Pay Attention

     Who among us doesn't remember that sharp rebuke from a school teacher as your young mind drifted off into some unknown place, any place, for at those times it seemed as if anything was more interesting that what the teacher was rambling on about (not the Norman conquest again!).  Besides, that cute guy or gal was the one drawing your attention.  You know, that alpha-guy or that alpha-gal.  Hmm, turns out that the stronger of the two turned out to be the alpha-gal, the one that can not only get you to stop eating red meat, but may actually kill you.  Doesn't that tick you off?  But those ticks are real, and so is the killing part, especially if you don't have the alpha-gal gene and then bite into a burger, something which you've done for years.  Wait, what the heck am I talking about?  And can you make out that image on the right?  Do you see it (big clue, there)?  Do I have your attention now?  But first...

Photo: Lennart Nilsson

     Admittedly, I am not a good witness.  That is, I think that I observe things --the changing sky, the slight altercations in conversations, the trends of different age groups-- but a quick grab-n-go thief or a car dinging a parked car and taking off, not so much.  It's not that I don't try, sometimes even quizzing myself after talking with someone while walking my dog: what color were his shorts?; and his eyes?; was she wearing any rings or have any distinguishing marks?; what make was the car that stopped and let you cross?  Somehow, that Jason Bourne observation gene just never coalesced in my brain.  Better to just let the smaller stuff float by and look at the big picture...or am I missing that as well?

     In these times, there seems to be so much trying to capture our attention, or perhaps a better way to put it is, trying to distract us.  Take a selfie and quickly look to make sure that it turned out near-perfect, then move on, in the process missing the actual moment had you stopped and just taken it in.  Look at the picture, you were there; but the reality is, not really.  That is, you weren't there.  You were just passing through and taking a picture, as if to show that you were there.  And before long, you are the one looking back and wondering how time has flown by and you're close to, if not already in, the countdown, the years left now able to be measured by the fingers of a cosmic on-air newscaster of old, silently signaling you before you go on (or off) the air...four, three, two.  What happened to those 20s, 30s, and 40s?  Kids are now grandkids.  Pets are now in their 4th or 5th iteration.  Body aches are not disappearing as quickly, and your flexibility and reflexes seem to taunt you in the background as if saying, are you kidding?  And it is likely that at that point, whatever your age, you glance back and wonder, how much did you really see, and how much were you really there?

     Take the example of our changing weather.  The Russian Arctic hit 90°F a couple of weeks ago.  The Arctic!  Wrote Scientific American: The Arctic is cooking.  Across northern Russia --a region that is famously bitterly cold-- temperatures this week have routinely surpassed 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32.2 degrees Celsius), adding to the mountain of broken heat records this summer has racked up so far.  In recent days, the Selagoncy meteorological station, near the border of the Arctic Circle, recorded 93.0 degrees F (33.9 degrees C); another station, Olenek, logged 90.9 degrees F (32.7 degrees C), according to data collected by weather information service Ogimet and reported by climatologist Maximiliano Herrera.  To put that in perspective, these temperatures are on par for Orlando, Fla., at this time of year...It’s a dangerous feedback loop: as sea ice melts, the Arctic reflects less sunlight, and the ocean absorbs more heat.  This generates even more sea ice loss.  The region is warming as much as four times faster than the rest of the world.   El Niño is back and forecasters are predicting that 2027 will prove even hotter than 2026.  Which may mean more heat and drought in many areas (Europe, Africa, the western US) and flooding and stronger storms in other parts of the world (China evacuated over one and a half million people due to a typhoon just over a month ago).  But that's just the weather.  There are also the ongoing wars everywhere (did anyone notice the 500,000 people killed in the fighting in Ethiopia a few years ago?).  Lebanon, Gaza, and Iran, along with our aging military infrastructure in the Pacific (mold, rust, and a vastly diminished weapons supply), and things may be getting a bit tense in both Taiwan and South Korea (and perhaps here with our "peace" leader who long ago promised no more foreign wars).  But forget the political bouncing ball; imagine you as one of the residents living in those war-torn areas, your home now rubble and you wondering how or IF food and aid will arrive.  This sobering piece from over 30 years ago described survival conditions in Sarajevo: The major problem is fuel.  You cannot buy coal.  And now it is almost impossible to find wood.  Since the war started, all of our trees have been cut down.  Wooden backs of park benches, frames and doors in ruined apartments, handrails from staircases, shelves from abandoned stores and kiosks, wooden stools and bars from restaurants, even the crosses and pyramids from the cemeteries -- all have been burned for warmth...No one eats animal fat anymore, or meat, or cheese, or milk, or eggs...When combined with rice and well-seasoned, everything becomes edible.  In spring, summer and fall, leaves found in parks, gardens, fields, and hills are used as ingredients.  We eat a precious mix of wild imagination.  Did (do) any of us notice?

