The Old Sea

On Scars

I cut my finger today doing something generally stupid. It wasn't a bad cut or anything, but it's in the perfect place to be a constant reminder of my foolishness for the next several days. Looking down at my hands and arms I noticed all kind of various scars that crisscross their way over my skin. For some of the scars I can remember what caused them. For others the memory has faded almost as much as the scar has. Still it's like a visual record of my life's physical traumas, even if they only resulted in the smallest of imprint. The thing is I know I've been hurt more often than I have scars to prove. So why is it that only a select few...I was going to say make the cut. Now I know that physically speaking there is a very good reason why certain injuries leave a mark while others leave no trace. Maybe it's something more though. Maybe it's our body's way of remembering something in a physical way so that we can try our best to avoid having it happen again.

If you're a drinker then there's probably a time you can remember when you had a little too much fun and made yourself sick. It could be strawberry margaritas or just plain light beer, there was that one time you had too much of it and wish you hadn't. Of course by the time you figured this out it was already too late. The memory of that lesson may to this day still bring a slight shudder as you look back on it. While you can't see it, wouldn't that also be just another scar? Maybe somewhere in our brain there is a physical marker that indicates where the memory lives. Other memories from that same time period may have long since drifted away, but that one stays with you because of the pain associated with. It could be that pain retains.

There are plenty of people out there who have experienced something so traumatizing that they can't just walk away from it. I used to wonder why people couldn't simply get over it. I mean it happened and was horrible, but why dwell on it? Why couldn't they just get past it and move on with their lives? Wouldn't they be happier if they let go of that pain? The thing I didn't understand was that the mental scarring is so much that it won't simply heal on its own. At least not anytime soon. It would be like trying to run a marathon on a broken leg and wondering why each step hurts. Now granted there are some people who prefer to wallow in their own misery. It's strangely comforting to them for some reason. Others though want to heal, but just can't. If your tooth was hurting the smart thing to do would be to go see a dentist. They're trained to work on teeth that hurt. So if your mind is hurting why would anyone think about trying to fix it themselves? Sure you may be mentally strong, but that might not be enough to heal those scars. When I cut my finger today I could have wished it to stop bleeding through sheer willpower. The smarter thing to do was to take action and stop it myself. There's only so much I can do at this point though. I don't know if it will become yet another scar. Maybe all scars are just lessons we couldn't learn without a physical reminder of our own frailty. Then again maybe they're reminders of our ability to recover from nearly anything and be stronger for it, if only for the fact that the next time that situation comes around we know we can survive it.

Sea Sky

On the Beaten Path

As of right now mankind is at the top of the food chain. We have been for longer than anyone can remember. Most organisms on this planet have to adapt to their environment, but we've taken a different route and make the environment adapt to us. We use tools and technology to overcome our physical limitations when it comes to the world. An anteater developed a long snout and tongue in order to continue feeding on ants that built burrows that were tall and narrow. One could argue the easier or at least more direct method of dealing with this problem wouldn't have been to alter their physical appearance, but instead to simply knock down the anthills. Instead their method ensures that they can continue eating ants and the ants can continue building their hills. In a strange way it's almost like the path of least resistance. Really it's a long way around to come a short way back. I'm not saying that man doesn't come up with some ingenious ways to overcome problems, but our methods are often based on changing the situation to suit our needs. In a sense we've stopped evolving, at least on any quantifiable level. Sure our technology has gotten better, but we're no better capable of living in sub arctic temperatures than we were a thousand years ago. If the world's clean water literally dried up tomorrow we wouldn't be able to live in the desert to any degree better than those who live there now, which is focused more on survival than anything else.

Now I know a sudden and drastic change would likely limit any species ability to survive, at least in the short term. Still we can visibly observe how so many creatures on this planet have altered their very bodies in order to keep up with the changes in this world. Meanwhile we're roughly the same way we've been for thousands of years. We may live longer and be larger than those who came before us, but that's because we've made advances in medicine and generally have more food to eat. For the most part we don't have any incentive to evolve because we feel like we've got this place mastered. The world supposedly bends to our will so why should we change when things are obviously working so well for us as they are?

For a long time I used to wonder if reality was the same for me as it was for everyone else. Was the color orange I saw really the same color orange someone else saw? How would we ever know that we were seeing different things? Along with this there seemed to be a set way to do things. If you wanted to write a sentence in English you had to follow a certain structure. If you wanted to throw a free throw and not have it drop like a useless brick on the basketball court, you had to throw it in an established manner. If you wanted to earn money you had to follow the rules decided beforehand on what services or products were worth something, otherwise you wouldn't earn enough to rub two dimes together. Basically if you want to do really anything then you have to follow what those have proven to be successful in the past. Sticking with what's tested and true means that for the most part you know what your chances of success will be, at least to some varying degree.

