The great Pittsburgh Pirate Willie Stargell once commented on the nature of hitting by saying something like, “They give you a round ball and a round bat, and they tell you to ‘hit it square.’” Isn’t that also the nature of your life?
 
You have probably found yourself in numerous circumstances that require you to do something difficult, often more difficult than hitting a 95-mph fastball or 89-mph slider thrown from only 60 feet six inches away. Your reaction time in many circumstances is what you regret afterward: “If I had only acted faster….” For a fastball, the batter has less than half a second to react. For emergencies, we might have a little more or maybe just as little. Seconds pass very quickly, and half-seconds are often the units of decision-making.  
 
Hall-of-Fame Willie Stargell was a successful baseball player who played more than two thousand games. In his two-decade career, he didn’t react well in almost 2,000 plate appearances: He struck out 1,936 times. But he also hit 475 homers and was also a Most Valuable Player. None of those strikeouts did anything to diminish his achievements. He ‘hit the ball square’ when he could, and he tried when he couldn’t. From the beginning of his stellar career to the end, Willie Stargell was in pursuit of hitting in less than a half second something round squarely enough to be successful.
 
It doesn’t matter what fastball or slider the world throws at you. It matters how you react. It also matters how you face the next pitch. No past plate appearance determines the next at bat. When you faced that last circumstance, you did what you could to hit the round ball with the round bat squarely. So, you struck out. You’re still at the plate because you’re still alive. The next pitcher is ready to throw one past you. Are you ready to swing?
 
You have many games to play and many more plate appearances. Pick up the round bat and hit the round ball squarely as many times as you can. It’s the successful career that determines your induction into the People Hall of Fame, not your missing one pitch or another. 

Funny, isn’t it? We have differing notions of beauty and majesty, but certain phenomena infuse many people with a common feeling of wonder. A sense of wonder can come from natural phenomena, such as the Grand Canyon, Earth as seen from a jet seven miles up, or a coral reef 35 feet below the surface of turquoise tropical waters, or little critters as seen through a microscope and distant stars as seen through a telescope. Human phenomena also strike many with a sense of wonder: an orchestra and choir performing Beethoven’s Ode an die Freude, a skyline like Manhattan’s as seen from the East River, the solution to an equation, a delighted child’s expression. There’s much in our lives that speaks wonder.

Where you find wonder says much about who you are. Does the sense of it permeate you in the quiet of a garden? Does it suffuse you in the presence of athletic prowess or animal skill? Do you have to wander to wonder? Wandering to wonder is not uncommon. Wonder probably drives millions of people to travel every year, but you don’t have to go somewhere to find it. Others find it in their own lives, homes, neighborhoods, schools, and places of worship.

​Wonder flashes from innumerable acts, processes, features, or life-forms. Some people see more; some, less, and some, probably, none. Where do you stand on the scale of wonder-seers?  Where have you found wonder? Where will you look for it today?

 Are you an imperfect radiator? I think we all are. The energy from outside makes its way inward, permeating our psyches. It doesn’t always come back out as it went in like a tennis ball rebounding from a wall.
 
Maybe we are quantum-like. At the quantum level, energy that goes into a system doesn’t come out as it went in. Planck discovered the rule. Energy equals frequency times a very small constant, one with a bunch of zeroes on the right hand side of the decimal point. High energy in doesn’t necessarily mean high energy immediately out. High frequency blue light in can mean low frequency red light out. Thus, the sun shines on our planet and the ground reradiates in infrared; shorter, more energetic ultraviolet wavelengths arriving at the surface become longer less energetic wavelengths we call heat. (Our atmosphere, as a consequence, is heated mostly from below)
 
So, people around you exude a certain amount of psychic energy, call it some emotional discharge like a solar flare. The flares vary in intensity. They vary in energy, but they strike you nonetheless. Now what? After absorbing that energy, do you, like things in the quantum world, return the energy in a lower frequency and at unexpected times? Or, do you mirror the frequency of incoming emotional energy?
 
