There’s been a breakthrough in optics. Distant stars once considered to be too close together to distinguish might be easily resolvable by focusing on the phase of their light rather than on their intensity. The breakthrough will enable astronomers to overcome the “Rayleigh Curse,” or “Criterion,” or “Limit.” Binary star systems at great distance from us might seem to be a single star when only their intensity is measured.* Toying with the quantum nature of light will help astronomers isolate the light of one from another. You might be thinking, “Yeah, so?” 
 
There appears to be an analog in humanity. Think about the stereotypical response, “They all look alike to me.” Or think of any of its variations, “They all act alike,” “What can you expect, given their common background?” Or even, “What do you expect from someone who belongs to that political party?” We know that biases are born of ignorance, that distance between groups is a curse upon us. We see others by the intensity of their actions or the adamant adherence to a point of view, and when that intensity seems out of sync with our own, we fail to distinguish among members of a group so far from us. We know we are out-of-phase with what we see, but we don't recognize the out-of-sync phases of those within the groups we judge.
 
What we need is a new way of looking, a way of distinguishing by phases, by recognizing that two people can be in very close proximity but be distinctly out-of-phase with each other. That requires a look not at the intensity of behavior, but rather at the characteristics of individual behavior. One wave might be in a trough while the accompanying wave might be on a crest.
 
The problem rests in our individual filters. We’ve set our filters to look at intensity, and what we look for is what we see. When intensity of behavior appears to be the same for two or more, we see not a number of individuals, but one. So, there are inner cities in the United States were crime statistics indicate a certain intensity of danger. But within those urban areas live those who are out-of-phase with those whose behavior we note simply because it is more intense. Nevertheless, for those at a distance, say in the suburbs, the individuals are unresolvable.
 
The Curse is an inverse one: Greater distance means less distinction. Unfortunately, in many instances crossing the distance far enough to see two or more separate entities, or persons, is beyond either the capability or will of the observers who see from afar. Proximity, as we know, can breed familiarity. Identical twins, easily identified by their mother, present a blurred individuality for strangers. If we want to know, we have to either get close or have a new way of seeing.
 
How do you overcome the problem of human distance? Surely, you must have a way, some methodology or apparatus that keeps you from bias over a distant group, a mechanism that enables you to identify individuals. I know you probably wish everyone could overcome the human Rayleigh Curse as you have.
  
 
Universidad Complutense de Madrid. "A team of physicists dispels Rayleigh's curse." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 14 October 2016. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161014151959.htm .
Full article at https://www.osapublishing.org/optica/fulltext.cfm?uri=optica-3-10-1144&id=351044

Input results in output, but there’s an unseen operator between the two: The black box. For us, that box is the brain. We think we know what the input is. We can see or measure the output. We can’t see what happens between the two. We know emotions and thoughts somehow combine. Somehow the brain acts in an unseen, largely understood, and mysterious manner.
 
So, let’s say you get wrapped up in some argument, maybe one about religion, or politics, or historical interpretation. You know that your input can’t be exactly the same as another person’s; you know that you will process the input at least a bit differently, and you know that your output will probably differ from that of another. That’s the nature of black boxes. We can’t see how they work.
 
In every argument black boxes operate beyond the knowledge of the opponents. We don’t fully know what’s going on inside the boxes. The output is obvious, however. So, maybe the way to tone down contention is to put a filter over the output side of the boxes. But that means an “after-the-fact” filter. Whatever goes on inside the black boxes has already gone on by the time of its emergence.
 
All right, then maybe the way to obtain some control is to filter the input side of the boxes. Because we don’t know exactly what goes on inside the boxes—we don’t fully understand and we haven’t even fully identified the mechanisms at work—we know that something unknown inside will somehow change the input. We might not be able to filter fully the output, but by filtering the input, we get a bit more control before it disappears inside the boxes.  

