A Story Worth Telling

As I consider career paths, I am confronted by several question:

  • What am I good at?
  • What can I do others can’t?
  • How can I be of most value?
  • How do I want to spend my time?
  • What would my ideal workday look like?
  • What am I motivated by, and why?
  • Who do I want to serve?
  • What industry do I want to help?
  • What mission needs my talents?
  • What do I want to do?

Something I’ve been beyond fascinated with since the pandemic slowed my life down is TV shows and movies. Most likely I began watching more closely because there wasn’t much else to do. But there’s also something beyond real through these on-screen stories–there’s truth. These stories, whether fictional or not, hold deep truths about our humanity and our individual/shared experience in this life. That’s important. It’s substantial.

I’m struck by another question as I consider a career telling stories:

  • How much do these stories really matter? Are they truly impactful in changing how people live their lives or are they merely entertainment for the masses?

I think about the story of Christ. And William Wallace in Braveheart. And Iron Man throughout the MCU. These myths are far beyond entertainment. They make people want to be better. They make people more heroic, more inspired, better than they were before. Their impact is real, and the masterful power of the literature or cinematic experience is real. It counts, for something. Not always, but sometimes.

It’s really been making me think.

SPEED LIMIT ENFORCED BY AIRCRAFT

I’d like to see a statistic for the number of people who believe this sign.

Given that speed limits were initially constructed to save money during wartime (55 mph is the sweet spot on the bell curve of gasoline used per speed graph), the idea that an aircraft (with a much higher carbon footprint than cars traveling 20 miles over) is monitoring speeds on an interstate is not only counterintuitive–it’s absurd.

I guess the chance that people might slow down and save a life is worth the cost of a couple signs.

Ragnarök

[THOR RAGNARÖK SPOLERS]

In Norse mythology, Ragnarök is the event where Asgard, the home of gods such as Thor, Loki, and Odin, is destroyed. However, the story of Asgard and Scandinavian gods doesn’t end there. After Ragnarök, Asgard is renewed.

Variations of these Norse myths are told throughout the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) through the heroic God of Thunder, Thor, an original member of the Avengers. In Thor Ragnarok, well, you can guess what transpires. After Odin’s death, Thor’s sister Hela escapes her imprisonment in the underworld and tries to take over Asgard. Several other events lead to the inevitable destruction of Asgard–Ragnarök itself. Luckily, many Asgardians are saved through the likes of timeless and unlikely heroes (and their large spaceship borrowed from a distant planet).

During Ragnarök, the great Heimdall–the gatekeeper god who can see and hear throughout the cosmos while controlling the Bifröst (rainbow bridge that connects worlds)–assures Thor of what his father, Odin, conveyed in his final moments:

“Asgard is not a place, it’s a people.”

Heimdall to Thor

And so Asgardians were saved even though Asgard was destroyed. They were together on the safe harbor of their ship until their inevitable and unfortunate encounter with Thanos. After the events of Infinity War & Endgame, Asgardians set up a new home in the town of Tønsberg, Norway. A long way of Asgard–in a different realm, but enough of them to remember who they are.

What’s the moral of the story? No matter where you go, you will bring your people with you. Your family, your ancestors, the people who sacrificed so that you could be alive. They are you and you, them. People are not determined by where they live in the cosmos but by who they are. While your location impacts how you live, that you are alive will always unite you with your people, your culture, your home.

Asgard is a people, not a place. Asgard was destroyed, but Asgardians not. Now in the MCU, there is hope for Asgardians under their new leader, Valkyrie. They are rebuilding their home because they never lost it–it just changed location.

Moving away from home–be it destroyed or intact–doesn’t change your cosmic identity. While it may change how you live your life, you will always be the sum of all the people and choices that made you, both throughout the past and during your lifetime. You are quite a marvel, and you will always be more than your address.

Eco Conservation

There’s a growing concern about the future of our planet, or at least the planet we’ve known so far. Industrialism is rapidly accelerating and our dependence on the system that destroys natural places is more evident now than ever before. In the age of the Anthropocene, human beings are responsible for the destruction of habitats around the globe. We are manifesting the sixth mass extinction. Many of the species we’ve come to love since our safari-themed nursery rooms may not be around for the next generation.

