time travel

Life advances in chunks when you are not careful enough. A new career, a new home, a new human being, these enter my world more obtrusively than changes used to. I am less reflective, or maybe less able to be. My writing sits in 2011, my opinions in some similar amber from almost a decade before then...but I am still tired somehow. The children make a damn fine excuse, but somewhere in the folds of my guilt I know I am just as I always have been: lazy, cautious, a little timid...

I reflect most often on older adventures. I love my current ones, but as time turns memories to self-perpetuating myths, discarding the pain and fear that once came with them, they turn into soft nostalgia, warming but heavy. The sadness of nostalgia has always somewhat fascinated me, it is a concept that can only be explained in anecdote: the sinking feeling in my stomach when I think of that long walk with mom on a fall afternoon when we found the candy in her favorite black coat, the coat dad would accidentally ruin later that night (dry clean only) and I realized for the first time in some weird materialistic way that we often can never go back again and that even trivial moments can be important.

We can never go back again.

I would. I think I would. I would return to Southeast Asia, perhaps just for that day in the torrential rain, dodging the larger mud piles on a sprint home from language class, slipping everywhere, smelling the life of life mixing around me...it is indescribable, except to say that I love it and miss it, and yet am saddened by its impermanence.

I tell myself to hug those boys because soon they will be men, with their own adventures that will no longer include me. Hug them while you can. But they want to play XBox, or head down to hill to play ball...I call my dad, we swap conspiracy theories, and we are both sad somewhere deep in there about things unsaid and undone, things we cannot return to even if we would. I think we would.

dread

I keep reading and hearing that there is a lot to be afraid of these days. As global challenges force a need for broader perspectives, compromise, diligent but patient thought and action, it seems our political, economic, and social landscapes are increasingly defined by just the opposite: polarization, uncompromising ideology, and principled egocentricity. Our challenges are enormous while our capacity to overcome them is impotent.

This fear is also more personal. As a child I ran fairly free, my more often than not included hopping on a bike and peddling out to wherever: up and down trails and back streets, across town to friends houses, to little shops to spend whatever change I could steal from between couch cushions on tootsie rolls and candy cigarettes. There was never the intense fear that I face today with my own child: what if someone steals him? Hits them with their car? What if he falls and no one stops to help him? What if he is scared and knocks on the wrong house?

The fear is equally felt on the other end of the spectrum. Today, Sunday, I took a short walk through town just as the churches were letting out. At a coffee shop just near the waterfront I came across an old man who was trying to stop people on the sidewalk. He was quiet and polite, but desperate, eyes were wide as he reached out to people, saying "Excuse me... excuse me..."  He reached out to me, and I stopped.

He asked if I could walk him across the street, walk to him to bus stop. He was mostly blind, old, alone, and terrified. As we waited for the bus, his arm wound around mine, still shaking, he began to tell me how he has been going to church here for 40 years, but only in the past three or four has he noticed that no one helps him anymore. Worse, he explained, people have started abusing him, kicking him or knocking him aside on the street. He is not sure if it is accidental or intentional, but he didn't seem to care which, he just knew that things were different and they filled him with dread. He kept grabbing my hand, "Are you still there? I am afraid. You will make sure the bus stops for me? It usually does not stop unless you wave it down, but I can not see it coming..."

It is hard for me to really determine whether things have actually changed. I have certainly changed. My parents likely felt the same fear I do now, and old, blind men likely felt just as abandoned and in fear. But I now see these things as I didn't before. I remember reading that at about age 26 males begin to associate consequences with actions, and as a result begin to see a world beyond their own immediate needs, and likely this is where my recognition of dread comes from: I am now capable of actually feeling it not just with regard to my own situation, but with regard to those other lost souls groping in the dark for someone to guide them.

'the singularity'

refers to a number of awe-some, awe-full, or awe-inspiring things. I tend to freeze up among the nuances of gravitational, conical, curvature, and other Hawkingesque nightmares of physics...I need good old fashioned American simplification, so I reduce the term: when the finite meets the infinite.

The 'technological singularity' is one I can at least wrap my head around, if only to grunt in protest. As access to information grows, while our ability to take in and process it does not (evolution being unable to match the speed at which technology alters our information landscape), our species will require augmentation to "keep up" with our technology.

"Augmentation" is usually thought to be technology interfaced with biology directly, helping stretch natural limitations into unknown shapes. We will need help to manage the speed, scope, interconnectivity, breadth, and depth of a world increasingly saturated with complex information.

This is a necessity borne of necessity. And yet, I cannot shake the sly doubt that it is all largely shit. What bothers me isn't the notion of wiring my body and brain to something external, I'm not a Luddite, and actually can't wait until I can get something to help me actually finish an issue of The Economist, but I do wonder about priorities -- will my ability to finish that issue of The Economist make me a better person? A better spouse or parent? A better citizen? Will our vastly expanded mental and physical capabilities lead to a better world?

heliotropism

is the tracking of the sun, east to west, of certain plants, flowers, and leaves.

There is a man on television, some archive footage on Al Jazeera, with a well groomed beard and soft brown eyes under a furrowed brow. He is very young. I imagine he is at an age I hope to be at soon - old enough to be humble, but young enough still to retain large portions of unadulterated hope. The trick is to gain one without losing too much of the other... I imagine that is easier said than done.

Behind the man is a wall of flame, unexplained, billowing smoke into what appears to be an already polluted sky. The story, I learn, is about this man's death at the hands of a suicide bomber. There are other important details, but I get lost quickly. The video switches between the footage of the man speaking in front of flames and the building in which his life was taken, now just a charred frame with debris scattered out into streets. Men stand around, scratching heads, wringing hands, and then a quick shot to some pools of blood on otherwise clear concrete. And then the story ends and there is news about football.

We rely on myths to overcome, to ignore, or to explain these types of things. Some rely on God, or a lack of God, and others rely on distractions. I have my own versions of both, but one of the more compelling and foolproof is the tracking of the sun, from East to West, every day--that heliotropic myth, the tired notion that new days always rise again, and we all will move, whether or not we are ready for it. Life is. Perhaps it is painful, frightening, and overwhelming, but it remains, against weird odds and with a struggling glory that I can't help but admire and want to talk about...

...and perhaps I share a desire, as so many authors before me (from whom many I steal, consciously or otherwise), to share that admiration in some way. So this begins. Part narcissistic outlet, part genuine scratchboard for half-formed ideas, this space is an attempt to capture and retain my thoughts on the tracking of life across that sky.

I begin with this myth, heliotropism, because it frames so much of who I am as an American and makes sense of our history and collective conscious. But I also start here because this particular myth distinctly resonates with me, a born wanderer, yet bound by the irrationality of maturity and responsibility. My whole being is drawn to following that large orb across the planet, but the wonders of an emerging middle age, the constructed responsibilities and expectations and...oh, my six year old, does he get enough sleep? and am I saving enough for college? and...so...well, we all need to walk the tight rope to the other side of the building, and I find my balance is much better with a place to store my words now and again.

That man, on television (the story is replaying again, and this time I see other details: Afghanistan, some leading role in the police force, the West's last hope...), there is something to the way he died that invites thought. Something to the way people end up in the explosions that they do, the small choices we make as we chase orbs and the large consequences we could not foresee at the time. It is hard to not feel completely helpless.

Ah, but the sun will rise again.  It always does.