Forest Walkway

On the Family Business

I've always wondered what it would have been like growing up with a family business. As it was the very idea seems somewhat foreign to me. On one side my grandparents were dairy farmers and on the other it was...well I'm not exactly sure what they did, but it wasn't exactly a line of work that could be followed. Both my parents were in the military for a short time and did various jobs before settling into government-related work. So growing up I thought that a job was just something you went to do in order to earn money, which it in fact is, but the work my parents did wasn't anything that they wanted to pass down to me. Some people grow up in a family of cops or business owners. So in those situations it may seem somewhat logical that the career choice was a bit more predetermined. They say you can be anything you want when you're growing up. While that may be true for some people in some situations, for a lot of people there are limitations to what our career choices may be. Having family that already owns a chain of McDonald's would certainly help someone if they too wanted to get into the restaurant business.

I've often wondered how family businesses even get started. My entire adult career has just been a series of jobs in offices. For the most part I'm very interchangeable with the other drones who sit in a cubicle all day. It's not exactly a bad thing because apparently the modern world needs people like me, who are willing to contribute to the process, whatever that may be. Then there are others who have stepped off the path and ventured out on their own. There are some very enterprising people out there. Someone could look at a location and realize that there is a need for a vending machine. At first it may be a means to make a little additional money. If the location is good and they're contentious about stocking it, a vending machine could make you a fair amount of money. Using the proceeds from that one machine a person could potentially buy more machines and expand to a point where it becomes their primary source of income. To me it's that first step of deciding to buy a vending machine that would never occur to me. Is that because of my upbringing when it comes to jobs? Maybe partially it prevented someone like me from ever straying from the traditional sense of work.

Growing up I had no idea what I wanted to do for a living. Truth is I'm still not entirely sure. I know that I want and need money so I just do what seems rational to get it. It was very late in high school that I even decided where I wanted to go to college or for what major. The whole thing was almost on a whim. I knew I liked computers. I knew that I had at least some talent when it came to them and they were still considered to be fairly new in terms of everyday use. Before they were being run by guys in California who knew how to speak the incomprehensible language of the computer and had math skills that made normal people run in fear. At least that was the perception we had of computers in those days. A recruiter came to our school to talk about a technical college that would get me a Bachelor's degree in three years. A real degree too, not some fake degree you'd get from the University of Grenada. Up until that point I had carried around this idea that maybe I'd become a robotics designer, not knowing anything about the field except that it sounded cool. Having done some research it was going to be less about designing The Terminator and more about building a robot that welded a bumper onto a truck. Not the most exciting work out there. Plus the math required was intimidating. While I was good at math at the time, it wasn't exactly the kind of thing I wanted to spend my life doing. So after the recruiter's presentation I met with him to talk further about his college. Thing went very quickly from there. I suddenly had a direction and I just went with it.

While I was in school I was more or less on autopilot. I started this education path that would lead to a career field, so I was going to do what was necessary to finish it. Part of that was because I had never failed when it came to academics so failure to graduate didn't seem like an option, as cliche as that may sound. The other part came from the fact that I couldn't think of anything else to do should I not like where I was going. High school is almost like a salad bar when it comes to subject matter. They offer you a bunch of different information, but you ultimately take what you want and go with it if you're interested. I won't say high school was uninteresting, but nothing had really sparked for me. At least not until I started using computers. Really my career has been based on the fact that as a teenager I lacked the imagination to think of anything else.

There are some people who know what they want to do for a long time before they actually achieve it. A guy I went to high school with wanted to be a pilot for as long as I had known him. After we graduated he went to the academy to become a pilot. As far as I know that's what he's doing now. Sometimes I wish I had that kind of laser-like focus when it came to a career. I often wonder what kind of jobs other people do if they're not in the computer industry. In my mind there are like a dozen possible career choices, which is obviously limiting the true scope of the job world.

So what is it about certain people who decide they're not going to sit in a cube or the thought of doing so wouldn't even occur to them that makes them do the things they do? Is it easier for those people who have a family business to go into? I'm sure in many cases there are those who don't want anything to do with their father's scrap metal business or become a lawyer like their mother. Still having a predefined choice might be nice. Is your current career something your children could follow you into when they get old enough? Would you want them to? I wonder if the jobs we do today will be antiquated by the time our children are entering the workforce. What happens to the family business when there is no longer a need for that business?

Skyfire

On the Background

Normally I'd ask do you notice how we tend to overlook so many things in our lives, but that's kind of the whole point of this topic. We don't notice them anymore. All too often it seems as though the majority of the things in our life fall to the background, almost as though they've been painted in to give the illusion of substance. It's not exactly taking them for granted, but we may to fail to see them. How often do you really look at the things within your life? If we're not paying attention to what's around us, then what are we paying attention to?

When I say things in our lives, it can really mean a bunch of different aspects. The first one is the most obvious one, the stuff we collect as we travel through life. This could be furniture, cars, gadgets, or even houses. It's the accumulation of things that surround us. Even if you're something of a minimalist, you will gather up various things throughout your life. In a lot of cases those things aren't in the forefront of our perception of life. They're largely ignored once we have them. If you don't believe me, think about all the stuff you own. Then think about the last time you even touched everything you own. You know it's there and maybe there is a bit of comfort knowing that even if you don't touch it, you know it's there when you want it. As the saying goes "you don't know what you've got until it's gone" it's only when something is removed that you realize the hole it may leave. Sometimes we behave like a child and only want something because it's gone. Prior to that we may have just assumed it was there whenever we wanted it. Maybe that's just our idea of what comes with ownership. It's ours to do with what we want, even if we want to do nothing with it.

A larger problem is when we do the same thing with the people in our life. Now not everyone you know is going to be the focus of your attention all the time. It's just not realistic. Still there are probably people in your life that you assume will be there regardless of if you talk to them. They're doing their thing and you're doing yours. By that logic then it's very likely you yourself are in the background of someone else. People often wonder how they drifted apart from someone they were once close to. There could be a lot of circumstances for that, but it really comes down to allowing them to fall out of focus, where eventually we start to overlook their presence at all. It's not always a bad thing though. Sometimes in life people just go down different paths and those roads don't have the same destination.

It brings up the question of if something is in the background does that make it less important to us? Now I'm not saying you need to be hyper-aware of your surroundings or the people in your life, but it's interesting just how much of our life blurs into the background. It's very similar to how most of our life is in the past. We seem to be aware of only a fraction of the entire picture that makes up our life.

Darkshore

On Ghosts

When I was growing up I had the typical fascination with all things supernatural. The world was new to me and there was so much that was unexplained. Because of this I was willing to read about all kinds of various possible answers to the seemingly unexplainable events that happen in our weird little world. I had this Time-Life book on Ghosts, which described all sorts of ghost stories and their origins. It was presented in such a way that my child brain believed it to be factual. This was a Time-Life book after all. Looking back on those kinds of books it helps me realize how those stories lasted so long before the modern age. Today if you want to find out about something you type it into your search bar and in most cases there will be a Wikipedia entry on the subject. Also in most cases people treat this as the authority on the subject because at the bottom of the page is a nice list of references. Not to get into the validity of Wiki pages, but really it's much harder for myths and legends to perpetuate themselves when you have the internet and television shows dedicated to "finding the truth". Then again it's really hard to know that what you're seeing is based on reality. My dad used to say "Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see." Now you pretty much have to question more than half of what you see because it's becoming easier to fake reality. Back when these stories were being told there wasn't any way to counter or verify their validity.

