From A Distance

    By the time this post appears, I will likely be standing on some distant shore, perhaps guilt-ridden at leaving our animals at home (although in capable hands with someone who has not only cared for them for years but has made a business in doing so); and of course I marvel at both the ability of what we humans have created to move hundreds of us at a time and drop them off an ocean away, shifting time zones and turning body clocked nights into days.  Of course, the planes that do this transporting know nothing of this, their engines actually working almost entirely opposite that of our automobiles, growing ever-more efficient the more they keep running.  Keeping them going for 20 or 23 hours a day is ideal, or so an airline mechanic once told me (a recent non-stop flight just introduced that concept to bleary-eyed passengers).  But all of that travel pales next to those pesky photons (yes, I'm back on that subject, still fascinated at these constantly created particles that emerge from starry nuclear explosions and yet emerge to bring us the life sustaining energy of this planet and beyond).  If you remember, those photons struggle for millennia just trying to bust out of our sun (which one must be reminded is just a middle-sized star and one of billions in the universe, at least the universe that we know with our limited satellite capabilities), and once they do break away they travel at the speed of light (186,000 miles [300,000 km] per second) to spread out in every direction...and take 8 minutes to reach us here on Earth.  Okay, you've read all that before but here's where a concept of the distance of space enters the picture.  Those same photons that don't hit Earth but shoot right past us have no boundaries and hit Saturn after 80 minutes and Neptune 4 hours later (still traveling at the speed of light); and the "nearby" Kepler-62, our best possible hope for a habitable solar system similar to ours?...1200 years later.*  As NASA summed it up: One way to help visualize the relative distances in the solar system is to imagine a model in which the solar system is reduced in size by a factor of a billion.  The Earth is then about 1.3 cm in diameter (the size of a grape).  The Moon orbits about a foot away.  The Sun is 1.5 meters in diameter (about the height of a man) and 150 meters (about a city block) from the Earth.  Jupiter is 15 cm in diameter (the size of a large grapefruit) and 5 blocks away from the Sun.  Saturn (the size of an orange) is 10 blocks away; Uranus and Neptune (lemons) are 20 and 30 blocks away.  A human on this scale is the size of an atom; the nearest star would be over 40,000 km away!  And here I was, 8 hours from my home, and marveling that I had already gone so far away and done so in such a short time.  Ah, the human mind.

    It would be 33 hours before our heads would again touch a real bed and pillow and we would attempt to force our tired bodies to sleep despite that facts that our internal clocks were showing that it was just past noon back home.  But it wasn't our place to question the workings of the brain, especially as I finished the book that told an abbreviated version of what's involved in becoming a neurosurgeon.  Author John Colapinto described Josh Bederson, chief neurosurgeon at Mt. Sinai, as he mentors a resident surgeon on a particularly delicate operation: "This is the anterior choroidal artery," he said as he cleared a pathway toward the aneurysm.  "It's very small but unforgiving.  It supplies an area of the brain that contains cabling for motor functioning; if you occlude it, they don't walk again.  The white structure here that's very soft -- it's the ocular motor nerve that opens and closes the eye and moves it.  If you damage the nerve she's as good as blind."  At one point, he allowed the resident to take up the instruments and advance into the Sylvian fissure.  "When you introduce your instruments, you want to decrease the magnification on the scope, " he said.  "Advance your sucker.*  Less thumb.  Even less.  Slip past the temporal lobe.  Okay, the bipolar is in your right hand...Little too much thumb."

    The mind is a funny thing a times, tricking you into feeling this way or that, loving or not loving, caring or not caring. feeling sleepy and yet telling you to remain awake.  The  post's title above comes from a song by Julie Gold and one made popular first by Nanci Griffith and later by Bette Midler; in part its lyrics went: From a distance there is harmony...From a distance we all have enough...From a distance you look like my friend even though we are at war.  Here's part of songwriter's Julie Gold's tale: In 1978, at the age of 22, I came to New York in pursuit of my dream of being a songwriter.  And while dreams are essential, they don’t pay the rent.  For years, I worked various temp jobs while gigging at night and sending songs out whenever possible.  I demonstrated vacuum cleaners, Mr. Coffees and toaster ovens.  I worked the flea markets, as a proofreader, for a dentist and at a venetian blinds factory.  It was a struggle.  No health benefits.  No money for recreational purposes.  Desperation.  Self doubt.  Fear.  We all know what that’s like.  But, all the while, I clung to my dream like a life preserver.  I knew why I was born, and no one could discourage me from reaching my mountaintop.  I was willing to die trying.  Honest I was.  Of course she did realize her dream and go on to play in Carnegie Hall and hear how her song was touching so many people.  And so here were my wife and I, glimpsing the convoluted world that emanated from our sleepy eyes from an ocean away...and we were gaining some clarity.

    A few years ago Abigail Thomas wrote A Three Dog Life, a tale of her unexpected plunge into being alone after her husband suffers a traumatic brain injury.  Taking solace in her dogs, her daughter tells her simply that they're so easy to love because, "They don't talk."  Wrote Thomas: Dogs never sniff at the husks of old conversations, or conduct autopsies on weekends gone wrong.  An unexamined life may not be worth living, but the overexamined life is hell.  We talk too much.  Author Colapinto mentioned above also examined his life but did so in acknowledging the same publisher when it came to writing his own books: ...for asking if I'd be interested in writing some books in a proposed series about "becoming."  The subject matter was especially congenial to me at the time since I had a son starting his freshman year of college and I was already pondering the mystery of how young people settle on what they hope to do, and be, for the rest of their lives.  It also happens that I was, myself, thinking about new directions in which to take my life and writing and was thus aware that the process of change and becoming never really ends, even for someone rounding on his sixth decade.

    It was a thought for us as well, this "becoming" thing, as my wife and I walked in the long stretches of sand as the tides went out in the morning, a stretch of earth revealed for some six hours each day without fail as if allowed to breathe in the sun and its photon-nutrients while the water and waves retreated, drawn perhaps unwillingly with some magnetic pull beyond its (and our) understanding.  But from a distance little of it mattered, and that meant pretty much everything.  Not the television, not the politics, not the weather back home...these brief days would keep us insulated in a land far away, awakening ourselves to a new view and a new perspective; and for my wife, an old childhood home.  It was temporarily a time to forget about the future.  As author Thomas wrote: The future was also the place where the bad stuff waited in ambush.  My children were embarking on their futures in fragile vessels, and I trembled.  I wanted to remove obstacles, smooth their way.  I wanted to change their childhoods.  I needed to be right all the time.  I wanted them to listen to me, learn from my mistakes, and save themselves a lot of grief.  Well, now I know I can control my tongue, my temper, and my appetites, but that's it.  I have no effect on weather, traffic, or luck.  I can't make good things happen.  I can't keep anybody safe.  I can't influence the future and I can't fix up the past...What a relief.

 

*In such surgeries, maginification scopes allow surgeons much more clarity and detail of the areas they are operating on, allowing them to guide suturing and suctioning devices that can cut, cauterize and remove damaged or sectioned-off pieces of the targeted area.