If you pluck a guitar string, it vibrates immediately in an expected frequency, giving the pitch you want. Imagine now plucking a guitar string, seeing no immediate vibration and hearing no sound. Then, a few moments later and when you least expect it, the string vibrates and produces an unexpected sound, a pitch with a lower frequency, basically a lower note. The unexpected lower frequency is what happens when atoms receive energy and produce photons. Do you respond like the quantum world, letting energy bounce around to be absorbed inside only to be released at a lower frequency?
 
Anger in doesn’t have to be anger out. In the quantum world, frequencies change according to the principle Planck identified; what goes in will eventually emerge, but outgoing frequencies don’t have to match ingoing ones.

tIf you take just a cursory look at a paleontology book, you will realize that life’s been around for a long time. When multicellular life proliferated 543 million years ago, it began a “purifying” process that ultimately led to you.  Hundreds of millions of years of evolution passed without the super intelligence you possess. The heaven of your life was preceded by a purgatory of evolutionary trials.
 
Purgatorius unio appears to have been among the first species in that state of “purifying” human-like forms. But that was a long time ago, even before the extinction of the dinosaurs. The little creature was mouse-like or shrew-like in form, and probably possessed the intelligence of similar animals today, intelligence sufficient for finding food, mates, and shelter. The journey to your heaven of computers, machines, and diets was a long and punishing one: Major and minor extinctions acted like sieves through which only certain families of animals squeezed. Obviously, your ancestral line made it through every such barrier; otherwise, you wouldn’t be here. Purgatorius, if it could reason, would be proud of its offspring.
 
So, the millions of years have led to you. That’s not a fact to be taken lightly. Not one of the multicellular life-forms antecedent to or subsequent to Purgatorius lived through all those millions of years. Every critter was a temporary resident in the purgatory of “purification.” Every one of them hadn’t reached your “heavenly existence.” Each spent time in a purgatory engendered by the imperfections of its ancestry.
 
Now here you are, obviously the product of more than five hundred million years of change and more than 65 million years of primate development. Like your billions of ancestors you, too, are temporarily here, possibly another undergoing the “purification” leading to another heavenly state, some post-you human. You won’t, like Purgatorius way back when, be cognizant of your role in the process, but, thanks to the many previous Purgatorii, you can be cognizant of your current heavenly state. You know, unlike your ancient primate ancestor, that you are just a temporary resident. You might be an evolutionary step toward yet another heaven, and in retrospective light you might be seen as living in an antecedent purgatory. The difference between you and all those that lived in previous purgatories is that you are aware and have the intelligence to use this time of purification with purposes beyond mere survival.
 
Purgatorius was a preparation for you. Wouldn’t it be rewarding to think your descendants might acknowledge that you truly lived if not in a heaven then on the heavenly side of your purgatory? Your decisions and actions might become the fossilized evidence that life had, indeed, reached a new level of “purification.”  

Time isn’t on your side as you move between what was and what isn’t. Nothing new in that observation. But that brevity of the present influences your concerns. You don’t seem to have time to share concerns with everyone.
 
Consider, for this moment, life in 1877. Edison introduced a sound recorder, the Edisonphone. Rutherford B. Hayes became President by a single electoral vote and appointed Frederick Douglass as Marshal of Washington, D.C. Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce surrendered, and Sitting Bull led his Lakota Sioux into Canada. Important things happened. So did frivolous ones. The first Guernsey Cattle Club formed in New York City, and the first Westminster Dog Show occurred. It was also the year when baseball’s catchers donned masks and the Cincinnati Enquirer used the term “bullpen” to describe the area outside the foul lines.
 