Is there a built-in ambivalence? We get our sustenance from Earth. We share its elemental composition. We return to those elements after death (“Remember, Man, that you are dust and to dust you shall return”). Sacred Earth. And yet, there’s something in us that is anti-Earth, some sense of being more than Earth itself. Earth that is self-conscious. Earth materials make up sentient beings who see themselves ironically “in touch” with their spiritual side, a side that could be contaminated by Earth. The ambivalence expresses itself in those who would get “back to nature” and in those who would separate themselves from it.
 
So, in the building of Acoma, the Pueblo went to forests in the San Mateo Mountains twenty miles away, cut 40-foot pine logs, and hauled them to their city in the sky—without letting the logs touch the ground. Dropping the logs to the ground would have, as they believed, neutralized, eradicated, or otherwise negatively affected the magical qualities in the logs. Trees that once grew from Earth and then designated to support adobe roofs as vigas were kept from touching Earth. For twenty miles and up a steep-sided mesa!
 
Were the Pueblo different from us? Reality check. We want to use Earth for its practical material treasures while we proclaim its sacred beauty. Are we hypocrites? We want iron, but we don’t want iron mines, coal mines, alloy metal mines, and limestone quarries to make our steel world. We don’t want the landscape altered. We see a beauty we don’t want touched. We touch because necessity drives us to touch.
 
So many of us have so little knowledge of the planet, its makeup, and our relationship to the physical world that there should be little wonder about our apparent hypocrisy. “I’m for saving the environment,” we hear. But what does that mean? Does the person intent on saving the environment not use Earth at all? No food. No waste. No energy. No excess like clothing or shelter from rain, snow, and wind. No pavement of any kind. No medicines. No vitamins and minerals. Where’s the dividing line between using and keeping sacred? It is a shifting line that depends on the person drawing it.
 
Go to a gas station. Pump gas. In replacing the nozzle on the pump’s holder do you let a drop of gasoline fall to the ground? One drop? According to Statista* there are over 263,000,000 passenger vehicles in the USA alone. Let’s say the owners of those vehicles stop to pump gas only once per week. At a single of drop of gasoline spilled onto the ground per visit (there are probably two, three, five, or more drops) per vehicle, there would be 263,000,000 drops of gasoline spilled. Probably more. At one drop per visit, Americans would spill about 3,000 gallons of gasoline per week. For every 90,000 drops, add another gallon. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that the country consumes 2.5 billion gallons of gas per week.** You can do the math to calculate gallons per vehicle and drops per fill-up. And many of the same people who drop the drops, want us all to drop environmental change to preserve the beauty of sacred Nature.
 
You can, like the Pueblo, carry your viga above the ground, keeping it sacred, but then, looking back at the forest from which you cut the log, you will see one less tree standing. Oh-oh! There’s a missing tree. Somebody changed the environment just to build a roof.
 
Be very careful the next time you put gas in your car. You might say you are for preservation of sacred and beautiful Earth, but your drop of gas says otherwise.
 
* https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicles-in-the-united-states-since-1990/
 
** http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=23&t=10

Between 11,000 and 5,000 years ago, the Sahara was “green.” The Green Sahara, recently studied by Jessica E. Tierney, Francesco S. R. Pausata, and Peter B. deMenocal,* was for northern Africa a time of greater humidity, with an interrupting arid pause about 8,000 years ago. During the green period, rainfall was more abundant than it is today, and Neolithic people inhabited the region. And then as evidence from westernmost Sahara indicates, humid conditions ended to give us the great desert we know today.
 
Probably most people, and even you, don’t associate vegetation with the Sahara Desert though exceptions like oases and riverine environments, such as that of the Niger River and the Lower Nile, might come to mind. Timbuktu is not a place with lush vegetation today, and its population has dwindled under the same kind of desertification that has taken its toll on plant density in northern Africa over the past 5,000 years.
 
Landscapes change all the time and have always undergone change. Such change is sometimes slow. You and I are not going to outlive the desert nature of the Sahara. But question not: The land will once again become green. Within our short lifetimes, we can sense that there is some physical stability on the planet all the while we understand that variability is the product of ongoing geomorphological and climate processes. Vast thick sheets of ice no longer cover Canada and northern United States; all that ice has returned as water to the seas.
 
