Tag Archives: life

The road to here

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Sometimes you meet someone and their journey through life intrigues you. They share a glimpse of their history and you realize that you can’t really fathom what it would have been like to have had their experiences. You can hear of defining moments of good or bad luck, or even seemingly minor choices that end up with very significant consequences. Moments that alter a single life or many lives.

One interesting note is that it seems people who experience great hardships are often open to sharing them more openly than you would expect. I had one such encounter yesterday when I met a friend of a friend. Within minutes of meeting him I heard a story from his past that was from a dark part of his life, and so profoundly different from anything that I’d ever experienced that I felt I was listening to a movie plot, not an actual story from someone’s experience.

Sorry, I won’t be sharing the story. It’s not my story to tell. But it got me thinking about the road to here. About how every person is on a completely different journey. Each of us carrying with us the the successes and also the emotional as well as physical baggage that shaped us.

How different my journey is from someone born the same time as me in another part of the world… If I were to take a snapshot of the lives of myself and 8 others born at the same instance, I’d probably be in the top 1/3 financially today. I’d also be in the top 1/3 of those lucky to have a privileged path to my current life… with hardships that do not compare to the bottom 1/3, 3 people sharing my birthday, my birth second, but far less fortunate than me.

I think there is something therapeutic about hearing the stories of others. Appreciating that someone’s path is one you’d rather not have travelled is humbling. There isn’t judgment, just an appreciation that you had your own path, your own road that you travelled. And while the road can seem challenging, so many others face challenges you can’t imagine.

It’s wonderful to share the road, every now and then, with someone who has taken a completely different journey than you. To hear of their path to here and now, and to understand that we have a lot to appreciate about our own journey.

What are your defining moments on your road to here?

Waking state

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There are different levels of awakeness. Yes, I know that’s not a word, but it should be. Perhaps I should just say awareness but I’m thinking of something a little different. Awareness suggests choice, a choosing of how aware we are. Awakeness is a level of consciousness, a state rather than a choice.

There are days we are barely awake. We go through the motions of the day, oblivious and blissfully unaware of our existence beyond the trivial requirements placed on us by society: good family member, good employee… in a body than needs food and liquid substance.

There are times when we are a little more awake, and we see beauty and feel love. We recognize the value of the life we live.

And then there are moments of being fully awake. They are the rare moments when we understand that we are part of a living earth, we are beings conscious of our own existence and of the existence of the universe. We are all at once beings of purpose and yet insignificant in the cosmos: Everything and nothing.

Are we aware of how awake we are? How often do we spend at these different levels of awakeness? Should we be spending a bit more time a little more awake? What can we do to stay more awake more often?

Oh, can’t complain

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Today on a stroll through a Saturday Farmer’s Market I passed an interesting character. He was on the obese side of heavy, in a motorized wheelchair, in loud checkered pants, and a colourful muscle shirt that revealed his diabetes monitor on his arm. Just as I was passing him, he bumped into someone he knew and I heard his response to her question, “Oh, can’t complain.”

I find it fascinating that people who suffer the most, and need the most, are often the most optimistic and generous. I worked in a school for very high needs students, many of whom came from very needy families, yet their parents were far more likely to donate their time to a shelter or volunteer kitchen than at any other school I’ve ever worked at.

My thought of the day, “Quit yer bitch’in.”

So many people have so much more to worry about and yet they live a life where they ‘can’t complain’… so really, what do we have to complain about?

Life is amazing, there is so much to appreciate, so much to value and cherish. Live, laugh, love, and for your sake more than anyone else’s… stop complaining.

Not a question of first or rare or distant

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When thinking about whether we are alone in the universe or not, it seems to me that it isn’t a question of whether we (intelligent life) are rare? Or are we first/early compared to other intelligent life? Or are we simply too far away? But rather a question of enduring. Are intelligent civilizations enduring enough to travel beyond their solar system or galaxy?

The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence. Scientists today are looking for life in our very own solar system. It’s possible, in our vast universe, that our quest for life beyond earth may be as close as Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. It would probably b\e microbes, too small to see without a microscope, but that would still suggest that life is way more abundant than even most scientists would have imagined just a few years ago.

