Repost: The Undertow

Something has to push a button in order for to get writing.  Originally posted on my personal blog Subtle Light.


My car got towed this morning courtesy of the Carlsbad Police Department.  The reason: my auto registration is six months overdue and by law is susceptible to impound.  I suspect that I'm not alone in my circumstances.

Six months ago it would have only cost me $60 to register my car.  But six months ago I barely had money for food or gas.  Now without transportation, I'm unable cash the check that I received yesterday a recent job, unable video that book interview and cooking demonstration next week.  I don't know how I'll gather the funds to pay the multiple parking citations to reclaim my car and the late registration fees.  All for the lack of a paltry $60.

I could have asked friends for that registration fee, avoiding all of this.  But how many times have they already been asked by me or others they know.  With other acquaintances in more need than myself, how is it even possible for me to ask?

Too old and overqualified, I've been unemployed for the last 4 years, scrambling for odd jobs and relying on the generosity of friends to make ends meet.  When forced to scramble, unfortunate choices have to be made about which bills get paid and which ones don't.  Yes, there have been good days, but they have since become fewer.

The begged question asks, "Why doesn't he just get a job?"  I wait for an answer to another question: "Why are they unwilling to hire me?"  Even a dishwasher position requires 2 years experience.  Somehow I've joined ranks of the non-employed: unwanted and uncounted.  I've "re-invented myself" and become an "entrepreneur." But in this economy, who would by my wares and services?  Being an entrepreneur today is much akin to being a subsistence farmer or indentured servant.  With car impounded, I'm not even that.

I look into my wallet, only to see four dollar bills.  My checking account is overdrawn.  The cat wants food.

Mine is but an eddy in the worldwide economic undertow that has consumed countless, otherwise unsuspecting people.  Those who are able and willing, but are stymied for a reasons beyond their control.  We've found ourselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, thrashing to keep our heads above water with no lifeguard in sight.  I wonder how many cars like mine got towed today.

This happen to me on two previous occasions under the same circumstances, so I knew that the towing was possibility.  I accept by responsibility and the consequences of my choices.  The foolish lesson had been learned, but the personal financial difficulties simply could not prevent the additional teaching.

Still, looking at the plight of others around the world, I remain among the lucky ones.  What could $60 mean to them?

While ranting to the officer (it was time I get it off of my chest), he kept saying how sorry he was to hear it, how he was just following the law.  Lip service?  Perhaps.  The tow truck operator was just doing his job, wasn't he?  Making a living when others cannot.  It's all that can be done.  All part of the undertow, becoming more and more difficult to escape over time.

"I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore"

Howard Beale in Network, the film written in the 70's by Paddy Cheyefsky (click here for a movie recap) was the first character to scream out what has been on the minds of many for ages.  Most recently Egyptians, Libyans, Syrians, and others have taken up the cry in their struggle to be seen and heard and seek freedom.

There are so many wrongs going on Earth that to build a list would take volumes. A particularly dangerous and unbelievably corrupt example has gone unnoticed and unchecked in our heartland. Our farmers have been pummeled by a corporation that has changed our foods (and this writer believes our health and well being). If you have not read the details of the tactics used by Monsanto Corporation to threaten farmers into using their genetically altered seeds, take the time to read this article in Vanity Fair magazine Monsanto Harvest of Fear.

Millions, probably billions, of dollars have been raised for cancer, multiple sclerosis, autism, etc. research, but the school of thought that cannot be ignored is that Corporations produce and sell products that are at the core of why these diseases have killed and transformed the brains and bodies of so many humans in the first place. Pollution from manufacturing food and packaging food, chemicals and genetic engineering that are part of seeds and food production, artificial ingredients in most foods sold in supermarkets, affect millions, probably billions of humans. 

Scientists get grants from the Feds and are paid billions by non-profit foundations to focus on symptoms and work tirelessly to investigate how diseases attack the body. They explore and test to see what happens on a molecular and cellular level in response to a disease and study the attack against animal and human systems. Science has been successful in developing hundreds of drugs that slow down the attack of diseases and in many cases have figured out how to radiate and chemically win back healthful balance as a disease is strangled and put into remission or cured.

