Continuity...

     While fortunate enough to still have avoided Covid, I finally succumbed to a head cold, complete with sniffles and that feeling of somewhat puffy eyes as if it were already spring and clouds of pollen were floating around (but it isn't spring because another large batch of snow is due to arrive, adding even more to the heavy snowfall already in our mountains).  But relaying the idea of a head cold vs. a headcold or a head-cold (or even cold head) reminded me of the section in Joanne Anderson's book on punctuation (she's the chief desk editor of the daily Australian paper, The Age).  In that chapter she writes about why and when two words became hyphenated, or simply became a single word: Delta Air Lines or Delta Airlines (it's the former); check-up or checkup; non-fiction or nonfiction.  She notes that other one-word combos simply returned to two separate words: ice cream, test tube, and fig leaf among them, although I never recall ever seeing those words as single words (icecream??).  Wrote the author: It's often the modern way to drop hyphens with common prefixes such as cyber, mega, over, super and under.  Thus we're familiar with cybercrimes, megastorms, miniskirts, overjoyed, superstores and underwhelmed...I cheat when I encounter quite a few of the shorter everyday words ending in -up, -off or -out.  As there is no consistency to be found with these and they appear so often, I've taken to hyphenating many an -off and -up word and leaning towards one word for their -out cousins: stand-off, bake-off, check-up, mix-up, turnout, checkout.  (Back to me: I should note that many auto-correct programs will have their own version of what is or isn't the correct and/or accepted version and mine did not care for megastorms being written as one word).  But grammar, schmammer, who really cares?  Well, dictionary makers for one.  Turns out that in 2007 the Oxford dictionary removed 16,000 hyphenated words, either combining them into one word or separating them into two.  Wrote Anderson: The editor of the sixth edition, Angus Stevenson, said at the time that people were not confident about using hyphens any more.  Those stuffy lexicon folk; who knew that "graffiti" is the plural version? (a single scribble on a wall is properly called "graffito")   As I said, grammar, schmammer...but in many ways this shows the changing tastes and times of our world.  Separate us.  Unite us.  Or is it that so many of us may feel, can't we just leave well-enough alone?

       Even many mathematical laws of Nature, when placed against millions and billions of years, is changing in what scientists term deterministic chaos.  As Berkeley professor Walter Alvarez explained in his book, A Most Improbable Journey: In our personal lives, we can pass through long periods of continuity, going to work and returning home every day in a cyclical pattern, and meanwhile gradually getting older and perhaps wiser, which are trends.  And then, completely unexpectedly, contingency can strike, and we can fall off a ladder, or fall in love, and nothing will ever be the same again.  As a geologist, he further explained this concept in the manner of the odds of Earth being hit again by a huge asteroid as being close to nil.  Holding your thumb and forefingers together, he describes, link your hands together as if links in a chain.  The left hand's link would be Earth's orbit, and the right hand's link the orbit of that "killer" asteroid.  Now imagine that your left hand link is actually only 1/100 the size of  human hair, while the right hand link is a 1,000 times smaller than that, and that both of these are the relative orbits of both the asteroid and our planet; BUT within those orbits, our planet and that asteroid would be mere dots in that path and each within their own orbit.  As Alvarez wrote: Only if those [dots] pass through each other is there any chance of an impact, and since impactor orbits do intersect briefly, there is only a tiny window of time, a few minutes at most, in which both impactor and Earth are at the intersection points at the same time -- otherwise, no impact.  

     But then, we did have three major asteroids hit us: the dinosaur killing one 66 million years ago which left a crater 110 miles in diameter; the Canadian impact in Sudbury which was nearly 3 times older and which left a crater 160 miles in diameter; and the largest one in South Africa which hit over 2 billion years ago and left a crater 200 miles across.   As the author noted: ...we live our lives immersed in an ocean of contingency -- accidents, the vagaries of illness or health, or a chance meeting that leads to conflict or friendship, or love.  Even our existing at all is completely contingent and improbable to a degree that beggars belief.  He likens the chance of our --as in you-- being here today this way: ...if any single one of your ancestors in the gazillions of boxes back to the beginning of multicellular life, about a billion years ago, had been of the opposite sex, then that individual could not occupy that box, and you would not exist...So let's turn to the second method to see if we can get a rough estimate of how probable --or improbable-- we are.  If we ask how many people will be born into the next generation worldwide, the answer is on the order of a billion, about 10⁹.  If we ask how many individuals might be born into that generation, considering the number of eggs and sperm involved, the answer is about 10²⁵...If you take grains of fine sand, 10⁹ is a double handful, but 10²⁵ grains of fine sand would fill ten Grand Canyons!   Even picturing yourself in front of the Grand Canyon --much less 10 of them-- filled with sand and grabbing two handfuls, then realizing that only in those two handfuls, rests you...wow, makes you feel pretty lucky to be alive at all.