But I’m more a believer that the reason we don’t see alien life is for two reasons, the first being distance. Quite simply, even the nearest galaxy to our Milky way is astronomically far away.  “The closest known galaxy to us is the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, at 236,000,000,000,000,000 km (25,000 light years) from the Sun. The Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy is the next closest , at 662,000,000,000,000,000 km (70,000 light years) from the Sun.” If intelligent life started sending messages to us from the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy 10,000 years ago, it would still take 15,000 years to reach us if they could do the unlikely task of sending that message at the speed of light… and the crazy thing is, why would they send a message our way? 10,000 years ago there was no evidence coming from earth that we are a worthy planet to send a message to!

And the second reason we don’t see any intelligent life ‘out there’ in the universe is The Great Filter. Either it is extremely rare and difficult to get beyond simple, unintelligent multicellular life, or civilizations themselves getting to multi solar system travel capabilities are extremely rare. This second point is my belief. Civilizations are not enduring enough. It took Homo sapiens 300,000 years to become a scientifically intelligent life form that attempted to leave our planet and explore our solar system. During this time, we’ve been brutal to each other. We’ve created weapons of mass destruction and quite literally drawn lines in the sand to keep us separate from our brothers and sisters.

We’ve created religions that don’t like each other and think all other Gods are unworthy of following. We’ve created borders that keep ‘others’ out. We’ve created governments that are more interested in power than in caring for fellow humans. We’ve created corporations that worry more about profit than about caring for our planet. All the while we also create technologies that threaten the longevity of humanity. As technological innovations occur, it becomes easier for individuals and small groups to terrorize larger groups. It becomes easier for a single unstable person to threaten larger and larger populations around our planet.

What happens 50 years from now when a kid can create a devastating bomb or virus in their basement with readily available resources? Is that a world where we continue to advance technologically? Albert Einstein is often quoted as having said: “I don’t know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones“. In other words, we will destroy ourselves and become far more primitive, much less advanced. Imagine our world with no power grid, and no internet. How long would it take to get back to where we are now? What if the next pandemic is far more deadly and has us living like subsistence farmers, keeping ourselves in tiny communities, afraid of outsiders. How many hundreds of years would we be set back, and would we be trying to explore the cosmos when survival is our greatest concern?

I tend to be an optimist, and I’m excited about the future ahead of us. I think my kids have the potential to live healthy, productive, and cognitively sound lives past 100 years of age. I think there will be universal basic income for every human alive, and that things like childhood starvation and extreme poverty could come to an end. Technological advances could make us live healthier, longer, more fulfilling and creative lives. But I also fear that greed, power, and beliefs in bad ideas could corrupt us, and undermine our potential. Are we 50, 100, or 1,000 years away from ravaging our planet or at least the human race? Or are we a species that will populate other parts of our galaxy?

If I was an alien who came to explore earth today, I’m not sure I’d report back to my planet the the inhabitants are intelligent? I’m not sure I’d consider humans technologically advanced enough to seek contact? I’d be conveying that earthlings are as likely to destroy themselves as they are to send someone out of their own solar system. I’d send a message home and say, ‘Let’s leave them alone for now and see what they can do in another couple hundred of their earth years?‘

‘Let’s see if this race of humans will endure?‘

Inconceivably vast

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Webb’s First Deep Field is the first operational image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. The deep-field photograph, which covers a tiny area of sky visible from the Southern Hemisphere, is centered on SMACS 0723, a galaxy cluster in the constellation of Volans. Thousands of galaxies are visible in the image, some as old as 13 billion years.The image is the highest-resolution image of the early universe ever taken. Captured by the telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), the image was revealed to the public by NASA on 11 July 2022. (Wikipedia)

It’s too hard to fathom just how big the universe is. The image below only shows a few stars, they are the bright spots with 6 flares coming off of them… a by-product of the James Webb telescope’s design. The rest of the bright spots are galaxies. Galaxies that each hold billions or trillions of stars.