I've talked about death before and how if ghosts do exist, given the number of people who have lived and died on this planet, then this place must be swarming with ghosts. Unless there is some kind of requirement to become a ghost. Maybe ghosts are those who didn't pass the entrance exam to the afterlife. The real question though is: Why are they here? Granted most of the universe is so complex that to our eyes it's an endless stream of chaos. Some believe there is purpose to things and in that regard everything happens for a reason. I'm not sure who's right, if either of those ideas are close to what's really going on. Regardless, one would have to figure that if ghosts exist then there has to be a reason for it.

I guess you could go back to where those ghost stories originated. Were these stories based on real events or just manifestations due to our lack of understanding of the world around us? As I mentioned with conspiracies, people are natural storytellers and may exaggerate what they believe they saw because at the time it seems real to them. In some cases the story overshadows reality and takes on a life of its own. Is it possible that some sailor saw something off the starboard side that he couldn't explain? Yes, it's very likely considering the ocean is essentially an alien world with species living under the water that we don't even know about. So some strange fish in a storm suddenly becomes a mermaid. Today we like to explain things away with science because it's very comfortable to have a rational explanation to something that was probably very scary to people a hundred years ago. Even a supernatural phenomenon like the doppelganger has recently been explained, at least possibly explained. Using electromagnetic stimulation to a specific part of the brain, the test subject felt the presence of something that appeared to be a man. Granted the scientists who were running experiment didn't understand how or why this feeling of another presence was happening, they only knew that it was happening. So it's possible that those people who saw what they considered to be their double were experiencing increased electromagnetic activity within their brain.

Then again, it's possible that the experiment tapped into a larger issue. As you may know I'm a believer in the possibility that there are additional realities besides just the one we can perceive. What if applying electromagnetic stimulation to our brain opened up our ability to see that other part of reality that's normally closed off to us. Along those lines it could be that ghosts are whispers from the next reality over. What we call demons or spirits might just be "aliens" from another dimension. There was a fairly horrible movie called Event Horizon, which if you haven't seen it (count yourself lucky), is about a spaceship with an experimental engine that disappeared and has suddenly returned. It is revealed that when the engine turned on it opened up a gateway into space-time and jumped into another dimension that was chaos. In the movie this dimension was essentially our idea of hell. The movie was a mess of ideas, but I liked the one that hell is just on the other side of our reality and it's so alien to us that to even see it would drive a person mad.

We are all just energy and when we die that energy has to go somewhere. There are a lot of ideas on if there is a thing as a soul, but let's say for a moment that our soul is the consolidation of our energy. Upon death that energy has to transfer itself somewhere. Some believe that the soul simply moves to another Earthly body in the form of reincarnation. Another idea is that based on balance of positive and negative aspects of your life you are drawn to specific afterlife locations in the form of heaven or hell. The idea of a ghost is that the energy didn't make a complete journey to its final destination and is instead stuck in a sort of limbo. In that sense the ghost is just residual energy left with no place to go. Since we're not currently built to see the energies that surround us, for the most part we don't even know that there is anything else out there. That is until that energy gathers enough strength to impact our physical world.

There have been lots of theories on ghosts and supposedly unfinished business. Think about all the things you've ever done in your life. How much of your life was unfinished in some way? Maybe you're the kind of person that completes everything you start, but if you're like most people then a large part of your life is made up of false starts and unfinished business. Very rarely does life give us any kind of closure. It's unfortunate too because in a lot of cases we as people need closure in order to move on. You know what happens though when you don't have closure? Nothing. Even without closure you eventually move on. That is if you're a capable adult. Otherwise you let it haunt you to the point that it's crippling. So the idea that ghosts are people who died before they finished what they were "supposed" to complete would mean that nearly all of us are going to making a return trip here after we die. I say that because I don't know a single person who doesn't have some kind of regret. The amount of regret that causes a person to stick around as some kind of half-entity must be almost unimaginable.

It's a scary idea to think that ghosts could exist because we just have no idea exactly what they are or the circumstances that are needed to become one. Even more disconcerting is that just beyond our field of vision there is a whole array of supernatural entities floating right in front of us. It reminds me of the saying "I'm not afraid of the dark. I'm afraid of what's in the dark." We're living the dark, but we don't know it.

This is Ponderous

Have you noticed that time is so precious that even when it's free that if you don't spend it right it can cost you?

Footfall

On the Straw

Everyone has a breaking point and in most cases it's not just a single thing that's going to push us past it. More often than not it's a culmination of things or events that lead us to finally snap. That's how life is, it's not just one thing, but a series of things, the weight of which may eventually become overwhelming. It's the straw that people tend to focus on though. How many times have you found yourself losing your temper over something seemingly benign? You suddenly snap at someone who said something you didn't like or you see red when someone cuts you off while driving. The individual incident itself may have been frustrating, but all the events leading up to it contributed to the final melt down. Visualize all your stress as weights being added to your shoulders. Eventually you'll get to a point where you just can't hold it up any longer.

Frith told El-Ahrairah "All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and when they catch you, they will kill you... but first they must catch you." Some days it feels like the whole world is working against you. The frustration of feeling that way may be too much for us. Suddenly losing control of your emotions isn't fun, but what's worse is when you know it's coming and feel almost powerless to stop it. It's almost like watching an avalanche from the top. I guess an important question would be how do we know when it's all becoming too much before it actually overtakes us? It would come down to understanding what is it in your life that's working against you or even the things that contribute to your stress. Granted just about everything in life causes some kind of stress, either good or bad. There must be something that can be done to counter it at the time rather than letting it build up. I suppose that is something easier said than done though.

Some of the problem could originate within ourselves. We can have a tendency to overextend ourselves or underestimate the impact of certain things will have on our lives. Young children can be easily overwhelmed just by going too long without rest. If you've ever spent time around small children you'll know what I mean when it's around bed time or when they've been sick. Everything may seem fine to them and then it's like a switch was flipped and they completely lose it. Now sometimes it's just that one particular thing that sets them off, but in a lot of cases it's multiple things. They're overly tired or had just too much excitement that their tiny little brains essentially give out for a moment. For children they're just not mature enough to know how to identify that the situation is quickly moving out of control, much less understand how to cope with it. Instead they flip out and go straight into emotional reaction. Unfortunately as adults we may revert to this type of behavior from time to time. And in some cases people never learned how to appropriately deal with an accumulation of stress.

