When my oldest daughter was about 10 years old, I dropped her off at a friend’s house so she could attend her friend’s birthday party. We got her all dressed up and bought a gift and wrapped it, topping it with a pretty bow. Gift wrap bags hadn’t reached the peak of their popularity yet. Wrapping a gift was a bigger job back then but my daughter had done an excellent job. I pulled into the driveway of her friend’s house, and she jumped out of the car and made her way to the front door. As I pulled away, she had just rung the doorbell and was standing on the porch waiting to be let in for the party. I slowed way down to make sure she got in OK. As I was watching her, she turned around and looked at me with a shy grin on her face. I suddenly realized that she was halfway grown! It was such a sudden and wistful moment, that it sticks with me even now and there’s a lot of emotion attached to it.
Child rearing is a 20-to-25-year commitment for humans now. People in their late teens were considered adults when I was that age. I’m not making this statement to cast aspersions on anyone, including people currently in their late teens or their parents, who I believe are trying to do the best they can to raise kids into responsible adults. I believe they’ll be successful, but it will take longer than it did for previous generations. To compete in the employment or business market today, kids need education and financial support while they are in their late teens and early twenties. This has added another 5 to 7 years to child rearing as kids go to college to learn the skills needed for gainful employment or business. It’s not like it was in generations past when we had a basically agrarian economy. Kids grew up on the farm and learned all the details of how to run a farm by doing it their whole lives, as kids. Today, kids may know more about technology than we older folks do, but their ability to support themselves in early adulthood remains elusive for most. It’s tough being a young adult these days, but it also seemed quite difficult when I was a young adult, so there’s that.
We live in a complex, and ever-changing human dominated world. Oddly, for me anyway, some things seem to take forever, and some things are over in the blink of an eye. Child rearing is one of those things that are both too long and too short. About halfway through the process, you’re wondering if it’ll ever end, and then when the kids finally do leave the nest, you wonder how it all happened so quickly. My youngest daughter left home for good over a decade ago. The further I get away from my initial empty nest phase, the shorter the child raising years seem in retrospect. As Einstein once pointed out, the passage of time is relative to your frame of reference. This is true not only physically but emotionally and intellectually as well.
I once read this book called The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukov. In the book, he explains Einstein’s habit of performing thought experiments. This is how Einstein came up with most of his theories. I must admit, it took me almost 2 months to read this book, because it was full of thought experiments to be performed – which – silly me – I took the time to do. Despite my efforts though, I don’t know that I’m any closer to understanding physics or how the world works. This is what can happen when you have above-average intelligence, but you’re no genius either. On so many levels, I’m reaching for the stars, yet they remain out of reach. But I digress…
Speaking of noise and complexity, many of us have been inadvertently caught up in the cacophony of the daily news cycle. It’s easy for this to happen. It’s all in your face the minute you go on the internet, social media, or TV. I would wager a bet that most of us indulge in these preoccupations to some extent on the daily. The thing we usually forget is that these stories are brought to us courtesy of advertisers, and the idea is to keep us as hooked as any kid on drugs might be. In fact, for people of my age anyway, most of the ads are for drugs of various kinds. (“Ask your doctor if bliffendorforin is right for you…”) Regardless of whether you’re watching right leaning programming or left leaning programming, big pharma wants you to know that they have the cure for whatever ails you. They’re not choosy about your politics, they’re far more interested in the ratings, which should give you some idea of the overall importance of small details like content. Today’s headlines are nothing more than tomorrow’s somewhat dubious history.
If I had to be completely honest, I should admit here that I have as much chance of understanding someone else’s complicated tax return documents, as I do of understanding Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Ditto for any 850-page report documenting legal theories. There are some things that are so complex and turgid that I simply must delegate the study to others more qualified than myself. Leave it to people who get paid to do this stuff, and just give me the executive summary!
Which then leads me to the question of importance. It may turn out that human history is just that. Jesus himself said, “Heaven and Earth shall pass away, but my words will never pass away.” (Matthew 24:35) God forgive me for contradicting The Big Guy, but if Heaven and Earth will pass away, so will everything that pertains to it, including words. I’m merely suggesting here that taking a longer view may help to relieve anxiety.
That’s what being out in nature at odd times of the day and night does for me. It helps me with my perspective a little bit. Communing with something as old as a rock, as story filled as a petroglyph baking out in the desert sun for hundreds of years, as ephemeral as a summer rainstorm, or as deep as the view of The Milky Way bending across the sky on a summer night, helps me to gain some perspective on what’s important. I’m not saying that human history is entirely unimportant here. After all, we’re humans. It’s important to us! But as fate would have it, there are also other species on our life-giving planet, and it’s possible that what happens to them is also important: this includes all manner of flora and fauna. Because of our myriad physical and mental capabilities, humans have risen to the top of the evolutionary heap, but we may also be the cause of another mass extinction on this planet if we’re not careful. It’s true, with great privilege comes great responsibility. We don’t want Mother Nature to start over creating life forms. There’s also nothing to say that humans will outlast all the other species; in fact, we may be the first to go.
In this photo, the sun was just rising on a new day and tinting some of the clouds lavender, peach, and gold when I turned to see how sunrise was going on the first full day after the winter solstice here in the northern hemisphere of planet earth. Not to put too fine a point on it.
Adventures on Earth and Beyond 