And if you held your pinky up to the night sky you would completely cover the area of the sky that this photo covers with a sliver of a finger nail.

We are so insignificantly tiny, and our Milky Way galaxy is so insignificantly placed in the universe. We just can’t conceive of just how inconceivably vast our universe is, and how insignificantly tiny our solar system is.

It’s too much to comprehend. And yet, here we are. So significant to each other, so connected to our planet. We get to live lives rich in mystery and wonder.

What other life is out there, or was out there, some time in the 13 billion years of our universe’s existence? Could alien life comprehend our existence? We’ll probably never know.

If there was life in one of these distant galaxies right now, we wouldn’t it know for millions or billions of years. The light we see in that photo above are from the past. To put it into perspective, if they were looking at light from our planet, they would be seeing light emitted from before dinosaurs roamed the earth… in other words they would be looking at prehistoric life on a planet with single cell organisms or perhaps no life at all… yet.

It’s too hard to grasp. It’s inconceivable.

Now, not waiting…

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I was reflecting on retirement yesterday, and then today I listened to a podcast that mentioned we only live for about 4,000 weeks. We are lucky when it’s more, and when I consider that I’ve passed 2,800 weeks, it makes me appreciate all of the time I have left. This isn’t sad, it’s factual. And the fact is that every week, every day matters.

We’ve all had those weeks that fly by feeling like we’ve done no more than what needed to be done: Eat, sleep, work, repeat… with a few distractions along the way. And we’ve all had weeks that have felt special, even when the regular routine was all that was really done. What’s the difference?

Good conversations, acts of kindness, a delicious meal, a hug, a good laugh, or even a quiet moment of contemplation can help make an ordinary week a little more special. It would have been easy to use the word extraordinary rather than special, but that would be dishonest.

The reality is that it’s hard to live a life where every week is extraordinary. That said, it can be too easy to live a life where weeks just disappear, one less week to live, then another, then another. Every week doesn’t have to be exceptional, just well lived… well lived, not poorly wasted.

It’s fun to plan ahead for the future, but the time to enjoy life is now! Because we really don’t know how many weeks we have left, and so each week we do have is precious.

2 minutes of silent sunrise

Today is my first day without a father on this planet. I’m glad I got to see him in March because he died 15 minutes before I got on my flight to Toronto. Here’s a beautiful sunrise I got to see on the flight.

I’m m with my family now, although just one sister is awake. It will be good to spend a bit of time with my mom and sisters.

Enjoy the sunrise, appreciate what you’ve got, hug your family.

Unrecognizable future

Did you ever see the movie Blast from the Past? Here is the premise from Wikipedia:

The film focuses on a naive 35-year-old man, Adam Webber, who has spent his entire life (1962-1997) living in a Cold War-era fallout shelter built by his survivalist, anti-Communist father, who believes the United States has suffered a Soviet nuclear attack (in reality, a plane crashed into their house). When the doors unlock after 35 years (the amount of time his father believes the nuclear fallout will take to clear), Adam emerges into the modern world, where his innocence and old-fashioned views put him at comedic odds with others.

It’s a cute movie. It makes me wonder what it would be like for someone today to jump ahead and see what the future is like 35 years from now? What does life look like in 2058?

Will work look any like it does today? What about transportation? Money? Space flight? Religion? Politics? Artificial intelligence (AI) and computing?

There is so much that could, and will, be different from today. Some of these things might look similar, but some are going to look considerably different. I can’t imagine a world 35 years from now being less different today than 1997 was to 1962. Life in 2058 will be unrecognizable compared to life today.

For example: The entire monetary system is going to be digital. The workforce is going to be mostly different depending on how much AI has undermined many of today’s jobs. That same AI is going to change the way we integrate technology. Today it’s our phones that seem to be getting smarter and smarter but 35 years from now it will be integrated/cyborg technology that will be enhancing and enriching our lives.