While this is concerning to those who have sustained a special connection to the land, it’s less concerning to the industrialists, the men and women at the top of our social hierarchy. They are concerned with the future and getting us there. Perhaps this is for our own good. Perhaps there’s a lot we don’t know, and for good reason. Regardless, wherever humanity is going, however great the industrial revolution will blossom, we must not forget our roots.

We are human beings of planet earth. We have been sustained by the earth since before We (the royal we–life itself) existed. And the earth has been created and sustained by the cosmos. We have a role to play in maintaining the natural world, the unseen but ever present interstellar forces through and by which we’ve arrived at today. This is the land that holds our ancestors, the land where our dead have been buried and transformed since We left the ocean. This is the water that gives life, flowing from springs of life eternal. Without the earth, we would not get to play “space.”

There’s a new industry emerging, one that will compliment the industrial revolution as it progresses indefinitely forward. This industry will keep humanity’s feet touching the ground, ever aware of the world we’ve come from before we venture into worlds unknown. For now, we’ll call this new industry Ecosystem Conservation. There have been conservation projects since the dawn of man, though the scale has tipped towards resource accumulation in favor of environmental restoration. This is about to change.

In the past 100 years, conservation jobs have been saved for the government, the public sector. The private sector has broken through with an abundance of nature-inspired media. From Sit David Attenborough to National Geographic, we have educated the world about the world, the source of our existence. But the confinement of nature-restoration to the public sector is about to be turned on its head.

“It is my belief that the next 1,000 unicorns—companies that have a market valuation over a billion dollars—won’t be a search engine, won’t be a media company, they’ll be businesses developing green hydrogen, green agriculture, green steel, and green cement.”

Larry Fink, CEO and chairman of BlackRock. BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, with ~$9.46 trillion USD in assets under management. (Quote I’m Pondering from Tim Ferris’s 5-Bullet Friday newsletter, issue 1/14/22)

Our planet is warming, natural disasters are worsening, and humans are left arguing about why and how bad. In 5 years, there will be no more debate. In 10 years, the first companies will have made strides in profitably restoring natural landscapes and aquatic ecosystems. Then, once we see tangible results, we’ll start investing in earth-saving solutions to these age-old problems. In 25 years, we will start thinking about how to modulate the climate to our–and nature’s–benefit on a global scale. We will become agents in the sustainability of our entire planet on the cosmic scale, but only if we learn how to work together.

The field of Eco Conservation is about to explode. I want to be there when it does, hard hat at the ready.

What is Consciousness?

No matter how you look at the world, it’s clear there’s life here. Life seems to be rare in the universe, but it’s abundant here. It’s hard for us to imagine a world without life because imagination requires consciousness and consciousness seems to require life. Can a star be conscious? Well, maybe. I suppose I don’t know whether consciousness requires life but I can say that life is, in some way, a conduit for consciousness.

You are conscious. So am I. So are trees, fungi, beetles, and dogs, but in different ways than us. Plenty of people don’t think that’s true, but just ask any indigenous culture. There’s reverence for creation because creation is what we are–we are part of the world, not separate from it. Everything in us, from our bones to our brains, comes from the earth. Where consciousness or the soul comes from is unknown, but we came from the living things of earth, and living things have consciousness. Monkeys are conscious of how their behaviors affect their place in the social hierarchy. Plants bends towards sunlight instead of shade. Scientific materialism can’t explain how indigenous elders communicate with trees, so they say it isn’t possible. Do you believe them?

We come from the earth. We are the sum total of all our ancestors put together, including the ones who weren’t conscious (like, our single-celled relatives of 4 billion years ago). Does life beget consciousness? What about complex life? Is there a certain anatomical feature that generates consciousness, like the hind part of our brainstem, or our occipital lobe, or is consciousness merely electrical impulses interacting with organic life forms?

I have only a lifetime to ask and reflect on these questions, no answers. The known is overrated. The world is far bigger than our minds can imagine–but why not at least try?

The Catholic Shadow

If the Catholic Church doesn’t start to reflect, recognize, accept, and begin to integrate its shadow, the faith will be irrelevant in 50 years. Enough Augustine and Aquinas–we need Jung.

Write, then Think

Today I told my students the truth about writing and thinking:

When you write, you think. Neurons in your brain start firing in a familiar pattern until there’s no more neural connections in that area. That’s when some students stop writing–when they run out of ideas. They believe they can only write about what they think about first.

This is exactly when you must keep writing.