It makes me wonder if it's physiological thing, at least partially. There needs to be a certain level of emotional maturity there as well, but I wonder if some people are experiencing a physical reaction to stress. You know how some people carry their stress in their shoulders. That's just the part of the body that's taken to absorbing the stress the person feels. I think everyone has an area of the body that does that for them. For some it's their back. For others it's their stomach. Whatever it may be, the body is experiencing physical alterations to non-physical stimulus. Even if we're not conscious of it, our mind is registering that added stress in some way. Eventually the mind and body need to shed some of that stress, almost like venting heat from a reactor. It's when we go too long that things start to get really ugly for us. So maybe we should stop looking at the straw that broke our back and instead look at all the weight that was slowly being added before. It might save us a little bit of pain.

The Beaten Path

On Second Thought

If you're anything like me then you've had moments of conflict.  Not conflict with someone or something, but within yourself.  If you're really like me then it may feel like you're constantly in conflict.  Have you ever noticed how often times what you want and what you need tend to be different things?  That has been a major theme in the story of my life.  I used to think it was a Gemini thing, but the more I've talked to people, the more it seems to be a pretty common thing for everyone in general.  We seem to be a somewhat contrary species, especially with ourselves.

I've mentioned before that in life it seems that everything has a cost associated with it.  I think that cost really comes into play when dealing with duality.  For instance I've always wanted a simpler life, possibly living in the country.  I used to visit my grandparents' farm and it seemed like a wonderful kind of life.  Away from all the people with nature all around.  However, when I was there I would always want the modern conveniences like cable television or a store that sold more than one kind of magazine.  That kind of simple life came at the cost of missing out on things I had become used to having.  I remember on one of my last visits there I woke up to the sound of Metallica in the distance.  It wasn't overly loud, but it was normally so quiet there that sound could really carry.  I went outside trying to identify where the sound could be coming from.  I finally found that it was drifting in from the farm across the street.  Someone was working in their barn and had the music playing so the barn was acting like a megaphone.  I sat there and listened to the next few songs, appreciating the irony of how I wanted to get away and as soon as something familiar showed up, I ran right towards it.  Having experienced both country and city life, I've found that I want the best of both worlds, which may not exist anywhere but in my head.

The same kind of thing happens when people go camping.  When I was a little kid my parents would take us camping in what I consider to be real camping.  We would pack tents and travel gear.  Plus my parents would dip into their stash of MREs, which I was so excited to eat.  My dad would drive for what seemed like forever until we found a spot.  Then we would setup tents and experience being out in the wild.  The food was different and how you prepared it wasn't like how you'd do it at home.  How you spent your day was nothing like how you'd normally spend your time.  It was such a drastic change from every day life.  At least that's how I remember it.  Go to any sporting goods store, hell just go to Wal-Mart and look at all the various things people can bring when going camping.  Packing for a camping trip can be more intensive than packing to go on vacation.  There are water filtration devices, gas grills, portable picnic tables, and other camp gadgets that make roughing it not so rough.  And we can't forget campers.  I know lots of people swear by them because once you go camping in a camper you don't want to sleep on the ground again.  I can understand that and I'm not saying one way or another is right.  Still it seems somewhat contrary to want to head out into nature and take everything with you.  It's almost as though you've just defeated the purpose.  But that's how people tend to be.  They want one thing, but only if that means they can have the other too.

In a lot of cases I think it comes down to the fact that people rarely know what they want.  Add to that we often don't know what to do with something once we have it because it may not live up to the expectation we've built up for it in our head.  Someone could say that they want to be in a relationship because they think it will make them happier than being alone.  Once they get into a relationship they think about how much simpler life was before they had another person to consider.  So they start thinking about maybe they want to be single again and the cycle starts itself all over.  The reality of the situation could be that what they need at the time is to be alone in the first place, but it runs contrary to what they want.

The whole thing got me wondering if it is possible truly believe in two conflicting ideas.  There seems to be a constant battle between our rational side and our emotional side.  In many cases the heart and the mind want two different things.  When asked about his peace sign on his helmet, Private Joker said "I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man", which in the context was both funny and horrible.  Unfortunately for us it tends to be the same when it comes to real life.

Ghost Land

On Our True Nature

It's been asked before "How well can you ever really know someone?" No matter how close we get to other people, there may always be something that we hold back from the world that's only for us. Some might call these secrets and maybe they are, but it's more just something we don't reveal.

When we meet someone for the first time we tend to only show a fraction of ourselves. In a job interview we put on our best professional face and try to convince strangers that we're capable of doing good work. On a first date we try to show the other person that we're interesting and do our best to hide our craziness. It's only after we get to know someone that we start to let our guard down a little bit and pull back the curtain to show more of ourselves. For each person this process may be different. If you're like me, it takes a long time for me to feel comfortable around someone to show them more of who I am. Until then I may keep things a bit more on the superficial side. Others may just throw it all out there right away and if the other person hangs around then they become friends. If not, then they both go their separate ways. I suppose that second way is pretty good because you get all the pretense out of the way and save some time not having to deal with people who don't like the "real" you.

Do you ever find yourself behaving differently around different people? For instance around family you may be more reserved, but with your close friends you're the one ordering the fourth round of shots and suggesting base jumping into the reservoir. Does this mean you're hiding your true nature from one group? Or are you taking on a persona to match the expectations that were set long before? I think we tend to put labels on just about everything. So instead of being a fully formed person with complex dreams and ideas, we're put into categories like Mother, Son, Husband, Friend, or Co-Worker. That label becomes an idea about who a person is. Your parents were people before you were born. They had a whole other life before you came along, but we only know them as Mom and Dad. As a child our world view is very limited so we only know what we see. There comes a time while growing up that you start to get a sense that your parents are not the masters of everything they do. In fact they're often just trying to do what they think they're supposed to in order to keep you alive. It's not until much later that we start to see them as people. That label starts to slip off a bit. Sure they'll always be Mom and Dad, but hopefully they'll be a little bit more fully formed as people to us.

We can lose ourselves in labels. Talk to a parent who no longer has any children in the house. Sometimes it's hard to know how to deal with the world because for so long you've looked at it from a specific role. Once that role is complete there may be a huge question mark as to what comes next. They will always be a parent, but that's no longer the primary aspect of their life. The same thing can happen when any relationship ends. After a break-up or divorce people have to start seeing themselves as something other than a boyfriend or a wife. The label that's been put on us may not be all that we are, but it certainly colors our perception of ourselves.

You may have heard about someone going to go find themselves. For a long time I didn't know what that meant because I couldn't understand how you'd lose track of who you are in the first place. The older I get the more I see how it's possible. The dreams you may have had as a kid take a backseat to necessity. Life may not take you where you wanted it to and before you know it you're off living a life that you didn't intend. The person you were or wanted to be may go dormant. I'm not sure if that old self is always there or if the transformation to your current self essentially erases what you used to be. I guess that becomes part of the search to see if you can ever bring back who you were or who you wanted to be. In some regard we may have hidden our true nature from even ourselves. So I guess the question is who are we really?

