You know, it is so easy to lose your footing. I am certainly one who has lost it too many times, but I am still here, asking for more. I have felt pulled by two incredibly unrelated stories. As some of you may know, I have been doing a weekly podcast for over a year now. It went through the inevitable creative incarnations. I have completely and permanently settled on doing a weekly news round up with some colorful commentary. How’s that?
I read a story about how the landing of the Vikings on what is now Newfoundland, Canada can be riveted to the actual year of their arrival. I will spare you the science, because we will get bogged down in the minutiae. However, because of the occurrence of a solar storm and how it marked trees, with their time-clock rings, it has been determined that they were there by 1021AD, 471 years before Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492.
It wasn’t a long walk for me to think about the idea that history keeps changing. Growing up, you kind of get this idea that history is all about facts that permanently anchor us in the present. Well, I’ll be damned, history keeps changing, with each new scientific revelation. I think most of us like the feeling of being blanketed in the truth of our past. It seems at least once a month there’s a story about new discoveries regarding our origin, yours and mine.
I guess I’d identify the part of this narrative just above, as me looking at my feet, while I talk to you. In the very big picture, it is interesting to know where we have come from, or at least I think so. However, it is a target that keeps moving, each time you choose to look at it. I had this flash of being on intellectual ice skates and having no idea what to do, because this damn journey keeps changing. Every time you go around the rink, much of it doesn’t look quite the same as when you saw it on your last revolution
OK. It’s now time to go mental bi-polar and travel beyond your wildest imagination. The other article that got me, felt like a right hook, after first getting a straight left jab to my right temple. Fortunately for both of us, I can’t find the news story, probably a direct result of the fog induced by the blow to my head. It dealt with a planet being discovered outside the Milky Way.
Before the dawn of Covid World, I started thinking about taking a road trip, which I almost did before the Wuhan Wipeout collapsed us all. I was going to drive around 400 miles from Vancouver, BC to my destination in the Kootenay Mountains. Living on such a small island like Kauai can give you the itch to stretch out on a highway, any highway. This was my idea of distance.
On occasion, I have looked up what the measure of a light year is and I immediately get a headache. I started reading how far the Milky Way was from us and how this planetary discover was even beyond its milky boundaries. I find things like the Big Bang Theory intriguing, but I just get this feeling when you think about “out there”, as far as you can possibly imagine, it even goes beyond that.
You know, it’s not like the Wicked Witch of the North is looking at this life size diorama of what is going on everywhere at every minute. I think we will continue rediscovering our past, gaining a sense of greater clarity along the way. The landscape of our past will keep changing and there is no end to it. Science is going to reveal so much more of what this infinite universe is all about, too. Everything we think we know will be constantly redefined.
It seems like examining history is about shrinking and shrinking, getting to the moments that initiated change. There is a kind of growing precision about it, because science has provided tremendous insight into what likely happened in our long history. So, the Vikings were walking Newfoundland, Canada around 1021AD, while indigenous people had been living there for at least 6,000 years before them. As of this moment, that’s the latest discovery of our odyssey, a journey written in pencil.
Every time, we bother to take the time to look in the rear view mirror, the view keeps changing. It kind of begs the issue of why not just drive your car on the road map of your choosing and try real hard not to hit anything on the way to wherever life takes you.
I think it is more comforting to feel secure in the moment, than it is to think about the infinite distances of this limitless space we inhabit. I do wonder how all of this happened, when it began, how it began, and how incomprehensible it will always be to all of us., at least for yours truly. If you don’t get too close, like Icarus, you can be OK. Sometimes, I do think about the infinite space we inhabit. Discovering a planet beyond the Milky Way is millions and millions of light years away from us and there is endless space beyond that. I try and understand how big all of this is and if space ends somewhere out there. It’s like trying to pin infinity to the mat and having it tap out, whispering a secret in your ear that only you can hear, just before it disappears and you can’t remember the message.
I do think about these things, wondering where my little life fits into it all. Hell, I don’t know how the sun comes up every morning, waltzing across the sky and disappearing on the other side of this tiny planet every day. I do keep trying to find a place for me in all this.
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Two guys, seemingly having nothing in common, put on a weekly show of what it’s like to be friends.