But new rampant problems like the high percentage of incidents of Autism in children come to the foreground as the years go by. Please let us all know if you know who is screaming at the top of their lungs, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" in response to the truth that our neighbors, our leaders, and the medical and financial industries are not setting off ALARMS and waging the battle against the root cause of disease; pollution, genetic alteration of our food sources, and pollution of Earth's air and water.

"Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain't heard nothin' yet!"

                                                                                            ............ Al Jolson, The Jazz Singer

Most humans cannot grasp huge concepts; the size of the universe, the number of people on the planet, the speed of light. Humans are self-centered creatures, wired for permanence, but incredibly fragile. 

I spent an hour this morning looking through YouTube at videos of micro to macro views of the cosmos and quarks, and I recommend you do the same when you have time to play. There is one particular clip I remember seeing when I was in HS that I cannot find yet. It started as a view through an electron microscope at quarks (maybe it wasn’t quarks; now that I think about it, quarks may be too small for that 1967 technology. Let’s move on saying they must have started by viewing stuff bigger than quarks). 

OK, back to what I actually do remember about this clip we saw in science class. It started as a microscopic view of cell structure and began pulling back through the microscope to see neutrons, protons, atoms, then through the larger parts of a human cell until it reaches the surface of the skin. As the video continues to pull back, it views the arm, the whole person it belongs to, the room he is in, his house, his neighborhood and eventually all the way back into space viewing the entire planet Earth. The camera then flips to viewing space through ever more powerful telescopes, the solar systems and beyond. 

The one thing that sticks in mind about these images is that at one point in the microscope the atomic size particles look exactly like the telescopic view of a solar system. For all you scientists out there who know this is absolutely incorrect, keep it too yourself. My point is there is much that we are made of that looks exactly like the universe we live in. And that is remarkable to me.

Being startled, amazed, and awakened to new information is a major part of what keeps me going. And recently I have been going good. A chance to write more, express, share ideas with new friends, has been a transfusion of life juice. Yes, there are some givens that I accept and appreciate being exposed to, that keep me sane and help me get through this maze of life that I have to navigate with all these other 7 billion humans. (The truth that "the only constant in life is change" comes to mind).

Certainly I have been happiest when I have lived in rural environs. Frenchtown, NJ in 1979 was rural farm country. Sedona, AZ in 1982 was a small town going through the process of realizing its population might explode. South Whidbey Island, WA is still a wonderful paradise of rural Earth.  Borrego Springs, San Diego County, California is an incredibly vibrant small desert town with less than 3,000 permanent peoples. Oh, do I long for living in these places in their (and my) prime. The interesting key element of this joy was that these small places contained more people I could relate to then any suburban or quasi-urban environment I have lived in.

I saw a piece on CBS Sunday Morning today that confirmed why I have longed for something different. 

CBS reports: "Consider this: Today, worldwide, more than half of us live in cities. By 2050, the United Nations projects nearly 75% of us will."

And then 5 minutes later I heard a more disheartening reality: 

"Today, about 250 million Americans choose to live in or around urban areas. That means more than three-quarters of our population shares just about three percent of our land area."

The lesson for me today is that I am not like those 250 million people, nor will I be part of that 75%.  The words spoken by Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame come to mind: "Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!" 

The sad truth for humans is that continuing to follow this path will lead to a world jammed with those poor suckers and they will one day have a revelation similar to Charleton Heston in the movie Soylent Green: "Soylent Green is people!"

Change as Motion, Energy, and Life

We need to get beyond thinking of the world as composed of things and accept a world in which everything is composed of processes. We need to think of change as something built into the very structure of everything—to think of the world as composed of little bits of change.

Poetically speaking, quantum physics is a description of the universe in which everything is made up of tiny little bits of change. Change is never absent from any picture, or from any system, for any interval. Change is intrinsic. Change is the stuff of life. Literally.

You live because of the continual exchange of gasses through the lungs, of the continual, complex construction of proteins, of the ongoing birth and death of cells. Life is change, life is complex fire—it cannot be frozen. It is always and forever a process.