I can imagine glasses or contact lenses or implants that give us information like map directions, names and details about people we meet, and even health data like heads up display data in a military jet today. I can imagine this working in a way with a hearing implant that allows us to have a video conversation like FaceTime on our phone today. Phones won’t be something we carry, they will be something embedded as part of the tools we wear or tools we integrate into implants.

If you don’t think that things will be drastically different than now, then you haven’t paid attention to the exponential rate of change that has happened since the 1990’s. In 1990 there was no Amazon, Deep Blue was 7 years away from beating world Chess champion Garry Kasparov, there were no smart phones, no electric cars, and Google was still 8 years away from being a company. Author Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Smart phones today would seem like magic in 1990. What does 2058 hold for us that will seem like nothing less than magic to us today? It’s cliche to say, but time will tell.

Always improving

I had a conversation with a good friend yesterday. He has a renovation going on and is quite involved in the process. He lamented about how busy he is and said something interesting to me. To summarize:

‘I don’t mind being busy, it just gets exhausting always doing things a little beyond what you are comfortable with.’

That’s a really interesting point. We live in a world where very few people, athletes for example, hone their skills and spend a tremendous amount of time doing only what they are good at. Most people are good at something and spend hours doing something else, scrambling to make time for the thing(s) they enjoy doing.

They love the design process, but spend most of their time building. They love building but spend most of their time ordering supplies and managing people. The love managing people but spend hours managing paper or digital files and documents. Beyond these examples, they spend time learning new, more challenging tasks and implementing them with beginner eyes, while not doing the things they know they can do well.

I understood my friend’s point and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to focus on the part of your job you are really good at for a while and not always be working on new challenging skills?’ Then we both had a chuckle realizing that we’d feel like we’d be standing still if we didn’t push ourselves. But that’s the impetus to ask the question,

Where does the push to always be improving come from?

Is it intrinsic? Is it organizational? Is it cultural? Are there places where jobs have not magnified in complexity and people are given the time they need to mostly do the things they love doing, and not just a lot of what they have to do? That doesn’t mean they stop improving, just that the things they improve on are things they really want to be doing. The idea of constantly improving is both appealing and exhausting. I think the key to making it feel good is to find reasons to celebrate achievements, to recognize gains, and to appreciate the journey… because there are always ways to improve… always more that can be done… always things to learn.

Disengaged

It’s apparent in schools, it’s apparent in the workforce… there are students and young adults who are disengaged with societal norms and constructs around school and work. They are questioning why they need to conform? Why they need to participate? There is a dissatisfaction with complying with expectations that schools is necessary, or that a ‘9-5’ job is somehow meaningful.

Some will buck the norm, find innovative alternatives, and create their own niches in the world. Others, many others, will struggle, wallow in unhappiness, and fight mental health demons that will leave them feeling defeated, or riddled with anxiety, or fully disengaged with a world they feel they don’t fit in. Some will escape this, some will find pharmaceutical ways to reduce or enhance their disconnect. Some of these will be doctor prescribed, others will be legally or illegally self-prescribed.

The fully immersive worlds of addictive, time-sucking on-demand television series, first-person online games, and glamorous, ‘living my best life’, ‘you will never be as happy as me’ illusions on social media certainly don’t help. Neither does unlimited access to porn, violence, and anti-Karen social justice warriors dishing out revenge and hate in the name of justice. The choices are fully immersed, unhappily jealous, or infuriatingly angry… and disengaged with the world. Real life is not as interesting, and not as engaging as experiences that our technological tools can provide. School is hard, a full day at work is boring, and it’s easier to disengage than participate.

The question is, will this disengaged group find their way? Or will they find themselves in their 30’s living in their parent’s basements or subsisting on minimal income, working only enough to survive, and never enough to thrive?

School and work can’t compete with the sheer entertainment value this group gets from disengaging, so what’s the path forward? We can’t make them buy in if they refuse, and we can’t let school-aged students wallow in a school-less escapes from an engaged and full life. I don’t have any solutions, but I have genuine concerns for a growing number of disengaged young adults who seem dissatisfied with living in a world they don’t feel they can participate meaningfully in.

What does the future hold for those who disengage by choice?