When you keep writing in the face of a dead-end neural pathway, you have no choice but to write about something else. You go to another section of neural connections, then transcribe that though process on the page. Then another, and another. You keep writing about what you do know about, what you can uncover within your own mind, or about some questions you have about that which you don’t know.

Every now and then, that process of writing, then writing more, allows you to draw connections neural connections between the ideas you wrote down, pathways you didn’t previously have. And you have just learned something new, without turning to an outside source. It was within your own mind. A self-revelation, a connection, a link that might shift your perception from here on out.

So write, and keep writing. Do not think first, just write. Let your thoughts flow then let them snag, trip, scrape their knees, and flow again. In this way writing is an act of courage–it’s going where your mind hasn’t gone before, into the unknown. Into yourself.

More than Meets the Eye

Order is only possible if there is also entropy. Entropy seems to win.

Entropy, as thermodynamic holds, is always increasing. All aspects of the universe tend toward chaos, towards falling apart. Organization is seldom witnessed, let alone maintained.

If God created everything, why did God create entropy? Why do things have to fall apart?

Perhaps the only way things can ever organize is if the raw materials somehow came together in the first place. The only way for things to come together, it seems, is if there are plenty of things that fall apart, first. The Big Bang did not create the perfect conditions for Earth; it created the conditions for stars to burn and explode, then Earth took shape after enough rock floating was floating around our sun that gravity pulled it all together. Order, but first there was chaos.

We tend to justify order as a good, benevolent force and chaos as a bad, malevolent one. Perhaps that’s the way it is. Or maybe order is an evolutionary mechanism, intrinsic to the survivability of complex social species such as ours. Maybe we equate order with goodness because that’s what’s best for our survival.

Either way, whether order, chaos, organization, or entropy takes over, all are aspects of God, Who is all things. There can be no light without darkness, no order without entropy, no good without evil. Life is duality, but here we are thinking God is only the good. It’s all God, is it not?

Being a Professional

Show up, do your work, go home.

Show up on time, do your best work, go home feeling accomplished.

Show up on time so you can focus without early distractions (like email, or the mess from yesterday), do your best work because the world needs it and your company enables it, go home feeling accomplished because you did something that moved you towards the change you seek to make.

Amateurs do the work because they have to. Professionals do the work because it’s important and the world would suffer if they didn’t.

Memory

We don’t remember much from when we were babies. That part of our brain wasn’t online.

What was online, though, was the rest of our itty-bitty bodies. Babies are sensory machines. It’s only through their experiences of the world–touching, tasting, smelling, grabbing, moving, crying–that they learn, grow, and develop. But what is “learning?” How does a baby learn?

Through neuronal pathways. Every time a baby tries to crawl, its nervous system attempts the complicated physiological process known as locomotion. In the beginning it doesn’t work. But after trying and trying, the neurons attached to the muscles in the arms and legs get enough practice. Like ski tracks down a fresh bank of snow, the baby’s brain now has the deep grooves of the neuromuscular pathways necessary to crawl. And that’s basically how learning works.

A baby doesn’t make memories because its brain is busy learning how to be alive, and a baby must be entirely present, in all its senses, in order to learn. Meanwhile, its body has to pay very careful attention to its environment so it can figure out how to act against gravity, understand, communicate, move, fight, flight, think, and, eventually, grow up. The visual memories we typically think of as our imagination don’t come until later. First, our body has to learn–then remember–how to live and survive.

As we grow up in our modern, westernized society, we are less in our bodies and more in our minds. As we are less aware and sensing of our bodies, we become less present and more past and future oriented (attention moves away from the brain stem and spinal cord and to the far reaches of the prefrontal cortex, unique in size and intellectual capacity to humans). We lose ourselves in our imagination. While our imagination is real to us, it often pulls us out of the present, the now.

The way a baby comes into the world is almost the same as how the universe came into existence through the Big Bang. In the beginning, everything was one, whole, unified, present, now. Then it expanded and reality was created in less than a second. Ever since then we’ve been moving away from the oneness, the center, the origin. We’ve been soaring away, in the far stretches of the universe, a reality so unbelievable it only seems possible through a rich, divine imagination. Still we long for connection, relationships, presence, and eternity. We desire things as they were in the beginning and always have been, a world without end. A world with unlimited potential. A world where we can become whatever we want.

A world like that of a baby who is loved.

For a baby, memories are embodied so we can learn to live. For us, memories control our bodies so much that we forget to live.