(And then the devil's advocate on my shoulder says, "What about frozen embryos? They are frozen—are you saying that they are not alive?" And my answer is, yes, they are not alive. But I'm not interested here in debating the philosophic points of reproductive technologies.)

We live a finite number of days, some finite total of hours, minutes, seconds. Our bodies are changing, slowly, imperceptibly each second, minute, hour, day, but we only can see those changes once they happen over a longer period. We rarely stand still long enough to do time-lapse photography of human beings as we cleverly do with plants. We are not the same person tomorrow as we were yesterday.

But now we are into the philosophic issue of identity, sameness, and difference. And how we define identity determines what we will say is the same and what we will call different. In absolute terms, no two things are ever the same, but we extract particular features, measure them to some accepted tolerance, compare each to each, lockstep, and then insist that these two chairs or these two ideas are identical.

To think of the world as it is – that is to accept a Heraclitean vortex that gives rise to occasionally stable clumps of matter that we take up and form into the things we surround ourselves with. We do not see stability as the exception because we cocoon ourselves with those materials that are stable. A forest, a desert, an ocean are richly evolving places, a bit different each day. But inside a house, the only differences are the things we move around, or the accretion of dust.

Look around you, wherever you are and you will find your world cluttered with human artifacts—it's an even bet if you will be able to see anything from where you sit that is not in some way artificial. We don't see change because we choose to surround ourselves only with things that are are long lasting.

And of course that is a good thing. We build refrigerators so that our food won't change into poison before we have a chance to eat it. We build walls and roofs so our beds won't convert into sponges when it rains. We sew clothes so that we can remain warm enough to sit and write blog postings before we go to bed.

But our passion—our obsession—with permanence leaves us like flies in amber frozen in an illusion of fixity. Lives are not lived in amber, but in change-rich environments.

And this is tremendously hypocritical of me, since I have lived my life in amber for several years now. But that is the topic for a later post.

Konstant Change

I raised my son on the foundation of the basic principle that "the only constant in life is change." It helped us through a number of realities: why his parents got divorced, why the dog died, why we lived in so many different houses. Constant change early in life makes it easier to adapt to loss and the eventual transitions all humans go through: starting High School, breaking up with you first love, and your Grandfather's death, are shared events that come to mind.


The downside of constant change in life is that somewhere inside your soul/spirit you learn to keep your distance and don't fully connect with people, places and things. Commitment issues may arise because you develop a natural defense mechanism that is geared to maintaining an easily accessible escape hatch.


Most humans adapt to conditions and environment while the brain builds a complex psychological and emotional web of responses to try to control "cause and effect". Humans with more developed intellectual perspectives tend to think their way through life's roller coaster, while humans who respond emotionally, whether it be sanguine or melancholy, ride the waves laughing, crying, crashing, and tumbling.


I used to be very judgmental about people who wear their emotions on their sleeves, because, like Spock and Data, it all seemed very unproductive. I wanted facts, truths, answers, and clarity. At some point in my 30's I began to realize that my traumatic early life had me locking down my vulnerability and throwing away the key. Having lived through big changes that included the divorce of my parents, the loss of my sister to MS, and as a young teacher the untimely death of 2 of our most popular student/athletes, I was living in my head and could not access my heart.


If it is a fact that change in the universe is constant, inevitable, and is the fabric of existence, than it is no wonder humans struggle to find peace and harmony. We spin through space and time, while the very ground we stand on is unstable. If humans fully embraced the notion that we have no semblance of control, would humans be happier? If we eliminated concepts like "mine" and "ours", if we shared all the resources on the planet with every human having equal access to water and minerals, would there be fear and greed?


In the previous post on this Blog "The Notion of Nothingness" Tim informs us that:


"When I hear the phrase "there will always be ....... war, poverty, stupidity, etc.", I find it difficult not to see those mouthing that phrase as children, intellectually speaking. For accepting one's own mortality is something that usually comes late in adulthood (if it does), and a persistent unwillingness to accept the universality of change seems to be little more than another level of immaturity ........"

The notion that a mature human would necessarily understand, accept, and be at peace with death, or that only a human with child-like intelligence would believe that there always will be anything, is a judgmental view suggesting the theory that with enough education and experience a human would evolve to knowing-ness.  