      What was that famous time scale by Carl Sagan: if our known universe were graphed out on a calendar --from January 1st to December 31st-- we, that is us as a human civilization able to record history and form societies and build living spaces and grow food, show up only on the last day, the last hour, the last minute, the last few seconds!  So from that perspective, how much were any of us here?  And yet, we were.  We are.  Let me refer once again to Turkish author Ece Temelkuran: A strange nation, we are -- still in the making when the nation states are so fallen that they are considered real estate opportunities by the rulers of the world.  And our population is multiplying in number as the new world order takes shape.  Lost, broken, melancholic perhaps, but somehow we survive better than anyone else.  We may be the people of half-smiles, yet we never stop looking at our old pictures to remember how we once laughed.  We may have no riches, but we possess the reluctantly acquired yet unique power of believing in ourselves when nobody else does.  We may be confused about who we have become after losing our homes, yet every day, we reinvent courage to keep on living as nobodies.  We know what breaks a person -- any person.  It is not the loss of home but the loss of faith in building a new one.  We may be a nation of half-frozen hearts, but we know how to survive without any bearings.  And as the unhomed, who have developed the skill to sense minute changes in the air, we already know that many more will soon learn to live like us.  After reading all that, it was as if she was also saying "pay attention" to what could be --or is-- happening in today's world.

Our most recent rescue...

     Sy Safransky wrote a piece about his cat, Cirrus, in The Sun (he was the longtime publisher of the periodical): Because Cirrus was always in the moment, the only way I could feel close to her, really close, was to become more present.  Even if I was in the same room, I wasn’t with her until I stopped rushing around to get things done, and quieted down a little, became aware of my breathing, her breathing, the light, the sounds, the smells.  Being present with Cirrus was important.  So was being present with myself.  What do I know about the way cats and humans have been thrown together—mysterious creatures on a mysterious planet?  All of us here for just a little while, then gone.  Author Adam Gopnik put it a different way in describing the passing of his dog: A dog’s death is like no other.  Not worse than any other, of course.  But unlike any other, inasmuch as the disparity between the loss and the profound grief it provokes is so bewildering to outsiders and even to those who feel it.  When our family Havanese, Butterscotch, died a while ago, after thirteen years of a happy-go-lucky, charming, loving, and greedy existence, I could scarcely walk through Central Park without shutting my eyes, since tears flooded them when I saw other dogs running and playing freely, as she had done for so long.  Dog grief somehow passes beyond “appropriate” sadness into unfathomable feeling.  Why is this so?  Because our dogs love us unconditionally?  Well, so do our parents, and when, after a long life, they die we mourn deeply, but on the whole we manage.  Is it because, as some say, we see our dogs every day?  We see the Amazon guy every day, too.  Maybe part of the explanation has to do with the privacy of the loss.  There are no wakes, no shivas, and so the feeling has nowhere organized to go.  A family ritual around ashes feels faintly misplaced.  The dog did not accomplish anything; it simply was, and its being filled the house.  Then, there’s the fact that the dog does not know death until it happens.  We understand death as a part of life, and it is our knowledge of mortality that shapes our understanding and makes us human.  They don’t.  I’m still haunted by our ailing, elderly dog’s large, trusting, liquid eyes looking out at us in the moments before her death: Hey, this is all right, right?  We’re just here at this crazy doctor place we go to like always, and then we’re going home?  That was what broke my heart.  Butterscotch trusted us absolutely, and we were about to kill her.  For her own good, because she was suffering so, because her once rich and bounding life had been reduced to a painful daily struggle, all of that.  But she was alive and then she wasn’t, and she didn’t understand it and we had done it to her.  As the ancient mystic Rumi once said: Out beyond ideas or rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a field.  I'll meet you there.  