The change in the landscapes of North America coincided with the greening of the Sahara. Earth runs its own compensation scheme: The Sahara was green, but Canada and northern USA weren’t; then green left the Sahara as North America greened. Take something from here and put it there; circulate the waters of the oceans and the gases of the atmosphere. We could almost convince ourselves that all this change evidences teleology with regard to our planet. But there’s really no proof of a purposed end. Earth changes because, well, it’s Earth, a dynamic planet. We don’t need to struggle to find a purpose. Without offending our belief systems, we can accept that change does occur: it might be purposeless or it might be purposeful. If we want to see a purpose, we have that prerogative. I think it might be better to accept that all change, physical as well as social, is inevitable and that even when we believe the world is static, it isn’t.  
 
I’m wondering whether you, like the continents and their generations of inhabitants, might have undergone either a desertification or a melting, a drying up of resources and a dwindling population of those who once seemed to be friends in abundance or a melting away of what at one time seemed a stable, though frigid, environment. Time and space do that to friendships and, if I may coin, “strangeships.” I’m also wondering whether or not you believe that somehow you or those missing friends are to blame or that somehow some unseen driver is at work against you, changing the landscape of your life with malicious intent.  
 
Neither Green Sahara nor continental glacier lasts, and lands once covered in vegetation can become quite barren just as lands once frozen can become lushly vegetated. Individuals do not experience changes that occur over thousands of years, but generations do. Imagine the Neolithic inhabitants of the Green Sahara, slowly by generations facing a slightly different landscape from that of their ancestors and deciding to move little bit by little bit. They had no choice but to walk toward a new green.  
 
The landscape of friendships always changes on a dynamic planet, but that fact doesn’t prohibit any of us from taking a walk toward a different social environment. Since so many changes are gradual, we usually don’t have to walk far to recapture some semblance of a former, greener world, but we do have to walk.   
 
 http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/1/e1601503.full “Rainfall regimes of the Green Sahara,” ScienceAdvances 18 Jan 2017: Vol 3, no. 1. E1601503, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1601503

Bangladesh intends to plant a million trees to decrease the number of people annually killed by lightning in the low-lying and largely flat country made by the Brahmaputra and Ganges Rivers. They have a logic for their decision,* but we should all remember what we have been taught: Don’t stand under a tree during a lightning storm.
 
Isn’t this just like what we all have experienced? I mean the confusing advice. Buy a new car; get the old one fixed; take this burgeoning major in college; no, that major is overcrowded with people, so there won’t be jobs; you need a vacation; don’t spend your money on frivolous short-term releases; it’s good to take a break because absence makes the heart grow fonder; out of sight, out of mind—the list of seeming contradictions is variable and long. Conflicting advice and choices, many of them requiring a decision on changing the world to suit our desires and needs.
 
That’s the story in most lives: Conflicting advice and choices, some significant, some not. Whether or not one should stand under a tree during a lightning storm was, we all thought, a problem resolved. You get the advice from parents, teachers, public officials, and weather forecasters. The Bangladesh government thinks the trees are a good idea. They seem to have proof from other such planting programs in the region. The trees are supposed to suffer damage while thwarting a strike’s passage to the ground. I’m just thinking that maybe children, in an attempt to get out of the rain, will run under a tree’s canopy while electrons bleed toward the sky and back to the natural lightning rod. But we can’t blame the Bangladeshis for wanting to protect people from lightning. Or can we?  
We can’t help ourselves from interfering in nature and in the lives of others. We think, “Oh, the sand is moving down current from Presque Isle in Lake Erie. If it all moves in the longshore transport system, then Presque Isle State Park will be no more. We should do something. Let’s build artificial headlands to capture the moving sand.” And so the Commonwealth had crane operators drop rocks to form a series of little islands just off shore. Tombolos, or connections made of sand, the officials reasoned, will form as a product of the longshore currents. Walla! New headlands and the preservation of Presque Isle.
 
