Tag: Human

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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By strict accounting of cosmic abundances, our planet and the life we find here amount to essentially zero. Insignificant. A small speck of blue and green suspended in an ocean of night, a tiny bit of rock and water orbiting just another star. The great forces that shape our universe have grown the voids over billions of years, and their present-day monstrousness puts cosmic insignificance into stark relief. Forget planets and stars; at these scales, even mighty galaxies are reduced to mere dots of light. […]

Yes, the universe is mostly void, but we have found many wonders in those great expanses. The voids don’t simply exist; they define and provide contrast to the galaxies that surround them. The properties of the voids — their shapes and sizes and so on — reflect the mysterious forces that govern the evolution of the universe. Within the voids we find the occasional dim dwarf galaxy, like an oasis in the desert. And we have found that the voids are brimming with cosmic energies that may someday overwhelm the rest of the universe.

It’s true that in cosmic terms, Earth is neither large nor long-lived. But that is only one way of measuring significance. Compared with the voids, there is something special happening on our planet. Despite decades of searching, Earth is still the only known place in the entire universe where conscious beings raise their curious eyes to the sky and wonder.

Earth is the only known place where humanity exists — where humanity can exist. It is the only known place where laughter, love, anger and joy exist. The only known place where we can find dance, music, art, politics and cosmology.

Our disagreements and jealousies and all the beautiful complexities that make us human aren’t meaningless. The presence and dominance of the cosmic voids guarantee the opposite — the stories and experiences we fill our lives with are special precisely because they will never happen in the empty expanse of most of the universe.

I have learned that the same lessons that cosmic voids teach us are found in the voids we encounter in our own lives. Voids sharpen and define; they create contrast; they are full of potential. The pain we feel from loss is the last reminder of the gift of a life deeply loved. The silence before a performance begins is sparkling with electric anticipation. Our choice to ignore anxiety-inducing news is necessary to allow us to focus on what matters. […]

Billions of years from now the sun will engorge and Earth will turn to dust. The cosmic voids, guardians of great nothingness, will remain. That bare fact, at first uncomfortable, gives us the ability to treasure what we’re given.

Tell a joke to your friends. Fight for what you believe in. Call your mother. Create something the cosmos hasn’t seen before. The implacability of the cosmic voids calls us to action. The universe won’t do anything for us except give us the freedom to exist. What we do with that existence is entirely up to us. It is our responsibility to imbue the cosmos with meaning and purpose.

— Paul M. Sutter, from “The Emptiness of the Universe Gives Our Lives Meaning” (NY Times, November 3, 2024)

Thank you Cara for sharing.

Technology…the knack of so arranging the world so that we need not experience it.

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“Technology…the knack of so arranging the world so that we need not experience it.” — Max Frisch Homo Faber (1957)”

This is a book about the disappearance of experience…

Certain types of experience—some rooted deeply in our evolutionary history, such as face-to-face interaction and various forms of pleasure-seeking; others more recent and reflective of cultural norms, such as patience and our sense of public space and place—are fading from our lives. Many of these experiences are what, historically, have helped us form and nurture a shared reality as human beings.

Mediating technologies have been a significant force behind these changes. By “technology” I mean the devices such as computers, smartphones, smart speakers, wearable sensors, and, in our likely future, implantable objects, as well as the software, algorithms, and Internet platforms we rely on to translate the data these devices assemble about us. Technology also includes the virtual realities and augmented realities we experience through our use of these tools. Our integration of these tools into our daily lives has blurred the boundary between “virtual” things—things not grounded in physical reality that we encounter while online or via mediating technologies—and “real” things embedded in physical space.

These technologies mediate between us and our world. For now, we still have some choice in how much mediation we allow. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people lived lives of near-constant mediation out of necessity, as work, education, and social life migrated online. Culturally we were prepared for this shift, given how much time we were already spending using screens large and small to mediate our daily lives, and our evolving preference for such forms of interaction.

That preference encourages the embrace of new forms of mediated experience that do not necessarily improve our interactions as human beings, even as they also bring greater convenience. Our understanding of experience has become disordered, in ways large and small. More and more people mistrust their own experiences. More and more people create their own realities rather than live in the world around them. We can no longer assume that reality is a matter of consensus. We are beginning to see hints of how these new ways of experiencing the world—more mediated, more personalized, more immediate yet less bounded by the realities of the physical world—have altered our understanding of reality.

— Christine Rosen, from the Introduction of “The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World” (W. W. Norton & Company, September 10, 2024)

Book Reviews:

Guest Post: Janne bala nas ma btindas

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DK: “Beautiful photo, shame it was marred by a Human.”

