today’s modern world, with all of its widespread electricity bringing us the wonders of artificial light, heat, internet, refrigeration, gaming, and the like, often neglects to remind us of the difficult stages we’ve been through. So caught up in our modern technology, bringing us our superior artificial light and entertainment, we sometimes lose sight of the enormous scales of time in which such luxuries were not possible because of the available resources and knowledge. Long ago, people saw such sights every single night (discounting clouds and such). Of course the modern luxuries would not be possible without the struggles and the breakthroughs of the past, and they are inherently meaningful to us all because of this fact, but even so we tend to discount the matter entirely when current stresses and trials call much of our attention to the present, into the glare.

The intense glare of the present moment tends to far outshine the past, even where it is directly related to the very well-being of that which we hold so dear to our present lifestyle, because we see it as it is and tend to believe that the struggles of the past—however tightly they may have been intertwined with the luxuries of the present—are gone, and only worth fleeting consideration when such a thing is forced upon us. But set aside some amount of time, such as a carefree weekend (as many do when they get the chance), and go and enjoy the uncomplicated luxuries of a relaxing camping trip, or some such trip, spent far enough away from modern civilization that you can truly appreciate the incredibly vast sight that awaits you when you gaze upon a clear night sky. Even when you are looking upon the clear night sky in all of its unsheltered glory, you could probably assign every single star in the sky a memory of your past and not even come close to exhausting the entire “library” your mind has at its disposal. There certainly aren’t enough constellations in the typically recognized assortment to map out all the complicated connections.

Our personal lives are like that, in a way. So caught up in our present moments, so engulfed in all of our modern habits and technologies, we tend to lose sight of the awesome complexities of our past lives which may hold untold fortunes for our present and future potentials if we were to give them proper consideration. They get lost in the glare of all of this modernity. But those starry points are there, even if you do not see them currently. Take a few steps back, and some time to devote to careful consideration, and they should make their way back into the sky as the glare of your overwhelming present subsides for a time. Do this occasionally. Remember your roots. Each of us has much to learn.

Each of us can be considered a similar, though wildly uncomplicated, model of humanity—just as we have so much to learn for ourselves, from ourselves, so humanity has much to learn for itself… from itself. What is available to be remembered of the past is, by far, the most effective way to indulge this necessity. Because things done wrong can be perfected, and things done right can be repeated… because we remember. Because we have the capacity to look back upon an event long past, recognize its brightly shining light so much like a beacon upon the utter blackness of the rest of the past, and devote our time and our consideration to its usefulness. Because the past is forever entangled within the present, and realizing this and seizing this phenomenon for all its worth opens up untold windows into the best possible futures—both for you, and anyone, as individuals, and for humankind as a whole.

The starlit blackness of the past is our only true guide into the hazy unknown of the inexorable future. THE BEST IS YET TO COME.

Posted by Unknown | at 11:39 PM | 0 comments

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