The Black Forest

On Music

Music is kind of a special thing for me because more and more I realize that I need it. When I go a day without hearing some kind of music, the day seems to have been missing something. It wasn't always that way though. I'm not entirely sure when it happened. I suppose like most kids I grew up listening to whatever my parents were listening to. For some that can be downright painful. I'm pretty thankful that my parents listened to stuff that I liked. I grew up with Pink Floyd, Queen, and Journey. Most of it was on vinyl because back then cassette tapes were only just starting to appear, so the music had a unique sound to it that I think has been partially lost with today's digital age. Part of me misses the pops and scratches that came along with those songs. As a kid I just assumed it was part of the song. I think in a lot of cases music captures a certain time for us. It's almost like a Normal Rockwell painting, in that it recalls a nostalgic time that maybe didn't exist exactly how we remember it, but the music brings us back there anyway.

As I got a little older I started to stray away from what my parents were listening to. I found that the music on the few radio stations just wasn't my kettle of frogs. This was the 80s so you can imagine the type of music I'm talking about. If you like that sort of thing then good for you, but for me it was like listening to someone strangle a baby elephant. There was only so much Poison, Def Leppard, or Cinderella I could listen to before it all started to sound the same to me. At the time it felt like there wasn't anything I wanted to listen to so I did the only logical thing I could think of at the time; I just stopped listening to music all together. Sure I would hear the occasional song if someone else was playing music. I just wasn't actively looking for anything and mostly didn't care about music.

In high school each classroom had a television in it. This allowed for the faculty to broadcast various things on the closed circuit system. In the mornings students were able to get in front of the camera and basically do the morning announcements. Often they'd have some extra video or music before or afterward. For the most part these were things you could watch without thinking. One morning in freshman algebra they played a video from some band I had never heard of before. Some stringy blond haired guy was singing about the world's worst pep rally. When the video finished my algebra teacher said "What the hell was that?" That was the question alright. Before that moment I had never even heard of the band Nirvana or that music like that could exist. It was like a whole new world was opened up to me. I know that may sound like I'm overselling the impact of Nirvana on the musical world, but for me they were a big deal. I would imagine there are moments like that for a lot of people. It could have been they first heard The Beatles or Metallica. It's at that moment that you realize the world you thought you knew had so much more to offer.

From that point on I wanted to know more music, even if it didn't sound like what I heard just then. Not long after I bought my first CD, which I bought from a guy on the bus for ten dollars. I listened to AC/DC - The Razor's Edge over and over, not because it was exactly a great album, but because it was my first CD. It started to snowball from there. New music just kept appearing seemingly out of nowhere. All the time prior to that I had just assumed what was being played on the radio was all there was. My friends became a great source for new types of music. Every time I would go to their house it seemed they somehow gotten a hold of some strange new band I would have never even known to look for. Most of this stuff wasn't the kind of thing that they played on any radio station we could pick up. It was up to us to go out and find it on our own. Even now when I see my old friends they still manage to challenge me musically, playing stuff that I had no idea was out there. One of my oldest friends is a DJ so it's kind of his job and passion to discover new music, something I still haven't found a knack for.

At one point I got the idea that maybe I wanted to create music. My friends, who were infinitely more musically talented than me, were playing guitar and drums so I figured I should try something. I managed to convince my parents to buy me one of those electronic drum pads for Christmas. It didn't take long for me to realize that I had no musical talent. When I was in elementary school they put me on triangle because I couldn't play anything else. As for the drum pad, I might as well have been standing on the back porch banging pots together and yowling like a cat for as good as I sounded. I resigned myself to be more of an appreciator of music than a creator of one.

I've talked about the state of FM radio today. It hasn't changed that much since I was a kid. If a person only listened to what was playing on FM radio they would be missing out on so much music that's hiding out there. I'm not saying all radio is bad. For the past ten years I've been listening to the college radio station in Boulder (shamelessly plugging Radio 1190). While I don't like everything they play, they have consistently played music that I would have never heard otherwise. If I had to choose only one source of music for the last ten years, they would have been it. It's nice to still manage to be surprised by music when sometimes it feels like everything has been filtered down to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Night Shade

On the Five Year Flaw

When I was in college Dodge had recently made a major change to their Ram pickup truck. It put them back in direct competition with Ford and Chevrolet. At the time I remember wanting one because 1) they looked cool and 2) I had heard that Dodge trucks were pretty reliable. A friend of mine said that I should wait at least another four years before getting one though. When I asked why he said that there was supposedly a five year flaw built into all the new models and in a few years that flaw would begin showing itself in the first generation of vehicles. It sounded like a great conspiracy theory regarding manufacturing, partially because it almost had a ring of truth to it. I suppose that's how conspiracies get started though by sounding like they might possibly be true. Add to that at the time there was no way to verify if it was true. You would just have to wait and see if in five years the Ram truck suddenly fell apart. Still the idea may have some merit because more and more it feels like things aren't built to last. I know in saying this I will probably come off as an old man who is nostalgic about how things worked better before. I don't know that they always worked better or lasted longer, but there seems to be a definite trend for things to have a short shelf life. Are things built today intentionally designed to fail in a relatively short amount of time?

In most cases a person will do what they think they can get away with. That may seem cynical, but look around at the world today and see if I'm making it up. There are exceptions where people go above and beyond. You may take pride in your work or whatever you do and that's good. Just because the majority of people behave as though they don't care doesn't mean you should behave the same way. Although it can be disheartening to put forth seemingly more effort than those around you and find that the reward is roughly the same regardless of quality. That could be what perpetuates the problem. So when a company is manufacturing something they'll often do the least amount of work or use the cheapest possible materials. You may have heard about government contracts being awarded to the lowest bidder. It makes sense that you don't want to spend more than necessary, but in some of those cases the bid came in lower than everyone else because the quality was significantly lower than competing bids. Think about that when you see planes flying overhead or a rocket launching.

When I was a kid VCRs were a somewhat new form of technology. As soon as the first video store opened in town we decided to buy one because it opened up a lot of possibilities when it came to entertainment. Back then we had about three or four television channels so a new option was really nice. That first VCR was a beast. It had the fake wood on the sides and weighed enough to stop airplane wheels from moving. It also didn't have any special features except that it would play VHS tapes consistently. Oh and you could fast forward and rewind. It really was a simple machine. That VCR lasted for years and probably played hundreds of tapes. As with most things it eventually started to wear out and like an old dog it just behaved like it was tired. It was time to get a replacement. By then the technology wasn't as new so prices had dropped and more brands were available. The next VCR we bought didn't last even half as long as the original. Sure it had a few new features built in, but it's primary purpose was to play VHS tapes. Before long it died. It didn't go slowly like the first VCR. The first one died of old age. The second one had a heart attack. Every VCR since that first one has only lasted a fraction of the time. Some were better than others and one could argue that maybe we got a lemon with that second one. That doesn't explain why every single one afterward didn't last as long. It's almost as though those other VCRs were the junk food equivalent.