That works for Presque Isle, but as sands remain on Presque Isle, the people down current east of the park lose the resupply sand that naturally moves their way, so saving Presque Isle means jeopardizing other beaches. Seems that every time we impose a fix, we impose it at a cost. Those trees on Bangladesh might do the same. Trees take time to grow, and sands in currents take time to move. So, the current residents along the American side of Lake Erie might not see the down stream effects of the artificial headlands off Presque Isle. And the Bangladeshis of today might not reap the benefits or ills of one million trees. If they are all palm trees, there will be a new supply of coconuts to eat, but there will also be a few children, seeking shelter, who will be zapped by lightning. Choices. Hmnn.
 
Every major project engenders a new problem. Take water projects, for example. Nothing like having abundant fresh water for a growing population. Dams that hold back great reservoirs of water change the character of river systems and have the potential to drown anyone down stream if they fail. After droughts the rains come, and come, and come, as the weather of California in early 2017 exemplifies. In February, county officials ordered the evacuation of 188,000 people living down stream from the 770-foot-high Oroville Dam. The dam seemed solid and stable, but the emergency spillway showed signs of collapsing. People who had benefited from the dam and who had built communities because of it, had to evacuate. Do you think any of them complained? Do you think the people who moved into down stream communities after the dam was constructed should complain?
 
But what’s our choice? We could just let things go as they are, meaning that Bangladeshis would continue to have high casualties from lightning strikes, Presque Isle would partly wash away, and people would not build communities where water was not abundant. Or, we could interfere, using the best guesses we can make about what would improve human existence. Here’s some food for thought: If we move to or continue to live in an area where certain inconveniences or dangers exist, should we complain when we are inconvenienced or endangered? Should we accept certain inconveniences as inevitable and some dangers as potential and real?
 
In Versailles Borough v. McKeesport Coal & Coke Co., 83 P.L.J. 379 the plaintiffs sought damages because hydrogen sulfide from a culm bank (gob pile of coal waste rock from mines) damaged the paint on their homes. Supreme Court Justice Musmanno (1897-1968), then a county judge, wrote, “The plaintiffs are subject to an annoyance. This we accept, but it is an annoyance they have freely assumed” [Italics mine]. The residents chose to move where they could find work, and that work was in the mines, so the residences were near the culm banks.
 
Now think 2017 and the Oroville Dam. The presence of the dam has made life below it rather convenient—until the deluge threatened the structure. Did the residents not know that they had chosen to live where there was a potential for a 30-foot wall of water to cascade from a broken dam? But that begs another question: Do any of us really think about the consequences of changes we effect, like planting (or chopping down) trees, stopping the movement of sands, or impounding water? And another: Do we think about how place exerts a control over us?  
 
So, we all have to deal with the nature of place, and we all have to make choices. Do we effect a change we want that, in turn, might effect a change that we don’t want? In choosing place or in changing place we bear a personal responsibility to ourselves and to others who might be affected by our choices.  
 
* https://phys.org/news/2017-01-bangladesh-million-trees-lightning-toll.html

Mean-spirited statements on social media seem to proliferate after someone or some group suffers a loss in a contest of almost any kind—political, social, athletic, legal, cultural. The "team" loses, and the fans attack one another over the Web. A politician loses, and proponents attack one another over the Web. A beauty pageant or talent contestant loses, and idolizers attack one another over the Web. Nasty.
 
Okay, we get it; losing is difficult to accept. The inability to accept a loss in a contest isn’t new. But as we all know, mean-spirited statements and the hurtful actions of losers directed at winners have become quite frequent behavior.
 
Maybe we should look at the oft-quoted statement by fourth-century Church Doctor St. Ambrose: “No one heals himself by wounding another.” It’s obvious that wounding another is the “healing” tactic that prevails on social media.
 
Is there another healing tactic of which we can avail ourselves? Try this one. Think peace.
 
“Now why would you say that, Dear Professor? Do you believe that just by thinking peace, people can change themselves, heal themselves, or change one another?” Your questions initiate my monologue.
 
“I’m beginning to wonder whether or not there isn’t an actual discernible evil effect on social media. All the mean-spirited statements, all the trashing, might not be just empty words floating around in cyberspace, but rather are causes of further mean-spiritedness. And I don’t mean just by imitation. I’m not arguing that there’s propaganda out there. Everyone knows there is, and everyone knows that minds can be influenced. But I think there might be something out there that is actually influencing brain, that chemo-electric entity that is deemed to be part, if not all, of the physical base of mind.
 
