The World is changing, and we are
witnesses, passengers and creators of it all. Life is stretching into realms
our imaginations did not take us, and we may become what we never imagined
becoming, and do what we never dreamt of doing. A beautiful time. With
terrifying possibilities.
Sometimes I consider the
statistical improbability that I, We, the World even exists. Think of that Big
Bang, the heat and the power that it generated, and the billions of years that
followed it. And the improbability of a tiny chunk of matter finding itself in
precisely the cosmic balance to permit a set of near constants to occur for a
mere mili-instant of time, so that a particular set of biochemical factors
might coincide, so as to give rise to the faint possibility of life.
And that this life should so
endure the tortuous route of mutation and natural selection as to bring we human beings about. And that among the billions of us, your particular
daddy sperm should avoid entanglements with potential other eggs to make its
way toward your particular mama egg, overcoming the competition of
hundreds of thousands of rivals.
Isn't it a wonder that you and I are even here?
And this is where we start. This
is the settled end of the mystery of our Lives. But, with so many improbabilities and
impossibilities at our backs, can we doubt that there are a few still ahead?
Whatever it is that scholars will
be analyzing and dissecting and arguing over fifty years from now is unfolding
in this instant, before our doubting and cynical eyes. Even we can’t believe it, while it’s happening to us . We absolutely don’t understand it.
At some future point it will all be merely something that happened a long
time ago, like the Spanish Flu was to us last month – dry, distant,
unimaginable, and with little to teach us here today.
But here we are with our frenetic, exploding, perpetual
motion societies shut down. Facing a challenge we don’t quite know the shape
of.
So does it make sense to think
ahead while keeping absolutely loyal to what we think we already know? That
might be like taking a whip and reins into your new Model T in 1920, or sharpening
a pencil and grabbing an eraser as you sat down to compose on your new
Smith-Corona word processor in 1990. There are lots of things that may never return to 'normal'.
But it’s so hard to replace old
thinking. Because, what to replace it with? The new stimuli are just coming
into view, the new data still being harvested. It may reveal some of the gaps
(new gaps, not just the ones we’re already stumbling over), the oversights, the
miscalculations and false assumptions in our awareness and thinking and planning. But it won’t catch all
of them.
There’s so much uncertainty ahead.
But this isn’t a bad thing at all.
Because uncertainty is a constant in our lives all the time, except that we do
such a good job of not seeing it and pretending it isn’t. The unplanned and the
unexpected is constantly with us, but because its instances are overwhelmingly
minute and unimportant (the store’s out of our cereal, we encounter a friend on
the bus, a shoelace comes untied) they are easy to dismiss.
Maybe this crack in the routine of
the entire world will jar more of us into recognizing that change is the potent
and constant force it is, and that we aren’t only passive witnesses, or
passengers being carried along against our will. We are the creators of so much
of the change we live with, individually and collectively. Yet, so often our
efforts are aimed at preventing the changes we fear rather than creating and
shaping those that could fulfill us. We’re so afraid of the unknown. And now,
the unknown is crashing down on our lives with such force, and in so many interconnected
ways. It may shake us so much that there will be little left of the familiar to
cling to. And what then? How will we face up to that reality?
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