Dear all,

I was inspired, actually triggered by a comment from David on one of Cara’s Cove Island Photos yesterday morning. It’s that photo above, and his caption below it that he shared in the comment section. The photo was taken by our very own Cara Denison, another outstanding Cove Island Park photographer.

This is not just any human. This is our human, David himself.
The photo was not marred. The photo is whole because he is in it.
Where I come from, we have a saying, “Janne bala nas ma btindas.”
This translates to “Heaven is not worth stepping into if it had no humans in it.”

… and again, this is not just any human. This is our Human.

Side story: A few weeks ago, while I was riding the elevator at work, a coworker looked at my badge and asked, “Are you the Sawsan from International?” “Yes, I am.” I looked at their badge and saw that they were one of the doctors I had worked with for years but never met. My office is on the ground floor, theirs is on the 2nd. For three years, we never met. When things happen, they seem to come in clusters. Within a few weeks, I met a few more individuals in person that I had been working with for years and had not met in person.  

Every time I met someone in person that I had known for years, a softness settled on me like a fog blanket. My soul needed the reminder that this is another human. I tend to forget.

Kicks and giggles aside, I come here to this blog to be inspired and, in this crazy world we live in, to feel human again.

And every photo by Cara documenting the human behind Live & Learn is Whole.

Now I know DK that you prefer no humans, solitude, and silence. The fact is that the core of your blog is the human experience. Sorry, you can’t always be the observer! 

Here’s another one of Cara’s favorite photos of DK at Cove Island Park. Cara said she’ll explain why she chose this photo in the comments section.

Sawsan.

Lightly Child, Lightly. The earth is beautiful beyond all change.

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No matter the circumstance, human suffering matters. Our attending to it matters. Acts of tenderness are not morally trivial. […]

For as Naomi Klein has reminded us, our demise isn’t all or nothing, at least not for the next few centuries. “There are degrees to how bad this thing can get,” Klein says. “Literally, there are degrees.” As we struggle to figure out how to notch back the degrees, so as to mitigate the suffering that a warming planet is going to bring, we also need to figure out forms of relationality—both to ourselves and to each other—that won’t make things worse.

By the time I finished 10:04, I felt like I understood some options: not being ashamed of the desire to make a living doing what we love, while also daring to imagine “art before or after capital”; paying as intense attention to our collectivity as to our individuality; demanding a politics based on more than reproductive futurism, without belittling the daily miracle of conception, nor the labor and mysterious promise of childbearing and -rearing; attempting to listen seriously to others, especially those who differ profoundly from ourselves, no matter how precontaminated the attempts; spending time reading and writing poetry; and more. Far from despair, I felt flooded with the sense that everything mattered, from meticulous descriptions of individual works of art to kissing the forehead of a passed-out intern to analyzing our political language to documenting the sensual details of our daily lives to bagging dried mangoes to the creation of the book I was holding in my hand to my deciding to spend time writing a review of it. “The earth is beautiful beyond all change,” Lerner repeats in 10:04, quoting the poet William Bronk. The inspired and inspiring accomplishment of his novel makes me want to say that sometimes, art is too. And maybe—if incredibly—so might we be, ourselves.

— Maggie Nelson, from “Beyond All Change. On Ben Lerner’s 10:04” in “Like Love: Essays and Conversations..” (Graywolf Press, April 2, 2024)

Notes:

  • Photo: DK 5:11 am this morning at Cove Island Park. For more photos from this morning, click here for birds and here for landscape.
  • Thursday Posts inspired by Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
  • Book Review from The Guardian: “Like Love by Maggie Nelson review – music, passion and friendship“

Tell me about your sorrow

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A somewhat obscure text, about 2,000 years old, has been my unlikely teacher and guide for the past many years, and my north star these last several months, as so many of us have felt like we’re drowning in an ocean of sorrow and helplessness.

Buried deep within the Mishnah, a Jewish legal compendium from around the third century, is an ancient practice reflecting a deep understanding of the human psyche and spirit: When your heart is broken, when the specter of death visits your family, when you feel lost and alone and inclined to retreat, you show up. You entrust your pain to the community.

The text, Middot 2:2, describes a pilgrimage ritual from the time of the Second Temple. Several times each year, hundreds of thousands of Jews would ascend to Jerusalem, the center of Jewish religious and political life. They would climb the steps of the Temple Mount and enter its enormous plaza, turning to the right en masse, circling counterclockwise.

Meanwhile, the brokenhearted, the mourners (and here I would also include the lonely and the sick), would make this same ritual walk but they would turn to the left and circle in the opposite direction: every step against the current.

And each person who encountered someone in pain would look into their eyes and inquire: “What happened to you? Why does your heart ache?”

Continue reading “Tell me about your sorrow” →