You have to wonder if companies today find it in their best interest to create something that doesn't last. For the consumer a product that lasts forever would be great. However, for the manufacturer though it would prevent them from being able to constantly make money on selling new or replacement products. I remember thinking about how Willy Wonka wanted to make the Everlasting Gobstopper. The idea was that no matter how long you had it in your mouth, it would never dissolve, so you would have endless candy. No company would ever do that because why sell one piece of candy to someone when you can sell thousands over the course of time? My grandparents had appliances and tools that lasted for over twenty years. The idea of having to replace something every few years was unacceptable. Today something may last a couple years before it becomes obsolete or simply breaks thanks to cheap parts. Does that mean we're slowly creating a more disposable society?

The main character in Fight Club worked for a fictional automobile manufacturer and was telling someone how they determine if they should initiate a recall after an accident. "Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one." It may seem very dark and cynical to think that a company would be so callous, but in the end they are running a business. We do the same thing in our own lives. We weigh the cost of the consequences compared to simply leaving it alone and decide if it's worth the trouble. Companies just do it on a larger scale. Sony could decide that it's more cost effective to use transistors that have a 30% chance to fail because based on the number of units they're going to sell, only a small portion could ever see a problem. For them there would be no need to alter that unless something exploded. Back in 2000 there was a big deal about Firestone tires essentially killing people. According to Ford only 241 tires out of a million could have a defect. If you translate that to a percentage it's so small it almost seems insignificant. That's probably what they thought too until people started dying. Experts attributed at least 250 deaths to the Firestone tires. In the year 2000 there were an estimated 41,821 deaths from automobile accidents, which means that the Firestone problem was responsible for less than .6% of those. If the media hadn't caught wind of the story it's very possible that Ford/Firestone would have kept on manufacturing the tire. Strange how the story from Fight Club became reality not too long afterward.

Lately there has been this big push for things that are "Green". Hollywood and the media have been shoving it down our throats, trying to show how in touch they are with doing the right thing. While I think the sentiment is good, it often feels like they only just discovered there was a problem or it's just another trend that will go away once it stops getting attention. Ultimately it's part of a larger issue that there is a finite amount of resources for anything and at this point in time, where we are supposedly the most technologically advanced as we've ever been, one has to wonder if it's antiquated mindsets that are misusing what we have left in order to make a quick buck. Although sometimes it's hard to fault them for doing what they feel is necessary to make a living. Still there has to be some way to balance expense with quality so that everyone gets what they want.

Painted Forest

On Subroutine

Everyone has heard of the five stages of grief. It's normally associated with death, but it's really more to do with loss, death just happens to be one of the biggest losses we can experience. The thing about these stages is that they always happen in the same order. How long it takes to get through a stage my vary from person to person, but you will go through it before you can get to the next one. The only way to overcome the feeling of grief is to move through all five stages. An interesting thing about it is that in most cases you're almost powerless to prevent the reaction. You will experience denial followed by anger, even if the transition between the two is within moments of each other. The whole thing brings up a question about pre-configured behavior built into us. If the reaction to loss is a predictable pattern of behavior then could there be others that we don't know about? I've talked about control before. What if we're running through a series of predetermined subroutines?

When I was talking about smell I mentioned the idea that there were possibly built-in reactions to specific scents. Our reaction to them isn't based on personal preference, but rather something physiological at work. If we have a standard response to loss then logic would dictate that there would have to be standard responses to the opposite end of the spectrum. Granted not everyone reacts the exact same way in a given situation, however, maybe there is a mental road map that all people will have to follow in order to get to their destination.

Speaking of which, grief from loss seems to be something that's fairly well mapped out. We know how we will react, even if we'd rather not. It's just a matter of fact that it's going to happen so if you were being rational you could predict what was coming next. Or at least have a good idea of what to expect around the next corner. The thing is while we're in the middle of it one of the last things that we are is rational. It normally takes someone else outside the situation to recognize what's happening. We're typically riding the wave of emotion so our ability to predict anything has probably been compromised. In fact we tend to be fairly bad at predicting how we will react to a situation. Something like the death of a loved one may seem like something we will never get over, but more often than not we do recover. On the flip side we seem to convince ourselves that certain things will make us happy for longer periods than possible. I read an interesting article about the futility of happiness, which essentially says that your brain overestimates the duration of happiness from good things and underestimates its own ability to recover from bad things. Even in that regard though there is a certain amount of predictability in our inability to predict how we're going to react. If that makes any kind of sense.

Some people may not like the whole idea that things are somewhat predestined because that means our sense of control is a lot more limited than we'd probably want. One may try to fight against this behavior in some futile effort to show the universe that they aren't dictated by emotion. I would imagine sometimes they may feel like they're successful, but are they just prolonging the inevitable? It's almost like a child fighting against bed time. The outcome is going to be the same regardless of how much they fight it, still they can't go quietly. Some people never lose that mentality. It doesn't matter if the outcome is a forgone conclusion, they will fight against it until the very end. I'm sure some would see that as noble or respect their principles and maybe in certain situations they are. However, when it comes to our own nature, who or what are they fighting against?

If you've spent a significant amount of time with another person you may find yourself able to predict how they're going to behave in various situations. In some cases you may even have an idea of what they're going to say next. Basically you've been near them long enough to just know what comes next. As it was mentioned in the movie Groundhog Day, maybe God doesn't know everything, instead he's just been around so long that he can predict what's going to happen based on a few billion years of experience. It could be that some of that is because they are running along a predetermined track of behavior. Of course humans by their very nature are chaotic so really trying to predict exactly what one is going to do is a lot like trying to predict the weather. The slightest variation could have drastically different results. Still we understand how weather works and what should happen based on certain variables and the same is probably true with a person. How they get to the emotional destination may be a mystery, but the destination can be plotted. If that's true then why isn't there a manual on what we're going to do next?

The Elephant Tree

On Smell

Of our five sense it's really smell that's makes or break things and yet it seems to be mostly underrated compared to something like sight. Scientists have shown that smell is closely associated with memory thanks to the olfactory bulb being being part of the limbic system. All it takes for some people is a whiff of some familiar smell to recall a specific memory in a way that can be more powerful than looking at a photograph. The whole thing makes me wonder if it's possible that certain smells have built in specific meanings to us.

Apparently it's been determined that the smell of death is universal. All species instinctively recognize that smell. This came from researchers discovering that cockroaches tended to avoid places that had other dead cockroaches because of the smell of death. So for them it was a kind of warning that the place might not be safe. Death smells like danger. It's kind of the same reason shit smells bad to us, because it's full of bacteria that is potentially harmful to us. So the smell is a sort of warning for us to avoid it. Same thing with the smell of death and putrefaction. For us it's a warning that there is danger because when the human body breaks down it becomes poison. Now in nature the smell of death may mean different things. To a lion or a vulture it means there is potentially food near by. For a zebra though it could serve as a warning that in that direction is danger.

