Distilled Harmony: A Reaffirmation

 I suppose I could react to the recent Presidential election by shuffling around in sackcloth humming "American Pie" aka "The Day the Music Died." But that would really be simply a meaningless waste of time and energy. Tried hard to get a gentle, compassionate and competent woman elected, but it seems that millions of my fellow Americans are living in a pretty dark place, and used the ballot box to express their anger, fears and anxiety. Rather than rail against that darkness, I instead choose to reaffirm and suggest my contrary view of everyday existence: Distilled Harmony.

The three primary tenets of Distilled Harmony have been scattered throughout these Wall posts from more than a dozen years, to more dozens of you distributed among 8 or 10 nations around the globe. But it seems a good time to clarify and reaffirm these positive existential guidelines which I espouse, but still struggle to manifest in my own life.

The tenets are hierarchical - tenet one, Foster Harmony, dominates, followed in importance by tenet two, Enable Beauty, then tenet three, Distill Complexity. Let me break them down for you again.

Foster Harmony . In its simplest form this tenet can be stated as "play nice with others," or the old stand-by "treat others as you would be treated by them." Golden rule stuff. It is deceptive in its simplicity. It stands in direct contradiction to the currently more popular "give 'em what they deserve!" It holds us to a more forgiving, more compassionate mandate. It is the first tenet because it is hardest. Fostering Harmony - opening your life to giving and receiving love, is one of the most challenging, yet most rewarding tasks of our lives.

Enable Beauty. We are, in large part, what we create - not what we consume. This one gets a little tricky because it is far easier to buy beauty than create it. Hence the palaces of the super rich in every era of human history from antiquity to today. This tenet asks that we become creators, not merely consumers. Complicating the tenet is the notion of talent, and of course genius.

I saw a little girl sing grand opera on TV the other night. Mozart composed symphonies before his age hit double digits. Genius is not our creative benchmark. "To perform to the best of our ability" is. We need to spend a healthy portion of our lives creating something that at least strives toward beauty. Sing, dance, act, draw, paint, sculpt, play an instrument, build edifices, design gardens, compose music, perform, cook, design interiors, plan events. Whatever! But do something, anything, that makes the world around you, and the space in which you live, a more beautiful place.

Then there is Distill Complexity.  Life often seems to have been constructed by Rube Goldberg. Every task - particularly those designed to be performed in a digital environment - seems to follow a path designed by a contortionist whose favorite saying is "You can't get there from here." Or, "Your call is very important to us, please press one for, press two for, press three for, all others please hang up and try next week."

Let me indulge in a brief, but related story. When arriving on NC State's campus back in 1980 one benefit I soon discovered was the guy who could fix everything technology-related on campus. Now remember this was 1981 - no internet, no world-wide-web, no computers on desks; rather big room sized things over in the "computer building" that were fed paper punch cards. After a few years I was able to secure a UNIX computer from the college of engineering, which ran an archaic version of Wordstar - a dinosaur word processing program. It stopped working. I called guru Everett san and explained my problem. 

He asked, "What floor is your office on?"

"The fourth," I replied.

"Does it have a window?"

"Yes."

"Can you open it?"

"Yes."

"Open the window. Unplug your computer. Carry it to the window. Make sure there is no one beneath you. Now throw the computer out. Something better will come along soon." And he hung up.

And my computer problems had vanished, to be solved, later, bit by bite, by PCs and then Macs.

When we allow ourselves to get caught up in, enmeshed by, angered and frustrated by, the swirling, often negative complexities of modern life it is easy to lose sight of what is truly important: Our lives, and the lives of those we care about, and what we can do to enrich those lives that truly touch us.

So distill. Put the chaos that is confronting you on the front burner of your mind, turn up the heat, and let it simmer. Whenever anything that you truly cannot fix, or smells off, bubbles up, grab a slotted spoon and skim it off, toss it in the trash - down the disposal! Repeat until only those items that you can whip up with love and caring remain to clarify into a pleasing sauce of Harmony and Beauty remain. Remove from heat and allow to cool before serving.