The foothills the day before a major snowstorm

     So my head cold.  About a week into that persistent nasal drip, I was eating some popcorn and felt a kernel stuck in my front tooth.  Dang thing wouldn't come out, not matter how much I dug or used my fingernail or whatever; I'd better just go upstairs and floss it our.  Only, there was no kernel.  In fact, there was no tooth.  I was staring at big gap in the bottom of my mouth, and what I was feeling was the tiniest piece of what remained.  No biggee, said my dentist (yes, the son...see the last post), but you'll have to have the root extracted because it will get infected (his emphasis).  Well, at least my sniffles were getting better.  Which is when I sprained my ankle.  No biggee, to most at least; but with the snapping of my anterior tibialis tendon, and the surgeon telling me that all of the remaining (and weaker) tendons now having to take over were pretty well frayed, I feared the worst.  Once those tendons broke, I would be left with a floppy foot that would drag.  But didn't things happen in threes?  Dang deterministic chaos...

     All of this made me think of yoga, well, not really since I've never done yoga but I would pretend to stretch now and then as if I had great plans to do so (but again, not much).  So this appeared in Orion from writer Priya Subberwal: Most of the yoga I know has been taught by white people.  My early instructors were YouTube personalities, gym teachers, or ski bums writing second jobs...Yoga became popular in America in the 1960s.  Though it has been a spiritual practice in India for millennia, it's popularity in the West is largely focused on asana or the physical shapes. The man credited for this, B.K.S. Iyengar, was one of the first people to teach yoga to westerners...The meaning of the word yoga in Sanskrit can be translated to "yoke" or "unite": to unite the mind with the body and the individual consciousness with the universal consciousness. I like the idea that yoga may also unite my white and brown selves, who sometimes feel tension with one another.  Sometimes I catch the right wave and find my flow.  Like my grandmother, I move slowly and in silence.  Asanas drift through my mind in Sanskrit and English.  Other times, no words at all.  The practice of unifying is a challenge, never complete.  There is always tension to sit with, to lean into.  The trick is to just keep breathing. 

     There's that perky word "unite" as if what seems so easy may be more difficult that we thought.  Cells needed to unite to create life, and people needed to unite to create war...or with a bit of effort, peace.  Bayard Rustin* was a person willing to put in that effort.  In the movie about his efforts, he says this to Dr. Martin Luther King: You're one of the smartest men I know, so explain to me why, after all that's left undone, am I yet again forced to justify my existence.  Each of us are taught in ways both cunning and cruel that we inadequate, incomplete, and the easiest way to combat that feeling of not being enough is to find someone we consider less than.  Less than because they are poorer than us or because they are darker than us or because they desire someone our churches and our laws say they should not desire.  When we tell ourselves such lies, start to live and believe such lies, we do the work of our oppressors by oppressing ourselves...What they really want to destroy is all of us coming together and demanding this country change...They either believe in freedom and justice for all, or they do not.  Rustin went on to organize (in just 7 weeks, no less) a peaceful demonstration in Washington, D.C., one which was attended by 250,000 people. 

     But what may have seem a "united" front at the time, now seems to have dissipated as the political pendulum begins to swing back against those ideals Rustin worked for...the poorer, the darker, the churches and laws that say what you can't do what you want with your own bodies (in many states, even if it threatens your life).  So how far has that swung back?  Just to take the financial side, this emerged from Forbes when talking about the passing on of wealth, as in $93 trillion: America’s Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964), along with surviving members of older generations, are about to fuel the greatest wealth transfer of all time.  In the U.S. today, according to the Federal Reserve, Boomers control a stunning $75 trillion and their elders another $18 trillion of the nation’s $141 trillion in total household wealth.  Yes, some middle-class retirees will spend their savings and die broke.  But wealth in the U.S. has become increasingly concentrated, with the richest 1% holding 31% of net assets—meaning most one-percenters (minimum net worth $10 million) will leave plenty to their children, grandchildren and favorite causes.  That’s particularly true for the very richest.  Out of 88 million living Americans born before 1965, Forbes has identified 572 U.S. billionaires—the 0.0007%.  We estimate they have a collective net worth of $3.9 trillion to pass on.  The death tax?  “Only morons pay the estate tax,” former Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn famously quipped while serving as President Donald Trump’s chief economic advisor.  Make no mistake, the estate tax used to be a real revenue raiser.  But a quarter-century of political, regulatory and court decisions—and the ingenuity of private lawyers—have eviscerated it.  Congress has raised the amount that a married couple can pass on to heirs without owing estate or gift taxes from $1.35 million in 2000 to almost $26 million this year.  The full $26 million can now even go into a generation-skipping or dynasty trust—meaning it can grow in value for grandkids (or later generations) without any further gift or estate tax owed.  Plus, any assets someone still owns at death get a step-up in basis, so no capital gains tax is due on appreciation to that point.  The result: Only 0.04% of deaths resulted in estate taxes in 2020, down from 2.18% in 2000.  So did any of that penetrate?  Probably not since very few of us (perhaps none) have $26 million to worry about or pass on, much less $39 billion.  And now those amounts have skyrocketed passed the billion mark and etched "trillion" into our everyday vocabulary.  One only has to watched the flood of television series now out about unhappy, uber-wealthy families (there's that hyphen) are: Succession (we tried but could only take one episode), ExPats (ditto) and McMafia.  As one reporter told an interviewer after his lunch with a group of billionaires, "I was the only one in that room who felt that he had enough money."  

