Inside

As reported by the late-great Roger Angell in his brilliant essay, “This Old Man: Life in the Nineties,” the actor Laurence Olivier, reflecting on aging, once said in an interview. “Inside, we’re all seventeen, with red lips.”

Maybe, but I think that’s more poetry than reality.

For someone my age (five and sixty as I write this), it’s more like “Inside, we’re all 35, with full heads of hair.”

When I close my eyes and imagine who I am, I don’t feel like a teenager.

But I do see myself as no different really, than the young man I was in my prime—physical prime, that is.  I’m still mostly wrinkle-free, with a pretty flat stomach, and a hairline that doesn’t start in the middle of my cranium.

The face that stares back at me these days from the mirror or even worse, the Zoom call, isn’t who I am.  That’s some old guy masquerading as me.  He’s okay, I guess, but I can’t help thinking that whoever sees him, doesn’t really see me.  Even when I look his way, I can’t really make the connection to my true self.

No doubt this will continue to become more pronounced with each passing year.  By the time I’m eighty or so, the difference between my outward appearance and my inward self-conception will be half a century apart.  Maybe that’s what ultimately leads to death: your immaterial homunculus becomes so detached from your physical body that you just slip away to nothingness, leaving a dried-up husk of what you looked like but really weren’t.

I don’t mind aging; as mom always said, the alternative is much worse.  But it’s sort of confounding because to some extent, what’s aging isn’t me.  Not to get all Cartesian, but, since I  can imagine my being without my body, then my body can’t be me.

So, I probably shouldn’t worry that the container is past its “best by” date; what’s inside remains fresh.

Humbled

 Isn’t it marvelous how the Universe arranges itself to create you and me?

How fantastic is it that all of the atoms that exist configure themselves in a manner that results in our Sun, the Earth, and eventually, me, here, writing this and you, there, reading it?

Can you believe how incredible it is that somehow, the informational structure of everything that is leads ultimately, from the very beginning of time, through all eternity, to these ephemeral moments in which you and I find ourselves and each other?

That the vastness pinpoints like this, that the infinite focuses this way, that endless possibilities emerge as such singular unlikeliness is mind-boggling, heart-opening, and absolutely humbling.

I know that it’s not at all all for me (or you, or anyone), so that we get to experience it like this—or even, indeed, at all—is something we need to be aware of and grateful for every second of every day, especially in those moments we’re unaware and ungrateful—that is, most of the time.

Picture yourself in relationship to the globe and recognize what an infinitesimal spot each of us is on Mother Earth, and then remember that she is an incomprehensibly smaller spot on our galaxy, which is even a tinier spot on the Universe; if that doesn’t put into perspective getting cut off in traffic or having your favorite team lose, then something is surely amiss.

Complaining about anything is a wonderful privilege; merely existing in order to be able to do so is such an unlikely concurrence of events that every time we even think about being upset, we should get down on our knees and thank our lucky stars (and atoms) for the opportunity.

This isn’t to say that some people don’t have legitimate beef; the world is often a terrible, awful place, with tragic amounts of suffering.

However.

As I sit here  observing all that allows me to observe, I humbly observe: wow. Wow.  And more wow.

Ignorance

 There are so many things I just don’t understand.

For instance, how is it possible to simultaneously believe that an all-powerful God puts an immaterial soul into a zygote while also believing that that it’s morally imperative that this zygote be carried to birth by the woman whether she wants to or not?  If what matters is this immaterial soul, then why should the zygote matter at all?  Can’t God just put the soul into another zygote, no questions asked?  I don’t get it.

Or, why do some cars (or, that is, the people driving them) just have to pass me on my bike when I’m going downhill at the speed limit?  Would they feel the same way if I were in a small car?  Is it really just the pace I’m traveling at or is it something about being behind a bicycle that just makes them crazy?

Or, what’s the fascination with prepping a survivalist bunker for the apocalypse?  Who wants to live underground eating canned food after the nuclear holocaust or whatever?  Just let me die along with the rest of humanity when the asteroid hits.

