Seven Decades

     In less than a week I shall begin my seventh decade orbiting the sun while here on this "pale blue dot," a famous description of Earth from the late Carl Sagan (an atheist, no less).  It has indeed been miraculous for me just to ponder how fortunate I have been to have come this far and to have emerged so content at the way things have turned out.  Almost daily I am aware of how I am blessed in so many respects, not only physically and mentally but also regarding my relationships, including my relationship with that of our home planet, Earth.  Was any of this the result of the way I chose to live or what I chose to do, or was it fate or just sheer luck...maybe it was just a random roll of the dice?  Whatever it was, to have made it this far is absolutely amazing to me.  As Lao Tzu reminded us, "He who is contented is rich."

    My brother and I often talk about such things, about the bell curve of life and how our wants and needs change as we age.  Luckily for me, even as I was deep into my working life friends would often ask, "yes you want that but do you need it?"  Which brings me full circle to another quote so common on posters (yes, in my day we used to actually buy paper "posters" to pin on our walls): Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have.  Philosophically quite true but at this point in my life, perhaps Ingrid Bergman's words are a bit more accurate: Happiness is good health and a bad memory.

    Reaching this age also makes one (or me, at least) treasure what years (if any) may be left.  One only has to read about IPF or idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, the "ninja" disease that takes years to show any symptoms and is 100% fatal (it strikes people of all sorts, from the fittest to the lifelong smoker and has puzzled physicians for countless decades.  Wrote Dr. Michael J. Stephen IPF is: ...a relentless disease that turns lungs to stone...The models we used in the past to represent what happens in the lungs have turned out to be far too simplistic, and as is typical, the designs of nature and the human body are proving to be far more complicated and mysterious than previously thought...With careful separation of the lung tissue, scientists were able to measure the total distance of all the airways in the human body, and it amounted to more than fifteen hundred miles, an incredible amount of tissue packed into so small an area...

     After you're done taking that in (and taking a deep breath), take a peek at your arm, or your face, or any other part of your body and ponder something else we take for granted, the largest organ of our body...our skin.  Monty Lyman and his book, The Remarkable Life of Skin, starts out with this: We see skin all the time, both on ourselves and on others.  But when was the last time you really looked at your skin?  You might give it a regular inspection in the mirror, part of a daily skincare routine, but I mean properly looked.  And wondered.  Wondered at the elaborate, unique whorls carved on the tips of your finger, and at the furrows and hollow of the miniature landscape on the back of your hand.  Wondered at how this wafer-thin wall manages to keep your insides in and the treacherous outside out.  It's scratched, squashed and stretched thousands of times a day, but it doesn't break --at least not easily-- or wear out.  It's battered by high-energy radiation from the sun but stops it from ever touching our internal organs.  Many of the deadliest members of the bacterial hall of fame have visited the surface of your skin, but rarely do they ever get through.  Though we take it for granted, the wall the skin creates is utterly remarkable and it's constantly keeping us alive.

     Fascinating as all that is, author Lyman asks us to guess at what is the ideal cell shape for our skin?  What structure would bond tightly enough to keep water out and yet still allow enough flexibility for hairs and callouses to grow and push outward (it should be noted that we lose about 500 million skin cells daily!).  Turns out its the tetradecahedron, a 14-sided structure (what??).  Then came this from STAT: ...since the 1990s, even as colorectal cancer rates have declined for people 50 and older, they have more than doubled among American adults under 50, according to the National Cancer Institute.  By 2030, predicts a study published in April, colorectal cancer will be the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in people aged 20 to 49.  See what thoughts begin appearing when you start your seventh decade (okay, maybe the last one was due to me just having my coloscopy).

