Look, Up in the Sky...

     I have discovered (or perhaps just admitted to myself) that I am not paying attention, which is not to say that I don't notice things, although "notice" might be a bit too strong a description.  "Glimpse" might be more appropriate.  And all of this after writing earlier about becoming more "aware" in one's surroundings, about taking the time to notice the details, about trying to slow down and to just  "take it all in" patiently and naturally.  To enjoy and absorb life.  Hmm, who was that masked man who said that?

    It is far too easy to slide into a routine, to Groundhog Day the seasons and to celebrate birthdays until (as one tee shirt says) you're surprised to discover that you're hanging around a lot of old people.  Dan Schilling wrote about this slow diminishing of being aware of your surroundings (albeit from his Special Ops perspective) and I must admit that the scene from the first of the Jason Bourne series has haunted my memory bank, Bourne (Matt Damon) suffering from amnesia but asking the girl he was with (Julia Stiles) what she noticed in the coffee shop they were sitting in: very little, she replied, while Bourne questioned why he could notice the number of exits, and the man behind her being small at 155 lbs. but able to overcome an attack, and the car outside with the passenger having an earpiece, and the wiry fellow two seats down likely to get up in the next few moments.  In such a scene, I find myself relating more to the girl, innocently sipping my coffee and totally unaware that I'm about to get bonked on the head.

    Long ago I purchased a card game or rather a game box full of cards called Stare (now in its 3rd edition).  It's a box filled with everyday scenes of museum paintings, old movie posters, graphic drawings and such, almost all of them well-versed in the public eye (Normal Rockwell paintings are often featured).  In the game, you have 20 seconds to "stare" at the card, after which you must flip it over and answer the questions.  At first, you start to obsess on the details -- the number of dots on the sign, the colors of the feathers, that sort of thing.  But the "game" is actually pointing out the rather simple things one misses in life...not the details but rather the basics -- the number of people staring at a window, the position of the people in the background, which hand is pointing at the sign.  For me, my ability to "notice" is poor at best, all of which makes me wonder just how much of everyday life --both outdoors and in-- I am not only missing but indeed have missed.  Should I be faced with having to sum up my life with details (enough to say put in an autobiography), I fear that I would likely struggle to submit a full eight pages, all while wondering if I embellished a few of the highlights while omitting 98% of what actually happened.  You forgot the bits, as they would tell me in the UK...

View from the local cemetery as spring takes its time...

    Poor witness, but an even worse detective would be me (and perhaps the underlying reason I enjoy those British/Nordic series such as Fartblinda and Hidden Assets).  And being a doc?  Forget it, even if I wasn't colorblind...what red rash, Miss Kipling?  All of which makes me that much more fascinated by the observations of Dr. Jonathan Reisman in his book, The Unseen Body.  Take his opening chapter on the throat, a puzzling piece of human anatomy which in his eyes, remains the body's single most faulty (or perhaps most complex) design.  Who hasn't accidentally inhaled that small drop of water or saliva and gone into a sudden fit of choking.  It can feel as if you are about to perish as you struggle for air, your epiglottis going into spasm against the foreign invader of semi-solid material attempting to enter your lungs.  That tiny piece of tissue has to automatically and quickly decide and divert what you are doing (eating/swallowing or breathing) lest you actually DO perish.  As Reisman wrote: Swallowing involves the cooperation of five separate cranial nerves and more than twenty different muscles.  This complicated mechanism is the body's attempt to compensate for the throat's inherently dangerous anatomy, but it is a clunky and overly complex solution to a serious problem and therefore prone to failure.  This is especially the case when people talk while eating, an attempt to keep both the esophagus and the airway open at once.  It is no wonder that so many people choke to death every year.