And, on a related note, I’m sorry, I can’t see the point of pursuing immortality, or even, like all these Silicon Valley billionaires, wanting to live to be 200 years old or so.  It’s hard enough to make a meaningful life into one’s eighties (or, hell, even one’s thirties!), much less forever.  So, count me out.

Speaking of billionaires, I'm still puzzled about a hu-manned mission to Mars,  Just go to Burning Man for two weeks; it’s essentially the same environment, only with more sequins and glowsticks.

I don’t really get Soylent, either.  If you don’t have time to eat food, it seems like time to change your lifestyle, not your diet, if you ask me.

Finally, the most puzzling thing of all: why are so many people so mean to others?  What's so hard to understand about the Golden Rule?

Entropy

 Everything’s falling apart.  Always.

And it’s not just the shoddy workpersonship on those Ikea light fixtures; it’s everything, everywhere, all over the Universe.

Entropy is just time made manifest. And time is just God expressed through our experience of the natural world.

So, entropy and God are ultimately the same force.  No need for the guy with the beard and the book to hurl down lightning bolts in order to destroy things; it all happens naturally due to the fundamental laws of physics.

Unfortunately, this means that my jeans eventually get holes in them, my bicycle chains stretch to the point new ones are necessary, and no matter how many times I vacuum the rug, it gets covered in crumbs and dog hair sooner rather than later.

Our sun will use up all of its hydrogen in a couple of billion years and expand out to somewhere near the orbit of Jupiter; thankfully, no human beings will be around to observe this, but our A.I. sentient cockroach ancestors may want to scurry under whatever is analogous at that point to the kitchen stove if they hope to make it any further than that.

Science—well, Wikipedia—tells us that the entire Universe will essentially collapse in on itself as all the available energy is used up some google or so years in the future.  Sort of puts a losing season by the Pittsburgh Steelers in perspective, but still, when you think about it, both of those events are a product of entropy, as well.  

“Things fall apart,” as Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe put it in the title of his brilliant first novel, and while, to some extent, he was referring to societies and individual identities, it also applies to everything else, especially, the aforementioned Ikea products.

Our bodies offer perhaps the best illustration of all this in action; things falling apart is basically the story from about age 25 on.  So, let's embrace entropy while it embraces us!

Atoms

Here’s how scientist, Paul Fleischman, M.D., puts it in his monograph Vipassana Meditation and the Scientific Worldview: “All the sensuousness or pain of our bodies, all the delights or turmoil of our minds, are transformation within the atomic molecular substrate of the body.”

And further: “Our bodies are collections of atoms, that are organized into molecules, that function in the activities of cells, that cohere to form tissues, which interrelate to create an organism.  Our bodies are not solid, but are molecules suspended in realms of other molecules, all of which are undergoing continuous biotransformation.”

Crazy, isn’t it?

All of this, all of us, everything in the Universe, from stars to bicycles to toast with peanut butter and jelly, is made of atoms, all of which are whirring around, constantly in motion, and what’s really crazy is that the atoms that are “me” can observe this and by having atoms move around in my brain, think and write about it like this, so that the atoms that are “you” can read what I’ve written by having atoms move around in your brain, too!

So, maybe what’s craziest of all is to imagine that there is a “me” and a “you” at all, when, in fact, all we are—all that anything is—is “just” a collection of atoms that are all made of the same thing as everything else in the Universe—those very same atoms, that is.

This doesn’t mean, I realize, that my atoms don’t identify with themselves in a manner that make “me” identify them as “me,” nor that your atoms don’t do the same thing when it comes to “you.”  Still, if we think about things atomically, it sure does make is strange that there’s so much strife and conflict in the world, since everything, after all, is all the same thing.

But that’s just atoms being atoms, spinning and fluctuating endlessly; I guess we'll blame it on the protons, neutrons, electrons, and quarks.