     What we fight for, and what we fight against, may be as simple as a virus or as difficult as human rights (or money).  But each person, country or religion seems to often see such rights as limited to their own kind, their own rules, their own age, their own gender.  In such grandiose times we seem to have lost sight of how rare it is to simply be one of those lucky grains of sand.  So what will it take to unite us?  Another "killer" asteroid?  An atmosphere heating up as well as losing its oxygen?  Lands and waters so polluted that we begin to panic?  A virus so resistant to our medicines that we begin to succumb in mass?  Our sun disappearing, or becoming unbearably hot and bright?  The next solar eclipse (expected to be viewed by over 30 million people) will happen just about a month from now, but what if it somehow stayed dark?  Or if the opposite happened and it became super-bright?  And not just two or three times as bright, but trillions of times brighter?  Such an anomaly has been discovered wrote Smithsonian, one not only shining with such intensity but "swallowing" stars the size of our sun each day just to feed its energy.  Wrote part of the piece: The gargantuan object stretches about seven light-years across, and it puts our sun’s luminosity to shame—the quasar shines more than 500 trillion times brighter than the star in our solar system, the researchers reported Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy...“It looks like a gigantic and magnetic storm cell with temperatures of 10,000 degrees Celsius, lightning everywhere and winds blowing so fast they would go around Earth in a second,” Wolf tells the Guardian’s Tory Shepherd...Around the quasar, the accretion disk is 15,000 times the length between the sun and Neptune, per the ESA, and its black hole weighs about the same as 17 billion suns. (this NASA animation will give you an idea of just how massive black holes can be)

     When you read about something so impossibly large and so incredibly ravenous that our existence would be irrelevant, (and a reminder that our sun can hold over a million Earths) our squabbles over money or land or ethnicity seem beyond trivial.  So maybe an entirely new attitude is in order, a new consciousness that recognizes that indeed we are here almost only by chance, and that we can likely be gone equally quickly by chance.  And speaking of gone, my head cold faded away after five days or so and I was soon back driving about running errands, waiting quietly in my car in the left turn lane, waiting for the light and arrow to change.  Everyone had stopped momentarily as the lights did their shifting, as they do all day, everyday.  Then BAM!  A noise so unexpectedly loud that I had to piece together that the car once beside me was now a crumpled mess and drifting halfway across the intersection.  To my right sat a large company truck, virtually unphased and seemingly untouched, but it had slammed into the car ahead with full force.  No screeching tires, no swerving brakes, just that loud metal-on-metal impact.  There was no warning, not for anyone: the woman waiting in her car at the red light, the driver of the truck who wasn't paying attention, or me sitting there listening to a song.  One lane over and that would have been me.  Or had the truck driver decided to swerve to avoid hitting that car and it would have been me.  Deterministic chaos.  Just like that, the thought of a grain of sand came into my head, and how fortunate I was to be in one of those two handfuls...and how I could have just as easily been a grain of sand being blown away, carried by the winds of chance to land in those canyons, those ten Grand Canyons, filled with trillions upon trillions of other, unchosen grains of sand.**

     

Artist rendering of the newly-discovered black hole: ESO/M. Kornmesser

 *The portrayal of civil rights organizer Rustin was brilliantly portrayed by Colman Domingo (he's been nominated for an Oscar as best actor).  To see him interviewed off camera gives you an idea of just how dramatic that transformation was.  You can catch that interview on Graham Norton, himself a talk show legend in the UK (he's been hosting his show for 31 years and is still going strong).  If you're brand new to Graham Norton, his casual manner is to place all of his guests together on a couch and serve them whatever drinks they'd prefer, which often goes well but sometimes gets a bit out of hand...Matt Damon pounding down glass after glass of champagne trying to keep up with Bill Murray? And Hugh Bonneville getting up to go pee because on Norton's show there are no commercial breaks?  Yup, that episode alone may be worth your time...

**After calling in the accident, I saw the police and fire vehicles arrive to clear the intersection, after which I then drove over to provide a witness statement. The woman was slowly lifting her leg out of her crunched vehicle but emergency personnel were feeling she was well enough to not need an ambulance.  Another lucky grain of sand...