     Reisman brought up many such thoughts, those things about our bodies which we rarely think about because they just seem to work automatically.  But this next bit caught me off guard when he was served the traditional Icelandic dish, svid: I was handed a dinner plate, and staring up from it was a sheep's head split down the middle from front to back.  The exposed facial cross section was an image straight from my anatomy textbook: for weeks I had studied that same diagram (though human rather than ovine) leading up to a medical school exam...With the dinner plate as a mirror, I thought about what lay behind my own face.  My senses and their circuit board of perception had captured almost every experience of my life, including the sensations of every bite of food I've ever eaten.  The svid suggested that I, too, despite a lifetime of experiences, would one day end up on the dinner plate of some creature, be it large or microscopic, everything I touched and saw reduced to little more than chopped liver...Just as dissecting a cadaver told me about what my own body was made of and gave me an indirect glimpse inside myself, digging into the most philosophical meal I have ever eaten told me in no uncertain terms what my own body was made of: food...I cross-referenced cuts of beef against the muscle groups I was learning about on the human body and found that cattle and humans have similar anatomy after all -- the muscles just have different names.  Cattle have the filet mignon, and we have the psoas major muscle.  They have the rib eye, and we have the erector spinae.  The same muscles responsible for every movement our bodies make in life suddenly become meat after death, a change in perspective with no actual biological difference.

     So I'll admit that things have swept by me without me really noticing, perhaps brought to a head when trying to enroll my dog in a training class sponsored by our local humane society.  No matter what I did, the forms just wouldn't let me fill them out on my laptop.  What type of file was it, the woman at the facility asked me, pdf, xls, docx, flv?  I stopped at pdf, the only one I recognized.  Well, she told me, just take a picture of it (jpg.) and fill out the form on your phone (which worked perfectly); when I told her of that she replied: sometimes our web people forget that people still use their laptops to submit forms.  Hmm, and here I thought that I was keeping up with the times.  And yes, I noticed that the pandemic and supply chain bottlenecks have raised prices, but I failed to notice that in the past two years the deficit had dropped by nearly $1.6 trillion (yes, that's with a "t") reported the Bipartisan Policy Center.  Something must be going right since a former chunk of land nearby (a mink farm some 50 years ago) was building what I felt were rather large homes which started at $1.2 million; when I last walked by the yet-to-be-finished development less than a month later, I noticed that the entire thing had sold out.  And while getting my car serviced at the local Toyota dealer I casually asked how backlogged they were for new cars?  Highlanders and 4Runners (the most popular, I was told) were a year out, the hybrids even further.  How could I have missed those things?

     The Saturday Evening Post (yes, it's still being published in magazine format), had a piece on Garrison Keillor of Lake Wobegone fame.  His rule #13 is "Get out of the way.  You're old and slow.  Don't be an obstacle."  If this suggests a man resigned to stepping back in life, it's not that at all, wrote the article.  More a realization --repeated through Serenity-- that each generation gets its time in the spotlight.  Be realistic, he says; move aside gracefully; resist anger.  The publisher's page quotes Keillor saying: "My life is so good at 79 I wonder why I waited this long to get here,” writes Mr. Keillor. “I look at the front page of the paper and think, ‘Not My Problem.’  The world belongs to the young, I am only a tourist, and I love being a foreigner in America.  I enjoy it as I would enjoy Paris or Copenhagen, except I mostly know the language.  I don’t know who famous people are anymore and I’m okay with that.”  You learn that Less Is More, the great lesson of Jesus and also Buddha.  Each day becomes important after you pass the point of life expectancy.  Big problems vanish, small things make you happy.  And the worst is behind you because you lack the energy to be as foolish as you might otherwise be.  “We arrive at old age by luck; virtue is not crucial.  Luck is crucial.  If you took time to plan your life carefully, you’d be 90 by the time you turn 25.  So aim for adequacy.  Be good enough”.