Starving child's hand on worker.  Photo: Michael Wells

    I happened to pick up a massive coffee-table book* published by World Press Photo, a book titled Things As They Are (the photo on the right is from the book).  It was a compilation of photojournalists across the world, filming and writing about what was happening before their eyes and what they felt the world needed to see as well.  It was all there, a celebration of world events captured from 1955 onward, a few years after my birth...My Lai, the fall of the Berlin Wall, landing on the moon, Kennedy, the Beatles, Ali-Liston.  But one thing I noticed were all the events that I missed in-between, all the countless wars and destruction and disasters: the Hungarian revolution, the slums of Rio and Delhi, Biafra, Selma, Nicaragua, Bhopal.  To see such stunning photographs now and realize that I had either blanked them out or was so wrapped up in my youth and teenage years that as far as I was concerned, they didn't exist.  Thick-skinned, or thin-skinned?  Somehow I had to admit that my earlier life was rather sheltered.  Award-winning screenwriter Horton Foote (To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies, among others) said: I’ve known people that the world has thrown everything at to discourage them…to break their spirit.  And yet something about them retains a dignity.  They face life and don’t ask quarters.  Looking back it was glaringly obvious that there were lots of people who had a much harder life than me...

    Writer Julia Galef gave a TED Talk that tried to make us become more open, not only to ideas and thoughts but also to admitting when we've been wrong: There's a quote that I keep coming back to, by Saint-Exupéry. He's the author of "The Little Prince."  He said, "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up your men to collect wood and give orders and distribute the work.  Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."  In other words, I claim, if we really want to improve our judgment as individuals and as societies, what we need most is not more instruction in logic or rhetoric or probability or economics, even though those things are quite valuable.  But what we most need to use those principles well is scout mindset.  We need to change the way we feel.  We need to learn how to feel proud instead of ashamed when we notice we might have been wrong about something.  We need to learn how to feel intrigued instead of defensive when we encounter some information that contradicts our beliefs...What do you most yearn for?  Do you yearn to defend your own beliefs?  Or do you yearn to see the world as clearly as you possibly can?

    In growing older, there is a tendency to become more locked in your ways; I notice that my spirit of adventure and openness is much smaller than it was 20 or 30 or 50 years ago.  But I've also realized that I've been wrong about a lot of things, one of which is about the hope of today's youth and the future.  Some recent discoveries have included ultra-white paint that may help save our climate; said Smithsonian: Using statistical modeling, the researchers estimated that their ultra-white paint could reduce air conditioning use by up to 70 percent in hot cities like Reno, Nevada, and Phoenix, Arizona.  The same magazine said that our blue jeans may also be rounding an environmental corner with a new process that uses bacteria instead of toxic chemicals; said the piece about how jeans are dyed today: Synthesizing indigo dye requires a number of toxic chemicals, including formaldehyde, as does the dying process itself.  This creates an enormous amount of pollution; in some parts of the world, rivers near denim mills run blue, contaminating and killing fish and affecting the health of workers and residents.  With more than 40,000 tons of indigo produced each year, this is a significant problem.  And from PBS came this: Before COVID-19, tuberculosis was the world’s deadliest infectious disease, killing 1.4 million people in 2019.  A 31-year-old scientist from Burundi, Mireille Kamariza, helped develop a cheap diagnostic tool that can make it easier to detect TB, which is often confused in early stages with pneumonia or cancer.  Young scientists and researchers are working on restoring oyster and coral reefs, as well as denuded forests and fields.  How encouraging is all of that, asked the travel site, Contiki. 

    Then there were these refreshing book reviews from Nashville writer, Susannah Felts in Book Page: Remember Gen X? No? That’s fine, no one does. But hey, we’re out here, and we’re heading into midlife and its many crises. Good thing we have Heather Corinna with us along for the bumpy ride, like the whip-smart, sardonic friend you used to hang with at punk shows who’s now armed with a metric ton of hard-earned wisdom about the endocrine system, advice for vasomotor freakouts and edibles...Game changed. And on another review she wrote: Have you always been a sucker for luscious displays of color, pattern and texture in your personal space?  Or, after a year of staying home, are you fed up with your minimalist, white-walled temple and ready to splash bright shades and wallpaper everywhere?  Maybe you just need a gorgeous, aspirational coffee-table book to page through while you wait for the takeout to arrive.  If your answer to any of these possibilities is yes, then the new Justina Blakeney will be your jam. 