     We have a house full of rescued cats, as well as a rescued German Shepherd who is now unable to fully use his back legs.  They all want attention.  As does my wife.  Maybe you have something similar in your life: children or aging parents, or a lonely grandfather or a teenager who's lost his or her way.  But none of us want to reach a point where one side readies to leave and asks, didn't you see it coming?  You haven't been here for years.  We pay more attention to that spot on our neck darkening in color, or that eye growing yellow, or that fence needing repair, or that masked "agent" not identifying himself as he shoots.  But that coral reef off Florida dying, this planet overheating.  Not so much.  As Esquire wrote: If it feels like we're getting dumber every day, that's because we are, and actually that is fine, because sentience has proven to be a real pain in the ass.  But just because our brains are objectively worse than they were last century doesn't mean we haven't learned anything.  The more innocent 1999 versions of ourselves would never believe these 25 pieces of information we've picked up, and they would be just as disappointed as we are that we cannot put them back down.  Here was their first observation of the year so far: Sacrificing principles for money was profane in the '90s.  Now sacrificing money for principles is cringe.  In the 21st century, you seek fame first, then money, and maybe, if it's lucrative, you adopt a code of ethics.  The whole point of life now is selling out. 

    Maybe that's true.  I hope not.  But basically in the end, it becomes the same scenario: we claim we didn't see it coming?  Or did we just not want to see it coming, by turning our heads to the hypnotic screens of our phones or our earbuds, and tuning everything else out?  The characteristic of an imperialistic people is to try to have it own local god dubbed big boy of the whole universe, you see, wrote Joseph Campbell.  No other divinity counts.  And the way to bring this about is by annihilating the god or goddess who was there before.  Before you think that those words are sounding somewhat familiar, Campbell was talking about Babylon, a major city in Mesopotamia some 3800 years ago.  That's right, nearly four thousand years ago.  Pay attention, life goes by quickly and history does repeat.  

     But back to that alpha-gal, the one that can cause you to break out in hives or send you into anaphylactic shock.  It's actually a sugar molecule that most mammals --except humans and other primates-- have in their bodies, wrote a piece in The New Yorker.  It's the reason our bodies reject organ transplants from pigs.  The alpha-gal molecule triggers an allergic reaction, and more and more these days, a serious one.  Wrote part of the piece: One thing is certain; ticks make excellent disease vectors, purpose-built for the modern world.  They're resistant to pesticides, partial to rising temperatures, and happy to feed on anything that moves -- mice, deer, birds, hunters, hikers, suburbanites, and second-home builders.  As cities have sprawled into countryside, and people have pushed deeper into nature, we've turned ourselves into a vast smorgasbord for ticks.  Messing with their habitat seems only to make them multiply.  It gets worse.  Red meat and dairy are just the beginning.  Animal products are woven so tightly, so microscopically, into what we consume that we often don't know they're there.  Doritos, ramen, marshmallows, and frosted cereals, French fries cooked in beef tallow, tofu prepared on a grill that just had meat on it -- even the most innocuous products can contain beef, pork or dairy...Heparin, a common blood thinner, is extracted from pig intestines...Iron and vitamin B12 are often derived from beef organs, Vitamin D3 from lanolin secreted by the sebaceous glands of sheep...In the meantime, alpha-gal is a rare challenge to public health.  It has no cure, no ironclad diagnosis or epidemiological data, and an expanding horde of ticks to spread it.