From my perspective, the acceptance of the inevitable (aka CHANGE) creates so much FEAR in humans that billions of people have given over their inevitability to gods, or former humans that they have elevated to god status (see Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, etc.)


No amount of worship is going to change the scientific fact of change, but there is something to the notion that too much acceptance of the inevitable makes living as a fully engaged human, with all its simple pleasures like love and hope, more difficult.

The Notion of Nothingness

Change is intrinsic to all phenomena. And once we recognize this, we must accept that none of the verities that we wish were forever perfect and true could be: nothing exists unchanging forever. Not even our notion of nothingness remains unscathed by the passage of time. However much we may want to believe that what is real and true and good is real and true and good forever, we can only embrace such a delusion by embracing a form of intellectual infantilism, painting a fixed and unchanging canvass over a tableau of unceasing flux. But we cannot live in comfort if we perceive the world as it is. So we avoid asking "deep" questions, we do not long attend to beginnings and endings, we say things like "we will never forget" and refuse to ask what comes after there is no longer a "we."

I embrace this notion not out of love or affection but out of scientific acceptance: the standard model of modern physics compels us to conceive of change as inherent in all phenomena. This is relevant because all of the electronic devices exists only because the standard model taught us how to make them. Electronics implies the standard model and the standard model requires that change is intrinsic: change exists in everything from fundamental particles to the universe entire. Change is not excluded from any region of spacetime nor from any aspect or description of it. And while others may find it justifiable to postulate entities that exist in some manner other than physically, I do not.

The cell phone we carry around compels us, via the philosophical mouthful ontological commitment, to accept that change is intrinsic to all phenomena. Even to our thoughts. Even to number and ideas. Even to fantasies, Change applies to the smallest and most ephemeral entitles (such as electrons and tau leptons) to the largest and most persistent (such as galaxy clusters and the universe itself) . While we often have an emotional need to imagine that something is fixed for all time, we should not allow such an affect to hide this universal feature from us. Everything flows and nothing abides.

While our individual mortality may be, just barely, possible to bear, it is far more difficult to accept that humanity as a whole has not always existed and will, in all probability, eventually cease to exist.

When I hear the phrase "there will always be…" followed by some human relevant phenomena (e.g., war, poverty, stupidity, etc.) I find it difficult not to see those mouthing that phrase as children, intellectually speaking. For accepting one's own mortality is something that usually comes late in adulthood (if it does), and a persistent unwillingness to accept the universality of change seems to be little more than another level of immaturity, one that persists in many of those even after they have accepted their own impermanence.

We can choose to remain as children throughout our entire lives or embrace the impermanence of all things, even everything. Nothing is fixed, not even the notion of fixity. Nothing is infinite, not even the notion of infinity. Nothing is forever, not even the notion of eternity.

To be kind, I will end by providing the reader with the balm of a numbing puzzle, one that is clear, though it may seem to most to be no more lucid than a Zen koan:

Nothing is nothing, not even the notion of nothingness.

There's No Place Like Home

It's been lonely out here. Oh for sure, the sunrises and sunsets are awesome and I am moved by the power of the ocean. I constantly imagine the landscape without any development; it is mountainous and rugged. The canyons run deep and the Batiquitos Lagoon is a soothing tidal wetland preserve. But the humans I meet are from a different tribe.

Moving to a new location on Earth has been surprisingly strange. I new I'd love the Mediterranean clime, as I have had the pleasure of climbing the banks of the Isle of Santorini. But the 3 or 4 tribes of clans-people I have encountered here focus on different aspects of life than my peeps. They seem satisfied to ride the local waves, eat fast-ly prepared foods, and cruise the endless miles of freeways in their favorite possession, their ride.

Recently, I headed to a coffee shop to meet up with some folks I found while flipping through the internets and I was warmly surprised that immediately it was clear that some of my tribes-people actually live around here too. They sure were hard to find! They tell me that there are others of us around and that if we continue to commune, and drop bread crumbs as we go, before long we'll have lots of reunions, raising a glass to the good old days, and feeling more settled, connected, and at peace.

I'm sure glad I stayed around long enough to find my new home.