Who am I to say what is frivolous? Back at you: Who are you to say it? That’s the point here. Go into either what was or what is to see a wide range of concern or unconcern. You will understand and misunderstand. Obviously, some group thought that a dog show was significant enough to warrant their organizing efforts. Same with a cattle club. You can still find people devoted to breeding and judging dogs and cows. And just as wars took lives and displaced people in conspicuously important events, they still do the same. Some events engender concern and involvement by many; others don’t. Is it cliché to say that many people cannot empathize with others who are of different social and intellectual backgrounds? Is it cliché to say that ignorance breeds indifference? Would someone disinterested in the American political system care that Hayes was elected by a single electoral vote? Would someone in California care about the appointment of Douglass as D.C.’s marshal? Would someone in the Guernsey Cattle Club care about Sitting Bull’s leaving the country? Yes, some care is possible, but probably not deep concern. When people are different from one another, is empathy more difficult to achieve?
 
When something occurs, such as a sporting event or a tragic event, don’t be surprised by a wide range of responses, from empathy to indifference. Four days after Nicholas II was crowned Tsar of Russia, thousands of people gathered for a party at Khodynka Field for celebratory free buffets and gifts, including, for every partygoer, a roll, a sausage link, pretzel, some gingerbread, and a mug. You guessed it: A mad scramble on May 18, 1896, left more than 1,000 dead and a similar number injured. Nothing like free stuff at a party to get a crowd moving and trampling one another.  Now here’s where indifference surfaces:
Alexei Volkov met some of the crowd carrying their gifts on their way home. He reports, “The strange thing…was that not one person mentioned the catastrophe….”
 
Indifference makes as much difference as difference makes indifference. The Tsar appeared not to care about the deaths when he attended a ball in his honor. Some say he did not want to go, but political and diplomatic pressure forced him to divert his empathy to an ensuing offering of money to the victims. It was a show of empathy too late in coming. His seeming indifference made a difference in the way his people viewed him.
 
Indifference can make a lethal difference. Although more than a dozen people heard the screams of Kitty Genovese on the street outside her apartment building in 1964, no one rushed to her aid to prevent an ongoing knife attack by Winston Moseley. One person did eventually call the police. Apparently, the only person who rushed to help her was Sophia Farrar, who comforted the fatally wounded woman until the police came. Kitty’s death generated new terms, such as “Genovese syndrome” and “bystander effect.”
 
A little self-examination might enable you to evaluate your own concerns. So today, ask yourself about what is truly important to you. How many of your concerns might be in some degree frivolous? With whom do you share your concerns? You probably know your Intelligence Quotient and Emotional Quotient. Would knowing your Empathy Quotient give you a bit more self-knowledge? Should you take the Empathy Quotient test devised by Simon Baron-Cohen and found online at https://psychology-tools.com/empathy-quotient/ ?
 
Indifference can, indeed—by lack of deed—make a difference.
 

In 1398 a ruthless guy named Tamerlane (Timur the Lame) had his soldiers kill 100,000 Hindu people. Like those he killed, Tamerlane is dead. The Great Leveler makes a mockery of Pride’s seeking Power.
 
Those who might argue that we all possess an a priori knowledge that underlies experience need to look around. Pride’s seeking Power never leaves the planet, but the Great Leveler mocks it. If we truly had a priori knowledge, the Proud might not repeat the atrocities or even petty cruelties they perpetrated in the past. But of course, every generation has Tamerlanes.
 
One fact we do know is that no amount of learning seems to save the Proud of any generation from the final mockery. Of course, I’m not the first to say this. Percy Bysshe Shelley captured the thought more eloquently in his poem  “Ozymandias.” The poem tells of a great king and the Leveler. The inscription on the pedestal of an ancient fallen statue of Ozymandias reads, “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair.” Nothing, of course, remains of those works. They have gone the same way as Timur the Lame and his empire—into the hands of the Great Leveler.
 
The lesson of Death never seems to come with foreknowledge in the Proud. If we had a priori knowledge, ensuing generations might never see Pride seek Power. With a warning, with foreknowledge, possibly, one hundred thousand Hindu people would have lived longer. And today, those who suffer or perish because of Pride’s seeking Power might neither needlessly suffer nor prematurely perish.
 
There’s no consolation in the final mockery of the Proud, of course. When the Great Leveler acts on the Proud who sought Power, it is after their cruel effect. And no one born into the succeeding generation seems to carry innately the lesson of the final mockery. Tamerlane and Ozymandias are dead, but so are those on whom they inflicted suffering and death. That’s a sad fact.
 