The smell of death is a big one, but could it be possible there are other smells that are hardwired into our brains? If so, what purpose do they serve? I've known mothers who could pick their children out of dark room just by smell. I'm guessing that's something to do with a bond between mother and child that goes beyond just a physical thing, even though the child was technically a part of the mother at one point. I've heard that it extends to adopted children as well, meaning that it's not strictly limited to biological children. Something in our brain adjusts itself to recognize offspring, regardless of biology.

Ever notice that you could doing something and suddenly smell food and your stomach starts to rumble? Up until that point you weren't even aware that you were hungry. The moment that smell hits your nose you're body prepares itself for food, even if you're not actually going to eat because the smell is coming from the next cube over. It may seem obvious that the smell of cooked food makes us hungry, but why? Our brain recognizes the smell as something that seems appetizing. Is that based on past experience or is that regardless of our culinary history? Do vegetarians ever smell something cooking and their body reacts with hunger until they realize that it's stir fry cooked with chicken instead of tofu? Everyone has seen some situation where a person in a movie eats something, comments on how good it tastes, only to discovery that it's something normally thought of as unappetizing. Rocky Mountain Oysters for example. At that point our brain and our body are in conflict with each other because the smell makes us think of food, but thanks to our upbringing we may not think bull testicles are supposed to be eaten.

It also makes me wonder if it's possible to alter our perception of what a smell signifies. For instance what would happen if someone was being tortured while the room was filled with the smell of fresh baked cookies. Would that smell forever be associated with pain? Essentially what was wired to be a pleasant smell for most people would only serve as a reminder of something terrible. What factors dictate when a smell means to us?

We tend to pass along our history in our genes. Hair color, poor eyesight, or increased risk of cancer all can be passed to the next generation. Hopefully along the way the stronger genes win out over the weaker ones, but thanks to medical advancements we're bypassing that. I've talked about evolution before. My point though if those other traits could be passed down, is it possible for our history of smell to be sent down as well? Before we used fire to cook our food, no one would have any idea that the smell of cooking meat was a good thing. Eventually someone figured that out and it became common knowledge to everyone after that point. If that was the case then the smell of something would be part of our evolution.

Technically speaking a smell is actually made up of microscopic parts of whatever it is that smells. So when you're breathing in a bad smell, you're actually taking in things you'd probably want to avoid. On the flip side when you're smelling something delicious, you're ingesting parts of it before you take the first bite. I won't even get into the various smells associated with sex because that could be a topic by itself (as sex tends to be). Although it brings up the point that if smell is made up of small parts of the larger object, then tiny pieces of us are floating around. On some occasions we run into someone that smells like home, for lack of a better term. Chemically speaking the other person smells like the perfect match for us. That could mean there is more to the whole idea of soul mates, which could be on multiple levels that we don't fully understand and can't quantify through traditional means. Once again it just shows that there are so many things going on that even when you smell something, it could be more than just good or bad, but something much deeper.

Words Fail Me

I need a word that describes how an itch in one place prompts a scratch in another.

Red Rock

On the First Half

One of the things I really like about Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds is that it had the potential to be an entirely different movie. The entire first half of the movie plays more like a screwball romantic comedy rather than a horror movie. And because of that it feels a little bit more real when something actual does go wrong. Too often in movies there is very little setup before the main event happens. Some try harder than others, but for the most part you're just waiting for the new ice age or aliens to come busting in. In doing that it's a lot more difficult to care about the characters because they are just props for the action rather than fully formed people experiencing something. Horror movies tend to be even worse about this because more and more there is a kill before the credits start rolling. Someone possibly famous meets up with a grisly end, which is supposed to prepare us for what's eventually going to happen to all the other characters in the movie. So by the time you meet Perky Girl #2 and Douchebag #5 you already are trying to figure out how exactly they're going to get butchered.

With The Birds the movie could have kept going without ever actually having the birds attack. They didn't even need to change the title of the movie since the first meeting of the two main characters centers around a pair of love birds. So when the first attack happens it's actually kind of jolting because you almost forget you're watching a horror movie. Now you get a sense that these real characters are going through something unexpected. Even Full Metal Jacket did this to some degree. The entire first half of the movie is about boot camp. You know that it's eventually going to be a war movie, but in order to get to that you have to experience what they experience. For them boot camp was its own kind of hell. The actual war was just a change of scenery. Granted most people feel that you could stop watching the movie after Private Pyle takes care of things in the bathroom. The rest of the movie is a pretty standard war movie. The only difference is that you've been with the main character through some horrific events before he even went to Vietnam. Few movies are able to successfully pull this off though. More often than not any attempt to do so comes off like a movie is confused about its own type. Is this a romantic comedy with some paranormal elements or a paranormal movie with some romantic elements? Ultimately it should be a movie about real people, the backdrop could be really anything as long as you believe the people aren't just caricatures.

Sometimes I wish you could remove the titles from a movie. Imagine going into War of the Worlds without the initial narration and titles. It's some movie about Tom Cruise and his two bratty children. Extend that a bit, showing that they are in fact people living a life not entirely predetermined by the fact that aliens are going to burst from the ground in about fifteen minutes. Then when the storm comes it's a little more shocking. Hey wait, there are aliens in this movie?! Love it or hate it, the show Lost did a good job of that right off the bat. When I first started watching it I had no idea that it was going to have all this mystery. I thought it was just a movie about people who survived a plane crash on a tropical island, which in itself could be a pretty interesting concept. Then all of a sudden there is something huge and probably monstrous moving through the jungle. What was already interesting just got even more so because something completely unexpected happened.

In today's age of nearly instant information it's difficult to hide anything from moviegoers. I remember as a kid my parents decided to take me to what was supposed to be a cute holiday movie. This teenager gets a strange little creature as a pet and cuteness would ensue. That movie was Gremlins. The previews made it seem like the whole movie would be about a boy and his mysterious little friend, kind of like E.T. When the mogwais started to change into gremlins the parents in the audience started to get worried. This was not the cute holiday movie they had been promised. Then creatures are attempting to chew faces and getting blown up in microwaves. As a kid I thought this was awesome because I had no idea it was coming, that and I was a kid so the grosser the better. Gremlins or a movie like Gremlins couldn't come out today and have the same impact. The internet, the movie trailers, and even the MPAA pretty much tell you everything that you're going to see before you see it. I know it must be hard to try and promote movies today without giving away the store. Here's a hint though, you don't try to convince a person to watch a porn by showing the climatic gang bang scene in the trailer. You do that then they have no reason to pay for it. Then again today's audience have attention spans that can be measured in nanoseconds so if you don't grab them quick, you might not get them at all.