“What makes me wonder so? My thinking derives from reports of experiments that seem to have been run rather objectively and that appear to have some relatively strongly convincing conclusions about consciousness and its relationship to matter. We all know the story of Schrödinger’s Cat and the role observation plays in quantum mechanics. Seeing makes it so. All possibilities exist until we notice, and the noticing collapses them all into just one. A conscious observer influences what is observed.
 
“The experiment in question was run by Dr. Dean Radin and others. Running the famous “double-slit experiment,” Radin’s group had people think about the double-slit and the subatomic particle that, wave or particle, passed through to a target. The experimenters did a fairly good job at eliminating any kind of interference that might swing the results one way or another. They even used people who were at great distance from the apparatus, and they ran many crosschecks. The experiments seem to show that just thinking about the experiment was a form of observing. That is, consciousness determined the result just as physical observation is known to determine the result. You can watch a YouTube presentation by Radin at     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRSBaq3vAeY .
 
“How does this tie into St. Ambrose and social media’s ad hominem attacks? It suggests to me that those who argue that consciousness itself is an active agent in the Cosmos might be on to something of a truth—not one beyond argument, but certainly one to be taken seriously. If, as Radin reports in his YouTube talk and as others have reported in scientific literature, even random number generators can be influenced by a number of minds working in unison, then minds working in hateful unison might also have influence, even when those minds are connected only over the Web. Again, I’m not talking overt propaganda that influences lazy thinkers or the weak-minded. I’m arguing that the very consciousness of haters has a real and negative effect on brain, mind, and the behaviors and attitudes of the majority on the losing side of a contest. The group consciousness collapses all possible reactions to loss in a contest to a single outcome: Hate. Thinking makes it so.
 
“Sorry that I’m taking my time in making this point of departure for your own thinking. Ambrose noted the same mean-spirited nature of humans of his time, thus, his statement. Today, hateful speech and ad hominem attacks on the Web have self-fulfillment. They wound in an attempt to heal, and in doing so, they do no healing. The world of the losers collapses into only one outcome. The Cat is dead. Hate is the observed quantum.
 
“What if,” I argue, “we practiced the consciousness of peace? Yes, I know, gurus, formal church leaders, and even cult leaders have attempted to get followers ‘to think peace’ with varying and often failing results. Obviously, some intense focus would be necessary. In Radin’s experiments, meditators performed better than non-meditators. Many people would have to work in unison to effect a change. But ‘many people’ always includes ‘one person.’ Does that not mean that each of us can consciously contribute to and actually cause a quantum of peace?
 
“Here’s thinkin’ at you.”  

Leave it to musicians like Mozart, Berlioz, and the Rolling Stones to reveal inner feeling, offering a different kind of solace to those affected by loss. When we lose a loved one, we see not light, but darkness. Our world is painted black. We can talk about hope, about a bright future, and about other states of existence, but many of us, bewildered by the drastic change loss brings, find ourselves overcome by darkness. Of course, we know that “life goes on,” but we can’t ignore the darkness that we symbolize by the fashion of funerals: Black clothes, black drapery, black cars in a line. Color? We use flowers, but they, like us, are temporary and serve only to mask the black and symbolize belief.  
 
The harsh Dies Irae* of the great composers and the edgy and rough music of the Stones serve as contrast to typical soft dirges and inspirational music. There’s a roughness that accompanies loss, a roughness that we cannot comprehend. When we try to smooth the roughness, we fail. Death is a harsh dark reality, but even if it were colorful and smooth, it is still a reality we all have to face.
 
But life does go on, doesn’t it? There’s a hint of that in the song that Mick sings.** First, there’s an acknowledgement of a common experience: “I could not see this thing happening to you.” And then, “I have to turn my head until my darkness goes.” That’s it. That’s the hint. In loss we all might want even the sun painted black, but we know that the darkness eventually goes. There will be a time, an unpredictable time, when color will return and when we can look again, a time when we do not need to turn our heads away from the beauty around us. It’s that old, useless phrase “Life will go on,” that, regardless of our time of darkness, we know to be true.
 