Will anyone ever be born with an a priori warning? If someone were born with innate foreknowledge, could that person convince the Proud that their end is foreshadowed by the ruins of empires? 

Can’t fly over this planet at night without seeing them. Bright world! And I’m not just talking City of Lights or Las Vegas. We shine at night. Too bad there aren’t intelligent beings on the galaxy turnpike. Earth’s quite a sight at night. Definitely worth a flyby.
 
The other perspective isn’t so grand anymore. From well-lighted cities the skies appear dark. Too much interfering light rising from below and overwhelming the stars almost as effectively as the noon sun. Got to go into the wilderness, maybe Patagonia, maybe the Chilean Andes, or the Nevadan desert to see stars.
 
Go to Mono Lake on a clear night. Bright stars all the way to the horizon. Same on a darkened ship Mid-Pacific. What are we doing? More than half the people have little idea of the surrounding celestial lights. From the dark we see. Living in light means seeing little.
 
Why should we care? Well, for one reason alone. The stars drove ancients to wonder. Sure, we know what those bodies are now, and we have catalogued many of the nearest suns, but that’s not wonder. Wonder comes with mystery. Wonder comes with questions. What’s “up” there?
 
Of course, we know the “up” is all around us. We’ve seen the “up” from the perspective of space telescopes, astronauts on our moon, and distant planetary probes. The ancients had no real idea. Thus, their wonder.
 
In the wash of light the dark skies over cities beg no questions. Just remember that although those ancients didn’t know what the celestial lights were, they did initiate the wonder that resulted in our knowledge.
 
The path to knowledge is paved with wonder. 

The sandwich has many names and versions: Sub, hoagie, grinder. It’s a sandwich, okay? Basically a bun with good stuff—anything you want—in it. A meal in your hand in some instances, that is, something with representatives of different food groups: Grains in the bread, tomatoes as fruit, lettuce, onions, pickles, peppers as vegetables, cheese as dairy, and assorted meats with protein and fat in generous supply. Yep, a food pyramid meal in your hand.
 
Notice how some of our relationships are, to choose one representative version, hoagie-like? We meet someone, and that meeting leads to meeting relatives and friends. It also leads to meeting those far on the periphery of relationships and sometimes, also, enemies. It’s a society in your hand, that is, in every handshake.
 
We’ve heard much about our interconnectedness, including our “degrees of separation.” Now we even hear about our connectedness to Neandertals and Denisovans. Seems our ancestors were pretty active making, if not friends, definitely connections. Those connections are in the DNA of almost everyone save Africans, who are everyone’s ultimate parents.
 
Seventeen researchers (Benjamin Vernot, et al.) ran around collecting DNA for comparison and matched both Neandertal and Denisovan genes with non-African populations (Europeans, Asians, Melanesians). The ancestors of those non-African groups made connections a long time ago. A guy walks into a cave, sidles up to a rock, asks for a bone-marrow drink, and grunts at the woman next to him, “Hey, Babe, ever wonder what it’s like to spend some time with a modern human? Come outside, I want to show you my new wheel. It’s the latest model; it’s round.”
 
Well, what Denisovan or Neandertal wouldn’t fall for such sophistication? No wonder modern humans make a pyramid of groups based on an African origin and mixed in varying proportions. It’s a world of hominin hoagies, many different, but all rather good.
 

You have to admire the guy even though he was a loser in the long run. I’m talking about Hannibal, the great Carthaginian general who wreaked havoc on his Roman enemies until his defeat in northern Africa. There’s a saying attributed to him that might appear as the epitome of audacity, but is more a show of confidence: Aut viam inveniam aut faciam. “I will either find a way or make one.”
 
Is that you, also? Confronted with an obstacle, do you capitulate or do you, like Hannibal, drive your army and herd of elephants over the Alps? Want success? You don’t have time to wait. Find a way, or make one.