    Okay, I may be on the verge of honorary membership in the Curmudgeon Club, but it's hopeful to me that so many people of all ages are balancing and even overriding the negativity that seems to be floating in our air these days.  Kindness and courtesy and consideration still exist, and they exist in droves.  One only has to look from a different angle.  So I write about our lungs and our skin not to make you fearful but to make you grateful.  My life up to this point may be like the ever-erupting Stromboli, an island that pokes above the ocean but is merely the tip of what is a two-mile deep volcano; in talking to some of the island's residents the NY Times wrote: ...for some, the knowledge that the specter of death always exists is a thing of counterintuitive beauty.

    A little over a month ago it was World Oceans Day, a day to look at and wonder about our oceans, the "skin" of our planet.  Said Discover: ...researchers found large amounts of microplastics in pelagic red crabs and giant larvaceans, two filter-feeding species that reside in the midwater and are fundamental to food webs at both the ocean’s surface and floor....Roughly 8.3 billion tons of plastic have already been produced since the early 1950s, and 91 percent of that isn’t recycled.  And if plastic use continues at the current rate, there will eventually be more plastic in the ocean than fish, according to a 2017 U.N. report.  But it turns out that oceans, as vast as they are, have come and gone said National Geographic...and in the not too distant future (geologically), the oceans we know will be gone and a new one will appear.  Life evolving and changing...

    Looking back, I look at and wonder about my memories, my experiences, the people and animals I have known and remembered, or have perhaps forgotten.  Did I do right?  Am I doing right?  Am I helping to better the lives of others, or even myself?  The answer may have unwittingly come when my wife and I went on a hike, an hour and a half uphill jaunt that put us somewhere near the 8000' mark.  Our valley below was roasting in a heat wave of 100+ degree weather, while we were comfortably huffing and puffing away in a 70 degree breeze.  And before long, flowers.  Yellow columbines, lupines, asters, Indian paintbrush, bluebells (forgive my botanic generalizations of these flowers).  It was good to be breathing cooler, fresher air, and to be greeted by such beauty, innocent and oblivious to all that was happening below.

    It is speculated that the Himalaya mountains also "breathe," said National Geographic, although not in a time scale we as humans could imagine: If we could put our planetary clock on fast forward, Earth’s surface would writhe with activity.  Continents would scurry across the globe, oceans would open and close, and new mountains would shoot up toward the sky.  Yet even as mountains rise, they also periodically sink back down when the stress from tectonic collisions triggers earthquakes. These events happen in a cycle, like the chest of a rocky behemoth drawing uneven breaths, explains Luca Dal Zilio, a geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology.  Lungs and breath, skin and water?  Maybe as I start my solar orbit this time I'll realize that I have a bit more in common with Earth than I once thought.  As for celebrating my birthday, I'm quite content to have no presents or cake, just my wife and perhaps a friend or two.  As for the fireworks, I'll only have to look up, to look up and wonder at the mystery and miracle of it all.  The Perseid Meteor shower will be nearing its peak as if beckoning me once again on my newest journey.

*Do people still call them "coffee" tables; and for that matter, do people still place over-sized photo books on them (do people even still buy excessively large photobooks?)   I ask because when I picked up my "photo" order at my local office supply store (Costco long since closed its photo-printing operations in stores due to lack of demand), the clerk looked a bit puzzled and almost stunned; someone was actually still wanting copies of photos?  Luckily, I wasn't listening to my CDs at the time...and if you're wondering about that stark picture of the starving child's hand during the famine in Uganda, it won photographer Michael Wells the Photo of the Year (1990) from World Press.