     Good enough.  Great advice.  Even more so after reading how diminished our senses are compared to some animals (fish with 4 eyes, or a sea creature able to see colors far beyond our capabilities, "a color system quite unlike ours, or any other known animal," said Justin Marshall of the University of Queensland's Brain Institute; in this case, he was talking about the peacock shrimp).  What got to me was the complexity of our skin, all of this coming from author Jackie Higgins book, Sentient: The epidermis (from the Greek epi [upon] and derma [skin] is made up of five (layers).  At the surface is the stratum corneum of dry, dead skin cells that slough off every few weeks; farther down is the smooth, translucent stratum lucidum, which is found only on our fingers, the palms of our hands, and the soles of our feet; then the stratum granulosum of keratinocytes, the most common skin cells; next comes the stratum spinosum, the squamous cell layer, containing the Langerhaus cells that confer immunity.  Finally, there is the stratum basale, with melanocytes, or pigment cells, and column-shaped basal cells that divide, pushing older cells upward.  Deeper still, in the dermis, the bulk of skin is made up of a mesh of connective tissue that cocoons our nerves, blood vessels, and sweat glands.  It is in these epidermal and dermal borderlands that our sense of touch begins...if the skin is depressed by a mere five-hundredths of a millimeter,* they transform the physical deformation into an electrical impulse...to convey the infinite variety of how the world feels to our brain.

     The world is changing.  My brain is changing, or at least how the world feels to my brain is changing.  There is so much we have yet to discover and even if at times I feel that the world is passing me by, I can't help but notice all that continues to emerge right in front of me, as if staring out of an airplane window.  Pilot and author Mark Vanhoenacker summed it up nicely in his book Skyfaring: ...as passengers we are all given these increasingly rare quiet hours in which there is nowhere we have to go and nothing we have to do, hours in which we are alone with our thoughts and music and the moving picture of our journeys.  Then we blink and suddenly we see again the earth we are flying over.  From the window seat our focal point crosses between the personal and the planetary so smoothly that such movement seems to hint at a new species of grace, that we would come to only in the sky.  Whatever our idea of the sacred, our simplest questions --how the one relates to the many, how time equates to distance, how the present rests on the past as simply as our lights lie on each night's darkened sphere-- are rarely framed as clearly as they are by the oval window of an airplane.  We look through it over snowcapped cordilleras in the last red turn of the day, or upon the shining night-palmistry of cities, and we see that the window is a mirror, briefly raised above the world....From airplanes we occasionally look up and are briefly held by the stars or the firmament of blue.  But mostly we look down, caught by the sudden gravity of what we've left, and by thoughts of reunion, drifting like clouds over the half-bright world.

     So I end with yet another tidbit of wisdom from Keillor, his witticisms disappearing as quickly as they did from my dad and the days of Will Rogers.  "Never say anything bad about a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes," said Keillor, adding, "By then he's a mile away, you've got his shoes, and you can say whatever you want to."  Good advice...now if I can just avoid being hit by that car while crossing the street.

Addendum: in a nod to the last post, I mentioned the continuing drought in my state (and in much of the West), all while my state floods its golf courses and alfalfa/hay fields for a product destined for export.  But then came this from The Salt Lake Tribune a few weeks later...the enormous water usage in my state for coal.  Said the article: Sixty-one percent of the state's energy generation comes from coal, and natural gas makes up 24%—all this while Rocky Mountain Power is flooding its two coal plants with 26 million gallons of water a day (9.4 billion gallons a year).  According to the Global Energy Monitor: Heavy water usage from coal plants can have a long-term impact on aquifers in a region, since once depleted they can take hundreds of years to replenish.  In 2011, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) reported that, in at least 120 vulnerable watersheds across the U.S., power plants are a factor contributing to water stress.  Power plants can also potentially harm fish eggs, larvae, and other aquatic biota in their early stages, as they require particular combinations of fresh water flow and temperature, among other factors, all of which can be impacted by coal plant water usage... According to the Department of Defense National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), a wet recirculating cooling water system for a 520-MW coal-fired power plant uses about 12 million gallons of water per hour.  Makes one feel that letting lawns get a little brown may be little more than a thimble of water in an ocean.  Frustrating...

*In case you're at all wondering, that 500ths of a millimeter, the point our fingers can sense something, is less than 2/1000ths of an inch.