Every so often someone wanders off the beaten path and tries something radically different. Sometimes this abrupt departure results in an expected failure, but there are those rare times when it works beyond all imagination. Without those people who are willing to stray from the pack we might never have the society we do today. I wonder if these offshoots are the way modern man evolves in a situation where evolution is almost unneeded. Galileo changed the way people perceived the world. Monet changed the way people perceived art. Stephen Hawking changed the way we perceived the universe. Each went counter to what was already established and by doing so took mankind beyond what they thought they knew to something more. Now those people made significant changes to our shared perception, but every day there are tiny little variations on the conventional, some of which are quickly discarded and others that become the new standard. It's not always easy to recognize when you should stick what works or step off the path.

Pepper

On Behind Closed Doors

I used to be really jealous of other people having fun without me. It didn't even matter if I myself was already having a good time without them. When I would hear later about what others were doing I'd get the equivalent of order envy. Sure my good time was good, but in comparison it didn't seem as good. This was worst in high school. I would hear about people off drinking or having sex and I'd think about how I spent my evening playing video games or hanging with my friends, talking about whatever we liked, just wasn't as cool. Sometimes it felt downright childish. I wish I could say that I'm completely over that type of thinking, but every so often it comes back and I question how I spent my time compared to others, who seem to be off doing adult things. Part of that comes from the fact that for most of my life I've been on my own in some form or another. Living on my own. No significant relationships to speak of. Not only capable of being alone, but preferring it to company. The problem with that was that while I wanted to be alone, I didn't exactly want to be isolated from the world. I wanted to experience things. I wanted to experience the things I assumed other people were doing all the time, without me. Life seemed like this exclusive party and I wasn't invited.

There will always be curiosity about what goes on behind closed doors. No matter how well we think we know someone, there is always a part of them that's hidden. The friend from work goes home and does who-knows-what when no one is looking. It's very likely they go home and watch TV like most bored people. Still there is that shadow of a doubt that maybe, just maybe they're doing something exciting and telling no one about it. At least not until much later. Have you ever been talking to friends, revealing little pieces of information about yourself and someone exclaims that they didn't know that about you? Or on the flip side someone drops a bomb on you that you had no idea was possible. Someone was arrested. Someone was in a threesome. Someone once did hardcore drugs on more than one occasion. Someone nearly died doing something incredible or stupid or both. The person telling the story may not think anything of it because for them it's just another aspect of their life's journey. It happened and that doesn't necessarily mean that the same behavior is still going on. Still it makes one wonder when they did whatever did the people in their life have any idea that it was happening.

With most people in our lives we're coming in most of the way through the movie. There are exceptions to this of course, but unless you're still friends with the people you grew up with and never were apart for significant periods of your life, there are going to be serious gaps in knowledge about the people we choose as friends. Most of my friends are relatively late additions to my life, arriving at the last third of the story. Others who have been around for longer have been far enough away that they too may as well have shown up after things have already gotten started. That doesn't make either of them any less my friends, but it shows that even the people closest to us have plenty of things in their lives we don't know anything about. With most of the people I know, I couldn't tell you what they do with their spare time. There are some who I'm sure lead fairly mundane lives and are perfectly happy with the occasional burst of excitement. In fact I'm pretty sure that if we were able to examine each others lives we'd find that they are about as eventful as our own. As I said though, there is still that bit of doubt, that possibly someone out there is experiencing more than us and in doing so that means we may be missing out.

People always talk about their privacy as though it's a right. Then those same people who feel it's no one's business what they do behind closed doors are the first to rail about their right to know what someone else is doing. Be it a celebrity, or politician, or even neighbor. There is this sense of entitlement that seems to be spreading with the information age. The person who gets scared at the thought of someone seeing their internet search history is also the person who feels they should be informed who that politician slept with. We want to know what everyone else is up to, but would rather no one know what we're doing, even if it's nothing special. Sometimes our fears of what other people may think are justified because no one likes to be judged. Still if you figure that just about everyone in the world has something they do which could be embarrassing if viewed by a third party, then what does it matter what someone else thinks? There was a Stephen King story about a town on an island that ran into a force of evil. This evil had a single ultimatum: give him what he wants and he'll go away. Until he got what he wanted he was going to reveal everyone's dark secrets in front of the whole town. Of course everyone gasped when they heard someone's secret and felt somewhat morally superior. At least until their own secret was revealed. It was an interesting examination of what we try to hide away behind a locked door. Those doors give us just enough protection to feel that can be ourselves, without fear of judgement. The problem is those same doors can perpetuate the illusion that what's happening behind them is more interesting than it really is. So which is better, seeing what's on the other side regardless of what's there or forever wondering exactly what's happening just out of sight?