Not exactly sure where that came from, but I think I'll keep it in, and get back to trying to Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, and Distill Complexity in my own life. Still much work to be done there. Working on a sister piece to Moontree and am having trouble with leaves.

Little Tiny Wormholes

 I'm not talking about those little holes that appear in your yard after a summer rain, the ones made by actual worms. No, I'm talking about the wormholes that hook various points in spacetime together. Or as Wikipedia puts it:

"A wormhole is a hypothetical structure connecting disparate points in spacetime, and is based on a special solution of the Einstein field equations.^[1] A wormhole can be visualized as a tunnel with two ends at separate points in spacetime (i.e., different locations, different points in time, or both)."

OK, now that that is clear, a wormhole can zip things around the universe willy-nilly. One moment a thingy is here, the next it is somewhere and sometime else. So what does that have to do with you and me? Glad you asked. I have a theory. No, I have no training in theoretical physics, but if the richest man in the world, with no training in political science, can shrug off the bothersome chains of sanity to shill for another purported billionaire, I figure that opens the door for all sorts of idle speculation.

So here is my theory. Most speculation regarding wormholes is cosmic in nature - black holes at the center of galaxies, galaxies crashing into one another creating universe-wide gravity waves, mysterious entities light years away. Really huge Star Wars kinds of stuff. 

My theory brings the idea of wormholes into a much smaller conceptual space, like your house, garage, kitchen, etc. Let me cite an example.

Yesterday I was organizing stuff in the garage. Yeah, I know we moved months and months ago. Another year and we might get "moved in." Anyhow, I was moving a couple of items from one corner of the garage to another. I carried them in a plastic container, removed the items from the container and placed them on the shelf. Then I turned around and the plastic container had vanished. 

Now I am aware that another phenomenon could be in play here, the "where did I put my keys" issue. This occurs when we misplace an item that reappears minutes, hours or days later. "Ah ha! There you are!" This "missing keys" phenomenon occurs with increasing regularity as we move through our maturity. The "Tiny Little Wormhole" phenomenon, or TLW for short, is a completely different animal. Items that get sucked into a TLW are gone for good, never to be seen again. 

Think about it. You have your own examples, but were perhaps unaware of what was going on. That favorite sweater you looked for last week as the weather began to change. The flat head screwdriver you put on the bench. The Winnie the Pooh PJs with the footies. You name it - gone and never ever to be seen again.

There are some ramifications to TLWs that we may not have considered. When these things disappear from our place in spacetime they reappear somewhere else. There is a common trope in sci-fi literature that earth is in a sort of probationary period that will determine whether we are invited to join a highly sophisticated inter-galactic community. Most of these narratives do not end well for us, usually because of our tribe-like arrogance which culminates in violent genocide of some type or another.That may just be a cheap-shot plot device. 

There could be a more subtle reason for our exclusion: bad TLW management. That more advanced community has long learned to manage the TLWs. Things that disappear in the Greater Galactic Community (GGC) are actually funneled to specific regions of the universe in need of specific items: think recycling. We, however, just let things zip away. Think letting your dog off-leash to do its business wherever and making no effort to clean it up. By failing to understand and control our TLWs, we are trashing random parts of the universe.

That gets entered into the debit side of our galactic ledger, along with global warming, genocide, and the ever-increasing web of satellites we toss up blocking the communication paths of the galactic observers. Whew.

So what do we do to reverse this seemingly negative spiral? I think there is great potential benefit to addressing the issue at the TLW level. It seems logical (well, as logical as anything in this admittedly fanciful ramble) that TLWs are encouraged by our neglect. They snarf up random things to which we are not paying attention. So we need to keep our stuff better organized. Clean out the junk drawer. Put your tools, spices, clothes in planned spaces. This, I believe will thwart the TLWs and increase our chances of being accepted into the Greater Galactic Federation.

I must, however, admit to doing none of those things I advise above. I lean sharply toward the slovenly. Which is, no doubt, why TLWs swarm around me like mosquitoes on a summer evening. I suppose that, in order to increase earth's chances of GGF membership, I should clean up my act.

OK, I will. Starting tomorrow.