The other issue with today's movie is that there is a big push to stick with brand recognition rather than something new. You say "Harry Potter" and people will know exactly what to expect. You say "Percy Jackson" and unless you read the books, you have no idea what that's supposed to be except that it's probably a Harry Potter ripoff. It just goes downhill from there. Imagine if they tried to make Star Wars today. Would it be successful when you've got so many other well-known science fiction franchises? So when you go into a Saw movie you know that no matter who you meet no matter the circumstances, you're probably going to see them caught in some elaborate trap that threatens to dismember them. Sometimes that's what you want though. You don't go watch a Saw movie for a thought provoking look at the horror genre. You go to see the new fancy trap that rips the skin off someone's face and feeds it to them. I think that's why a movie like Audition is so disturbing. You may have been told it's a horror movie, but the first half lulls you into thinking one thing and then smacking you with another. I guess the question really comes down to if people want to be blindsided by a movie's true intention. I'm sure a lot of people would rather know what they're getting into because there is a bit of safety and comfort knowing that you're going to watch a monster in space movie. I just wonder how much more effective the plot would be if you didn't see it coming. It's a lot like life in that regard.

Words Fail Me

I need a word that describes when you're sleeping and wake up believing that you overslept, but in fact haven't and realize you've now cheated yourself out of some sleep.

Treeline

On the Freedom of Limitations

Someone once told me that everything in life has a cost attached to it. Obviously this isn't always a monetary thing, but it seems that everything today costs you a little something. If all things have a price then are we ever really free? And more importantly, is freedom really free because it seems there is a high cost to live.

Several months ago I became free. Well at least that's how it felt at the time. I was no longer held in place by anyone, except myself. In its own way it was very liberating to know that I was in charge of my own life again. I suppose I always was free, but I had put limits on myself because of other people. The other people in our lives can be good though, which is probably why we gravitate towards them. The positives outweigh the negatives. Still there was a realization that I no longer was limited by someone else or their needs and there was a sense of freedom that came with that. I'm not saying other people hold us back, although it's possible sometimes that they do. No it's more that we compromise in order to make two or more separate lives become one. Compromise can be a good thing because it opens us up to solutions that we may have not thought of otherwise. Like anything though there is a chance that you compromise yourself for someone else. I've known a lot of people who love being in a relationship and this isn't to say that by being in one you aren't free, but really your life is directly tied to someone else. When you don't have that attachment you potentially have more options to choose from. Well maybe not more, but different options anyway. The end of a relationship is often filled with pain, mostly emotional, but it's not limited to that. One of the first things a person does when a relationship ends (after they're done wallowing about how it ended in the first place) is start to do all the things that they couldn't do with the other person. It could be as small as changing what they eat or even when they eat. It could be as big as changing where they live. In some cases you don't want the freedom that comes from being alone. There is a comfort in having someone else around. So much so that any limitations are just accepted as the cost of doing business. Regardless of your relationship status, that is only a single aspect of freedom. Unless you happen to be Burgess Meredith in a Twilight Zone episode, you're always going to have to deal with people. They will ultimately dictate your choices in some way so in a way you'll never be free of them.

For most people one of the things that really limits any sense of freedom is money. It's the driving force for our society. Without money as a wage for work there is this fear that society would cease to function. If you think about it, if you weren't being paid for your job, would you still do it? Our current system is really just an elaborate barter system. For eight hours worth of work, the company will provide you with enough money to sustain your lifestyle (hopefully). There have been stories written about Utopian societies where people simply do their work for the betterment of the society. The idea is that it's in everyone's best interest to contribute so there is no need for monetary incentive. It's a nice idea, but it may never be realized. A lot of those stories never go into detail on how the society sustains itself. If you weren't required to work, but chose to, then what would you choose to do? Would there be any garbage men or office workers huddled into cubes? More likely there would be a lot of professional video game testers and television show watchers.

As I've mentioned before a lot of people today are locked into their current job because of salary requirements. They simply can't leave because doing so would mean they'd have to give up their lifestyle. That or something would be taken away. Even the type of job we can potentially get may be limited by a number of things. Education, experience, or location can all stop a person from getting a job they may want. When we're growing up we're told by our parents that we can be anything we want. Maybe that's just parental bias talking. Maybe it's true that at some point we could be anything we wanted and we're only limited by our own ambition. Somewhere along the way though we slowly start to have limitations put in place. These could be something we create or that are placed on us. Regardless of how they come about, once they're in place, it's really hard to break out. Ask someone who's attempted to change careers later in life how hard it was to make the transition. It's not impossible, but it's almost worse than entering the job market for the first time. By that time your experience could actually be something that holds you back, compared to helping you the way it did in the past.

When I was getting ready to graduate from college I had my mind set on going to the Pacific Northwest. I never liked the desert, but it was necessary to getting my education. So I started doing what I could to find opportunities to make my way out to some place I felt was more suited to me. At the time I thought having a newly completed education would be beneficial in my search. The problem was that I was here and I wanted to go there. Over there they had their own batch of new college graduates. There was a single opportunity to go to the area I wanted, but it would have meant a significant pay reduction compared to the local offers. Turns out the cost of being free of a location I didn't like was that I wouldn't be able to make as much money as I wanted. In the end I didn't take the offer because I had already become accustomed to a certain lifestyle, plus student loans weren't going to pay themselves on a lower salary. I still wonder though what would have happened if I had accepted the cost and gone. I would have been in a place that I liked and maybe with time the other pieces would have fallen into place. Sometimes that cost seems like too much. We rarely get second chances to try again though.

There will always be limitations to what we can do in our lives. Maybe part of our freedom comes from accepting certain ones while working to change others. I suppose in most cases a person is really only about three bad choices away from pitching everything in their life over the side anyway. In a sense we are never really free, but that's not a bad thing since being truly free means you've potentially gotten rid of everything that could ever hold you back, leaving you with nothing.

Words Fail Me

I need a word that describes when someone you've just met looks familiar.

Jungle

On The Maker

This isn't to go into the various iterations of God, but rather the idea that there is something out there that created us, or at the very least influenced life. When I was young I believed in the Christian version of God because that's how I was raised. Then as I got older and more cynical I stopped believing in anything. Everything felt like chaos and there was no reason why anything happened, good or bad. The idea of God felt like a fairy tale told to children to keep them from having sex or doing anything worthwhile because it scared the old people. While I was in college I entertained the idea that aliens planted us here as a sort of experiment. It seemed as likely as some mythical man in the clouds who essentially created man out of nothing and woman from pieces left over. Lately I've been starting to wonder if there isn't something that could be beyond our understanding. Something that operates on a level that makes us seem insignificant, which if you think about how large the universe is, really isn't that hard. Most people have heard about the near mathematical certainty that life exists elsewhere in the universe. Just the sheer number of planets that are out there indicates that something somewhere is also alive and possibly asking the same questions we are.

I can imagine thousands of years ago there were events that couldn't be explained. It's human nature to question things and try to understand the world around us. So with the lack of definitive answers, ancient man came up with his own about how things were made. At the time it was impossible for them to grasp the idea that Earth and everything on it was just a speck in an endless ocean of space. Certain things must have seemed like magic. Magic is really just science we don't yet understand. Look at all the things today that we pass off as impossible or label as paranormal. In a thousand years we may have a better understanding of our reality. I'm sure there will always be questions or things that defy explanation. I think that's really the nature of things. So the concept of God was created to help explain the unexplainable. Who knows maybe there is something to those beliefs and something is out there. I just don't know that anyone has ever gotten it completely right, if they were even close in the first place.

