Syzygy

Syzygy

   If you happened to be awake early this morning (in my case, a little after 6 AM), you likely saw the full lunar eclipse, a "syzygy" of certain elements coming into alignment, in this case the full moon falling directly into the shadow of the earth.  The eclipse was able to be safely viewed across much of the world and lasted a few minutes.  And after a little over an hour, the moon was gone, our earth rotating past and sending the moon into the mountains beyond.

   Also the other day, my friend suffered a serious accident, a woman pulling out directly and unexpectedly in front of her car as she leisurely traveled down a street.  Her car was totaled, a term used here in the U.S. to indicate that the car is beyond repair.  It was a perfect alignment of events.  A second before or after and she would have been past the woman's car; had the woman looked, had there been another lane, had the light stayed red a bit longer.  In another instance some years ago, my friend was driving home down a frontage road that borders the freeway, something he had down over and over during his drive out and back to work.  A construction truck coming the opposite way, its bed full of dirt fill from a nearby site, hit a pothole and jarred a baseball-sized rock loose from the top of the dirt, a rock that bounced out of the truck, onto the road and directly into my friend's windshield.  He was killed instantly.

   We hear those terms over and over.  Just a second later, if he would have taken a different route or had stayed late at work.  What is it about these circumstances, this syzygy, that causes accidents or trauma or death?  What is it that the same syzygy can bring about a chance meeting or the saving of a life.  The right place at the right time, or the wrong place and the wrong time.

   There was a similar question raised in an article that appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek on the dark side of interrogation techniques.  In the piece, it's pointed out that events have to line up almost perfectly to draw out information, whether that is an admission of guilt or withheld intelligence, the methods have, as a rule, proven effective...or so it was thought.  The good cop/bad cop routine, the humiliation, the deprivation, the beatings, all have seemed to produce what were a series of confessions, not only in the military world but also in the everyday civilian world ranging from police crimes to college cheating.  The new field, one which is actually quite old but is only now entering the interrogation field, is called behavioral sciences, and indeed, it is the science part that is entering the picture now.

   As it happens, the "science" part is beginning to prove that traditional indicators of detecting guilt and/or lying are often found to be as wrong as they are correct.  Shifty eyes, nervousness, shyness, all appeared as often with innocent people as with those who were guilty.  And coercion methods such as pretending to empathize or relate to the subject generated almost as many false confessions from innocent parties as they did from those who committed the crime.  A frightened individual in a tight room and possibly facing jail time, even if innocent, can often be slowly guided down a path of  "I'm sure you didn't know" and "you were just at the wrong place, how could you know," followed by the offer of leniency, an offer of just sign this paper and you can go.  It's the perfect lining up events, one side blocking out the other, a casting of a shadow over an otherwise lit world.

   When such events happen to us, such as my friend's accident, or being pulled over by the police, or being at the wrong place at the wrong time, it becomes difficult to see what went wrong.  Again the questions become "why me," or "why now?"  But as with what happens with the lunar eclipse, the sun's rays still manage to seemingly bend themselves around the earth, the moon's darkness broken by a faint umber glow as the light rays sail past.  Sometimes, even in those off, unimaginable moments, we need to think of the alignment that never occurred, the car that just missed us as it ran the red light, the jutting edge of the shelf that we dodged just as we stood up, the knife that slipped on the cutting board and that barely missed our finger, the things that went right.  In the larger scheme of things, those odd, sometimes disastrous moments are few in number, generally as few as the number of total lunar eclipse (the next full lunar eclipse happens about 11 months from now).

   It was all summed up, somewhat ironically, by the editors of Popular Science who assembled some of their combined thoughts on the question, "What's the most valuable lesson you've learned?"  One of their answers (and remember, this is from a science-oriented viewpoint), "Make it a great day, or not; the choice is yours."