Life – As We Know It…

Its hard for me to behave, knowing that one day I am going to die.

Every day I spend an hour eating in a small box, an hour playing with my kids in a small-medium box, an hour talking to my wife about my day in small boxes, two hours cleaning or organizing or getting ready for my days in small boxes, three hours driving in a very small box, six hours sleeping in a slightly bigger box, and finally ten hours sitting and working at a desk in another small box. My life, love, connection, exploration, pleasure, challenge, triumph and defeat exist purely in a state of isolation from the diversity and wonder of the world at large.

There is a lake high in the Sierras that sits atop a mountain. At its south shore a sheer cliff opens up to a wide open valley. In the middle of the Arizona desert twenty miles of I-10 there is a Mesa it only takes four hours to climb. From its edge you can see the sun setting deep in Mexico. At the top of a jungle brush covered mountain in the middle of Oahu there is a spot you can stand and see wilderness and ocean at the same time. You can also always feel half of your body being rained on by the misty Windward weather while the other half is dried by the sunny Leeward climate. A few blocks off Alvarado Street in Monterrey there is a coffee shop surrounded by a cobblestone courtyard. Every night it is filled with intellectuals, and drifters, and bums, and soldiers and students... all in lively debate and exchange. Or the little alley painted green behind the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. Last time I was there I met three kids busking their way to Louisiana. We sang the blues and fell asleep under the words "VESUVIO".

Upper Highland Lake

No matter how many memories I have of life outside the tiny boxes, in the end those boxes get the lion's share of my time. Think about how rediculous this is for a moment.

There are a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe, of them only a fraction old enough to have had a chance to possibly develop intelligent life. Those galaxies each have over a hundred billion stars, but again only a fraction have infrequent enough super novas in their local region to give life a chance to exist. And of those, only a fraction have a planetary system that contains enough planets to provide protection from debris to give life a chance. And of those, only a fraction likely posses the mass, orbit, temperature and composition to provide the conditions for stable and sustainable life to form. And create beings.

Expansion of the Universe

Those beings start out with no identity, simple cellar organisms carelessly swapping DNA, none containing a distinct identity. Then the sharing stops, and for three billion years the ones left compete to survive, steadily growing more complex and more intelligent from generation to generation. Fractal growth and emergent characteristics allow for these simple beings to become complex life forms, and exist together in perfect balance in a self-sustaining and thriving ecosystem. Everything from the origin of matter, to the behavior of heavenly bodies across the cosmos, to the pressures and precipitations that form weather patterns, to the hundreds of elements that work together to form stable geology, to the confluence of the bio and the eco all working together to keep life moving forward. Thirteen billion years, and a simple sub-atomic system with very simple rules has emerged and expanded into a machine that not only creates life, but only works in the direction of advancing existence.

Abiogenesis

This life creates Native American, Aboriginal and Tibetan sandpainting. It creates Vagner's Ring Cycle, Shakespeare's Hamlet. It builds Mayan temples, and the Great Wall. A woman fears a man who would force marriage on her, studies with the Shao Lin monks, creates Wing Chun, which is passed down for generations and then taught to Bruce Lee. A man nails objections to a Church on a heavy wooden door, then a king lusts after a women he isn't married to, and today the beliefs of over a billion people are changed. A country that once had a tradition of taking the elderly up mountains and throwing them off sheer cliffs now has the largest elderly population on the planet. A man who once said he felt slavery was just ends up freeing the slaves. A Jew sets out to abolish his corrupt church, but ends up creating a larger and more corrupt one in its place.

Sandpainting

A neuron fires the color of red, another fires the feeling of warmth, another the smell of lavender, another the tactile sensation of touch. These convergences turn into a memory, and this memory becomes a part of a chain of memories that form a conscious being. These memories are kept, and accessed, over a period of about a hundred years, until they stop being maintained. After that, all that is left of the memories are the impact the body that formed them left on the universe.

Somewhere out in the universe, 14 billion years ago, something causes a field to break into a 12 dimensional universe. Eight of these dimensions were folded in on themselves. Three of them expand to become space dimensions. One of them is being reconstructed in real time before our eyes. The change in spacial position of the three dimension across a fourth gives us a perception that we call time. This perception is what allows us to be. This illusion is what makes everything we do seem significant. All we are is sub-sub-atomic particles traveling one solution of an infinite number of paths from one point to another point in space. We exist as an illusion, and then are no more.

There is no time left to start again.