The absence of color in black ironically results from the absorption of all colors. Those surrounded by the black of loss still absorb a world of color. No, as Mick sings, “It’s not easy facin’ up when your whole world is black.”
 
Just remember that in the darkness of your feelings you are absorbing light, all the colors of light. The light, the color, lies inside even when your world is painted black. That’s why, in time—however long you need to take—your darkness will begin to go. There will be many around you trying to shine light on your life. With good intentions and in their attempt to help, they think that they can illuminate it and provide it with color. They see you sad, and they believe they have no effect.
 
You, in times of grief, think their efforts are useless. The black is seemingly impenetrable. But all the while you are, in fact, absorbing color. It’s in there. Be patient. You can, in time, release it. You will, in time, want to see color. 
 
*See “Flammis Acribus Addictis,” posted here on 2/5/17.
​** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4irXQhgMqg

Talk about snowbirds fleeing from the American Northeast to the Sunshine State! Look what happens in the Himalayas. Part of a region whose control is disputed by Pakistan, China, and India, the “state” of Jammu and Kashmir has two capitals, one for winter and the other for summer. The capital city Jammu is blisteringly hot in summer. The capital city Srinagar is very cold in winter.   
 
Nice when you can pick up your job and move to comfortable climes, isn’t it? That’s what the government officials get to do as they bounce from Jammu to Srinagar. If you can’t govern in Hawaii, chose a place that allows you to change scenery as it changes with seasons.
 
Most of us are tied to a place. Getting away is an event, usually one that requires some time away from school or work and either excess money or a credit card. The officials of Jammu and Kashmir get to incorporate change of scene and job. They get paid to bounce back and forth between “Scottsdale” and “Pittsburgh.”
 
Being tied to place has its advantages and disadvantages. Whatever the vicissitudes of weather, you’re stuck. Hot, dry, cold, wet: Live with it. What’s your choice? Right. You don’t have one. Of course, we all become acclimated to the weather. Freezing temperatures seem unbearable as fall turns to winter, but they seem tolerable as winter turns to spring. Hot temperatures seem intolerable as spring turns to summer, but they seem bearable as summer turns to fall.
 
If you are an American snowbird or an “Indian” official in Jammu and Kashmir, you run from adaptation, spending your time as you see fit in a climate that, because you changed place, seems rather mild. Those who stay behind suffer the extremes. They do, however, have an advantage. By contrast, they know widely different sensations: Being much too hot or much too cold. They move from a sauna right into a cold lake. The change can be exhilarating.
 
When everything is similar, nothing exhilarating happens. Relish the extremes wrought by the climate of place and the differences in the people around you. 

Reality has innumerable ways of confounding our perceptions of it.  Yet, we shouldn’t be surprised by our sometimes frequent, rarely infrequent, and often persistent confusion. Were it alive, the Cosmos would have little difficulty in disrupting the linguistic and sociological contexts of meaning. Heck! If we are capable of confounding ourselves and others, why shouldn’t the Universe be so capable? After all, even when we try to eliminate the subjective elements and immerse ourselves in logical, mathematical, or scientific thinking about reality, cosmos, or universe, we reach a point of non-visualization: "Things" we can’t see because they are too small, too far away, or mysterious in their ability to change as neutrinos change. And we can’t even call such “things” things because sometimes we consider relationships the “things” we study in our attempt to understand.
 
In thinking of relationships of any kind (between and among particles, or forces, or even people), we always fall back into the linguistic and sociological webs of meaning that predecessor humans passed along. Even so-called paradigm shifts are usually mere reflections, backward versions of what went before, or partly borrowed machinations. As long as we deal with “things” in a particular society and in a particular language, we don’t really overcome the confounding nature of reality. And if we believe we can overcome confusion by slipping into our mathematician’s clothing, we find that we simply replace what we once thought we could somehow visualize with something that we cannot see.
 