    So why now?  Humans have eaten live-birth animal products for centuries.  Scientists really don't know.  Could it be, asked another piece in the same magazine, that microbes are mutating and adapting far more quickly than we are?  Microorganisms are often omitted from the story of warming, even though they far outnumber plants and animals.  In 2019, an international group of thirty-three scientists warned in the journal Nature that the "unseen majority" of life was being transformed by rising temperatures, and that humans would have to contend with the consequences.  Microorganisms that infect us could become more common, and appear in new places.  Billions of other microbe species could be affected, too.  How would they respond when their environments shifted?  "We're dealing with the first life on Earth," Antje Boetius, a co-author of the Nature paper, who serves as the president and CEO of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, told me.  "Our planet is the test tube.  We make it a bit warmer, everything will change."  When scientists depict all of Earth's species on a tree of life, the lineage of humans looks like a twig.  Microbes -- biological entities that are too small to see without a microscope, including bacteria, fungi, viruses, protozoa, algae, and archaea-- take up most of the tree.  Microorganisms are not passive occupants of the planet -- they are co-creators of our environment.  Microscopic algae produce much of the oxygen that we breathe.  Various microbes process almost all the dead plants on the planet...The gap between the rate of human evolution and the rate of microbial evolution, Eren [A. Murat Eren, a microbial ecologist and computer scientist at the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity] said, is like "the difference between a drifting tectonic plate and an F-16 fighter jet."...We always ask: How are we going to adapt to a changing world?  The real question is: How are we going to coexist with microbes that have adapted to the new world?" (The Conversation talks a bit more about this).

Our rescued German Shepherd

     One way might be to get more of nature, to pay attention to the outdoors more instead of tending to our lawns or working ourselves to exhaustion.  There is no truth in the city, wrote Catherine Katłı̨̀ą Lafferty in her book, Mother Earth is Our Elder.  For centuries, cities have crumbled.  There are some exceptions.  There are ancient cities that managed to be sustainable for long periods of time, but all cities eventually meet demise in one way or another.  They have always destroyed themselves or been destroyed.  Even though humans tend to naturally congregate, the city separates us.  The only truth that exists is in nature...Cities are like a conceited person who never wants to age -- they need constant upkeep, require trending makeovers to keep from becoming decrepit.  Nature is more and more beautiful when left alone.  Mother Earth ages gracefully...  As she wrote those words I could picture her describing not the "city" but ourselves, the constant preening and needing constant upkeep.  Buy that new TV or hydration product, stick another needle in your gut instead of going on a hike, redecorate and drain your bank account so that the neighbors will be impressed.  

      Sometimes I wonder if life is a bit like watching a magic show, entertaining and fascinating but a display of sleight of hand.  Pay attention, says the guy on the street doing a quick round of three-card monte.  Watch closely now, then poof, it's gone.  Life.  Except life is a miracle, whatever your definition.  Go back and peek at that black & white image at the top of the page.  Look closely and what do you see?  The main clue is in the last word in the last sentence: it's how our eyes begin to form in the first few weeks in the embryo.  Taken long ago in what was then ground-breaking detail, photographer Lennart Nilsson described the upper part of the image as the sclera (the white) and the lens of the eye beginning to form in the eighth week; three weeks later the cornea forms and then the eye closes for nearly 90 days, the completion all taking place behind the still-forming eyelids.  But going back even further, scientists in Cell Biology asked why eyes formed at all, and how?  Their theory is that a single patch of light-sensitive cells was needed by deep-sea creatures to track night & day as well as to orient up and down.  Whatever the case, consider our eyes and other senses a miracle, if we could just pay attention and see it that way..  