If there is something all powerful out there then it's probably so incomprehensible to us that our brains may turn into jelly trying to understand what it is. Plus maybe it's not all powerful, but to us it might as well be. I've talked about our perception of time being a major limitation for us. Imagine if being omnipotent was really just able to see time in both directions. For us that would be god-like. Add to that an understanding of how reality could be shaped by those experiencing it and you'd have something so much more evolved than us we'd look like sea monkeys to it. We as a species like to believe we're so advanced and compared to everything else on this planet we may be. In the grand scheme of things we're pretty young and might as well be a teenager telling our parents how the world really works when we have no idea what's out there. For all we know there could have been whole civilizations that have risen and fallen a billion years before we crawled out of the mud. If that's the case were they "made" by the same thing that created us? Is that what God does, goes around randomly making new life and letting it do its own thing?

I'm not saying it's impossible for something to have created us, but imagine the power something like would have to have. Do you honestly believe that something like that would care about what we do on our little planet? Its motivations are beyond alien. It would be like us giving a crap about some microbes on an ant hill in Africa. What happens to them has very little impact on our daily lives. In fact most of the time we're not even fully aware that they're out there until something points it out to us. Plus there is the possibility that The Maker didn't really make us at all. Maybe instead it just gave us a little nudge and that was enough for us. If you think about it, what's more likely, that an ancient being created us as a fully formed human and didn't imbue us with more than a rudimentary understanding of the world around us. Or that through a subtle manipulation of events and circumstances it was able to ensure that life was able to spark on this planet, which by most standards should have been just another molten rock spinning in space. From there it was up to life to find a way to survive and even thrive. Ok both sound completely unlikely, but here we are so something happened. Maybe it was all just chance and the perfect confluence of events allowed life to exist.

Getting deeper into it all, what if there is more than one all powerful deity-like thing out there? There is the assumption that it's just one thing behind the curtain pulling the strings. What's to say that there couldn't be more, some of which are operating on different levels. Or even stranger, what if it's not a thing at all, but rather a series of things that operate in conjunction with each other to create a larger being? It could be that within this cloud there are several layers to it. Much like our own bodies there are so many pieces that operate independently of each other, but at the same time need each other to continue on. Those individual portions could be influencing reality in their own way, without the larger portion being aware.

Books and movies always try to bring the idea of God down to something we'd understand. God takes on a human form. God gets involved with the day to day of a single person. God loves skeeball. Whatever it is, it's basically anthropomorphizing something that defies our understanding. In reality it would probably be like us trying to talk to a starfish.

So who knows if there is something out there that moved reality in a certain way that it would be considered our maker. It could be that all this is just something that happened by chance on some random Tuesday a hundred billion years ago. It's the question that will keep us wondering about ourselves and where we come from and maybe it's a question without answers because we may never fully understand it.

Inner Space

On the Keystone

There is the eternal question of what's the meaning of life that has had people wondering what it's all about. That question has had countless answers, each one may be specific to the person answering the question. The one I like most and makes the most sense is that it really comes down to one thing. That one thing is your meaning for life and it's up to each of us to decide what that thing is. I've started to think of this thing as a sort of keystone to life. It's what holds everything else together. Without it there will always be something missing. With anything in life things can be broken up into several different categories: What you can't live without, what you can live with, and what you'd be willing to compromise on. This is true for buying a car, picking a mate, or ordering a pizza. The same premise extends beyond those little life choices and straight onto the bigger picture of life itself. The keystone is the piece that you can't live without, which brings up the question: Can you ever be happy without the keystone?

When looking at your life it's easy to see all the things you don't have. Sometimes that leads us to take for granted the things we do have. Still there are certain things in life that can't be overlooked. What is the most important thing in your life? It could be your family. It could be your job. It could be some sense of accomplishment that what you're doing has meaning. Regardless of what it is, it's the linchpin to your happiness. I'm not saying it's the only thing that drives whether you're happy or not because that would be oversimplifying life. I'm sure for most people at some point in their life there was a sense that something was missing. For some people it's being single and wanting to be in a relationship. They may be successful in nearly every other aspect of their life, but because they are single, they feel as though there is a hole in their life. For me it's always been this almost indescribable feeling like I don't belong where I am. I don't know that it's exactly a geographical issue. Sometimes it can be isolated to knowing that I shouldn't be somewhere specific, but more often than not it's a feeling that I'm out of position from where I'm supposed to be. Now other things in my life might be very good. I have plenty of good friends. I have a good job. I have my health. From the outside it would seem like I should be happy. It's that seemingly missing piece that stops things from feeling complete. Almost like a painting with an unpainted section right in the middle of it.

I used the word complete knowing full well that most people will always have a sense of life as a journey and not a destination. So in a way even if you have everything, you will always be looking off in the distance at what comes next. Even knowing that there is a hope that at some point we will be content with our life. Hopefully we will always strive to be better or make improvements on our situation. Is it possible if it feels like the most important thing is missing? In some cases is may not be the most important thing. It may in fact just be something that we put more importance on than it should have. Regardless of its true importance in the grand scheme of things, it's importance to us is really what matters.

There are things in life that we feel we just can't live without. I'm not talking about water or air, although I suppose those would be keystones in their own way. Ask a parent if they could live without their children. To a lesser degree ask someone to give up sex or the red meat. For each of us there is something that if taken away would cause us to seriously wonder what's the point of going on. The thing is in a lot of cases if we're forced to lose that thing it turns out we keep on going. It may feel horrible at the time, but as they say, life goes on. Life goes on even if you wish it wouldn't. For some people if they lose that certain something they never recover. Parents who lose a child may never feel completely right again. Sure life goes on, but it's forever changed by that loss. It's been said that it's better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. Try telling that to someone who has lost the most important thing in their life. The feeling of loss may not outweigh all the good memories that came before, but I bet there are moments when a person wishes that they had never known what it was like to have that one thing in their life. That way they wouldn't have to experience losing it.

That's assuming you had the keystone and due to some circumstance it was taken away. So which is worse, never finding your keystone or having it and then losing it? I suppose each person would answer that question differently. Never finding it or achieving some level of completion could haunt a person. The question of what their life could have been like would always be there. For some that would be like an itch that could never be scratched. When we were young we had all these dreams about what we would do. All these wonderful ideas about life and how we would get what we want. Then as we get older those dreams may fade. They may fade so much that you forget you even had them. In those situations are we forgetting who we were? In other cases you may just accept that just because you want something doesn't mean it's something you'll ever get. And maybe that's not a bad thing. Maybe coming to that realization forces a person to stop trying to grasp the unachievable and instead focus on the life they have now.

I guess in the end you should never stop trying to find happiness, but in that search you shouldn't overlook all that you already have. If you allow any one thing to dictate your happiness then maybe you're setting yourself up for disappointment if it doesn't work out exactly how you hoped. Maybe what seems like the keystone to life, that specific thing that's supposed to hold everything else in place, is also the one thing that can keep you from ever finding true contentment.