But rather than run this into some discussion about how understanding of reality “in general,” we might try to focus on what is wrong with our sense of human relationships, how they work, how to fix them when they go awry, and how to enhance them. The trick in all of this lies in attempts to visualize the non-visualizable.
 
Possibly a product of our scientific world and of social science thinking, we have come to believe that we can solve the mystery of human interactions, that we can whittle down the stick of relationships to shapes we can handle. When we look for explication we attempt to quantify or objectively describe. Trying to visualize anything requires us first to assume we can eventually visualize and second to assume that the visualization truly captures reality. So, what’s missing?
 
Mystery. Yeah! I know. I made you go through all that just to tell you that the best way to contemplate human relationships is to maintain their mystery. Reduce them to understanding, and you essentially reduce them to bits and pieces, all parts of a whole unseen. Of course, we want enumeration. We want objective analysis. We want to visualize. But reality doesn’t let us do that, and we have proof. Every time we attempt to understand the smallest relationships, such as that among the subatomic particles, we reach a barrier behind which the unseen, but real, operates. And every time we try to understand why some human relationships last and others don’t, we run into the same kind of barrier. Behind that wall is some reality that remains un-visualizable. Even when we ask those in a lasting human relationship why the relationship lasts, we get very little that we can apply to any other relationship. Not getting an easily visualizable “thing” on which to focus or to base another relationship, we get frustrated.
 
We want to explain a world that is ultimately inexplicable. We want to understand relationships because we often think that they involve two (or more) things or conscious entities that we can see. Shouldn’t understanding be a matter of adding up parts? We might think so, but then reality, or Cosmos, or Universe confounds us because it operates on different scales, some larger and some smaller than we can visualize or comprehend. We have access to linguistic and sociological tools, but the toolbox contains dark recesses into which we cannot peer.
 
Cherish the mystery of your relationships. Avoid trying to quantify and visualize. Some “things” are beyond visualization, and one of those things is the ultimate nature of relationships. 

We’ve known for some time that bees can tell the hive where to find food. They do it through a dance that uses figure eights, semicircles, and circles, rhythm and duration, and vertical or horizontal orientation, all adding up to direction and approximate distance to a stand of flowers. The dance is language that the other bees “understand” and that sets them in motion to fly to the food source—just like social media.
 
So, now, here we are, supposedly beyond just instinctive following, yet flying off to a place another has indicated. And, even if we don’t actually make a physical trip, we find ourselves following the dance to a mental position. The danger? Not much ordinarily, but occasionally, the human hive builds itself up into a frenzy of activity or attitude. Think this way or do this. The world is in imminent danger. The flowers are almost dead and the nectar will soon be gone. Life, as the members of a particular hive know it, will end—or so the dance seems to indicate.
 
The frenzied dances on social media lead members of a hive into imitative motions, sometimes for good as in relief for those struck by natural disasters, home fires, or terrible diseases, and sometimes for bad as in destructive riots, mass shoplifting sprees, and brawls. That so many can be urged to similar action over a short time almost seems to be an argument that humans can be made to act on instinctive impulses just like bees.
 
Every time that frenzied rioters, looters, violent protestors, or disruptive mobs rush to a single spot after a “dance” on social media, I think of bees. But I also think of bees when I see any of us—sometimes including me—imitate the mental dance, go to whatever intellectual distance the dancer indicates, or go in the described direction pointed to by the dancer.
 
Bees don’t have a choice. A scout bee finds a flower, brings back nectar and the scent of the flower, does the dance, and sets the other bees in motion. Humans, I hope, do have a choice; yet, over the centuries we have seen such hive activity of humans more often in destructive than in constructive thought and action. Is it not possible for each of us to learn the rudiments of choreography, to devise our own dances, or to revise the dances of those whom we might now imitate?
 
Bees so instructed by a dancing scout bee fly along a straight path to flowers. Humans so instructed by social media (or any media) have the ability to zigzag, find alternatives, or simply stay home to engage in their own creative choreography. We are all dancers. Some of us let others design our dances. Some of us become independent choreographers.