     Tristan Gooley was featured in a recent issue of Smithsonian, and he added that nature gives us all sorts of clues when we're outdoors: broadleaf tree "will always have more branches and leaves on its south side;" and if you're lost "touch a rock or a tree and focus on the temperature difference."  Wrote the author of the piece: Brick chimneys tend to lean slightly north over time, he [Gooley] noticed.  TV satellites in the Northeast United States generally point southwest, and the world's tennis courts are often aligned north-to-south to minimize the sun's glare.  The movie Green and Gold also had you looking back to nature and the land, and more importantly, what matters in the end.  Do we get so caught up in Esquire's #1 observation of today's world -- that it's easy to sell out because, well, it seems that almost all of our elected officials are leading the way and saying it's okay?  To allow logging into roadless national park areas, to mine in what were once national monuments?  The movie simply asks us (the movie is based on actual events), remember where you come from.  But admittedly, it's tough.  Yet Esquire's 25th observation of what is taking place in our world was this: The world will sometimes make you feel like it is conspiring to make you lose hope.  The rules and values you were raised with will turn out to have been suggestions.  You'll feel betrayed and disillusioned.  You'll want to give up and get bitter.  But you won't.  You'll get up every day and face it and try to keep your side of the street clean.  You'll dig deep for strength and hope and optimism, and there will be more of it than you could have imagined.  You'll survive. 

    In a future post, I'll be featuring some of the advertisements of my era, including one from Mazda (yes, the car company Mazda) which asked: For thousands of years, everyone who thinks has surely thought of the question at least once.  What is the meaning of life?...A simple question, yet always capable of producing a startling range of responses.  And, like life itself, some are uplifting, some are unsettling, but all are revealing...because we feel that when you ask better questions, you tend to come up with better answers.  And the questions don't get much better than this one.  There was also a revealing interview with Jonathan Winters, mentor to Robin Williams and many others (including my young teenage mind not paying attention in school).  The big thing is: I'm in the fourth quarter and I know it.  Lots of guys don't know where they are, period.  Maybe they are not in the stadium.  Maybe they are waiting in their cars listening to the crowd, and they are disappointed that they didn't get a ticket.  I want to make my time count.  I don't want to spend it foolishly.  But perhaps the best advice from those ads of 50-some years ago came from United Technologies, an aviation tech company that worked alongside military contracts and other fields (it would later merge with defense company Raytheon).  I point this out because I felt that it would be difficult to imagine a company such as the United Technologies of today (or Mazda and a host of others), spending advertising dollars to "talk" to us as humans, not to sell us something or to promote their products, but to have us ask the big questions, to pay attention to life.  Here was their "ad," one printed in The Wall Street Journal and titled "Get Out of That Rut:" Oscar Wilde said, "Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative."  So stop getting up at 6:05.  Get up at 5:06.  Walk a mile at dawn.  Find a new way to drive to work.  Switch chores with your spouse next Saturday.  Buy a wok.  Study wildflowers.  Stay up alone all night.  Read to the blind.  Start counting brown-eyed blondes or blonds.  Subscribe to an out-of-town paper.  Canoe at midnight.  Don't write to your congressman, take a whole scout troop to see him.  Learn to speak Italian.  Teach some kid the thing you do best.  Listen to two hours of uninterrupted Mozart.  Take up aerobic dancing.  Leap out of that rut.  Savor life.  Remember, we only pass this way once.  As director Devin Lindwell said of his film, Green and Gold: I hope people walk away with just a sense [that] there is so much goodness in the world and despite the hard things that go on in our lives, there is a glimmer of hope; we don’t know when the story is over”

                          

Last note about magic.  Unlike most Vegas-type shows, Justin Willman's Netflix special will have you fully entertained for over an hour as he crushes cell phones and randomly throws objectss into the audience to ask children to come up on stage, spin a wheel, and sit in a chair of their favorite color.  And finishing a thoroughly mixed-up Rubik's cube --anybody?-- piece of cake.  Take a peek...it will be unlike almost any "magic" show you've seen.