Car tires. You fill them up with air. And walla! A cushy ride. Typically, the air inside car tires exerts a pressure around 32 pounds per square inch. That keeps the tires inflated because the outward push is greater than the external air pressure (just 14.7 pounds per square inch at sea level). You could, of course, overfill your tires by adding more air, creating with a powerful pump an internal pressure sufficient to blow out the sidewalls. Obviously, that would be a hazardous act for anyone standing near the exploding tires.
 
People don’t knowingly overfill car tires short of some purpose to do so. Most of us just allow the computer on the free air pump to whistle when it senses the pressure we set as maximum. Or we just use a tire gauge to check pressure as we pump. Too much or too little pressure will result in uneven tire wear. We don’t push beyond the limit. Yet, we also realize by experience that perfect inflation requires an internal pressure somewhat greater than that of the ambient air outside. 
 
We are always caught up in the metaphors of our age, and pressure is the basis for a number of such metaphors. We speak, for example, of having “too much pressure” in school or job. Often we think of that pressure as coming from the outside. It’s as though someone else has control of the pump and is either consciously or unconsciously overfilling. Whereas it might be true that others can pump in some air, it is also true that we choose the thickness of the sidewalls and the resistance to overfilling. We also have control of the valve. We don’t have to let the extra air in.
 
Our cushy ride and durability occur when we control the internal pressure. 

Sediments, which can be anything from pieces of rock to pieces of shells and even salts precipitated from shallow seas and lakes, are carried by media like air, water, and ice until insufficient energy for transport allow them to sink and pile up in successive layers. That sentence took a long time to read, but it gives us an inverse model of sedimentation. The last words you read are the mostly recently written. In sedimentary rock layers that have lain undisturbed, the topmost layer is the most recent. We read the history, the story, of rocks from the bottom up. Lowermost layers are oldest. You can see the sequence in canyons cut into sedimentary rocks.
 
Not all areas are overlain by sediments and sedimentary rocks. Barren igneous rocks cover some volcanic areas, but the same principle applies. Lavas on top are youngest. You can see the sequence in canyons cut into layers of basalt.
 
In both sedimentary and igneous rock areas we see a multilayer structure reminiscent of a layer cake. Mother Nature (picture her in a baker’s hat) can also make an upside-down cake. Rocks can move, warp, and get overturned by tectonic activity as Earth’s plates shift. In some instances, like those producing overthrust faults, a bottom layer might even move over younger rock layers. That displacement makes reading Earth history a bit complicated with rocks imitating the sentences in these paragraphs: More recently written stuff appears on the bottom. Geologists have identified the vectors and causes of such forces for overturned rock layers.
 
We have seen such disruptions in human history repeatedly. Shifts in thought occur. What was a philosophy in the deep past comes to the present, forced over more recent thinking. Thus, socialism and capitalism, liberalism and conservatism, absolute and situational morality, and cultural tradition and intellectual rebellion keep changing positions. Like the rock layers, they are easy to document in most instances, but turnovers complicate interpretation.
 
Now you. Feeling or thinking a little as you once did? Something change? Did some force cause an overturn of the “natural order,” placing an older attitude, feeling, or way of thinking on top of your most recent layer? What produced the force? 

In This Giddy Globe, Oliver Herford says that the North Pole is the only “absolutely moral spot” on the planet. He wrote that in 1919, ten years after Cook, Peary, and Henson made their claims to have reached the Pole as its first explorers. They didn’t stay. An empty land cannot, obviously, be immoral or unethical.
 
But is emptiness our only hope of an ethical or moral place? Apparently, we are hard pressed to find a populated one that is “absolutely moral.” Your neighborhood? Your town or city? Your country or continent? With more frequent visitors to the North Pole nowadays, Herford would himself be hard pressed to make an argument for its position as morality’s sole refuge.  
 
What about synagogues, churches, mosques, temples? Aren’t they above reproach?
Well, we know enough about the stories of transgressions in “holy places” to make an argument that even houses of worship can be less than moral “spots.”
 
Herford wrote what he thought was a comic take on the world; thus, his title. He seems, however, to have hit on a serious topic. Where on Earth can we find a moral place?
 
For thousands of years we’ve been trying to determine what is moral, and we’re still looking for some place where we can find morality without corruption. It’s almost like the quantum measurement problem. As soon as we make a measurement of a quantum particle, we alter it. As soon as we enter a place, we introduce the potential for immorality. Put us at the Pole, and you make the Pole a place of potential immorality.
 
If Oliver were alive today, he might make his comment about Mars or some other planet where we have not walked the surface. As we travel among the planets and possibly the stars, will future Oliver Herfords keep pushing that “absolutely moral place” to even more remote parts of the universe?   

​Mountain streams cut V-shaped valleys. Mountain glaciers cut U-shaped valleys. Both erosional agents leave evidence they were there, once doing work. The streams might have dried up long ago, and the glaciers might have melted, but their valleys remain. The character of a geological agent is evident in its product. Some agents, however, merely move through an area without much effect. Wind gaps are cuts in mountains where once water or ice eroded but now serve only as passageways for the air that, unlike the winds in deserts and beach environments, does little work. The wind passes through the gap, the notch in a rocky ridge.
 
You can, if you wish, merely pass through an opening cut by a previous human agent. Or, you can make your own notch in the hard world around you, providing an easy passage for those that follow.

Ocean waves driven by winds impact shorelines. They erode in some places and construct in others, sometimes taking materials from one section of a coast and moving them to another section. Erosion and construction are 24/7 processes. The ocean doesn’t rest though it does both in degrees of intensity. Big storm waves can move seawall blocks that weigh many tons. Gentle waves do work on shores almost imperceptibly.
 
For those with little experience along beaches, typical images of sandy stretches fill the mind’s picture album. Those with wider experiences know that shores differ because of materials available and the dominant wave activity. Not all beaches are composed of sands. Some have particles best described as boulders.
 
Bigger particles indicate a relatively rough sea area. Big waves that might wash away tiny sand grains leave behind an accumulation of the “big stuff.” And there might be a lesson in this for all of us.
 
Resistance to wave erosion lies in the nature of the material. Now think. There you are, a shoreline repeatedly assaulted by the challenges of the world around you, that ocean of responsibilities, tasks, concerns. Are you a sand grain or a boulder? Can you resist the onslaught of storm waves or are you moved by the gentlest of ripples? The waves will continue their 24/7 activities. Will they erode what you are? 

For geologists a fault is a break caused by movement; rock on one side of the fault moves relative to rock on the other side. The movement can occur in any plane from horizontal to vertical. Every fault movement tells a story about its source of energy. When a block of Earth’s crust separates by tension (think stretching an object), one side of a fault drops relative to the other side. When compression (think pushing two stones together) drives blocks together, one side of a fault rises relative to the other side. Faults have names: Those that form from tension are normal faults; those that form from compression, or colliding, are reverse faults. Blocks of rock sliding past each other in a horizontal plane are strike-slip faults.
 
Probably, all the breaking and moving would be rather inconsequential if the release of energy from the movement were unnoticeable. But, alas, it isn’t. Movement along faults is the cause of most earthquakes, and we all know how devastating earthquakes can be: Broken homes and shattered lives. Some faults are clearly visible as is the San Andreas Fault in the Carrizo Plain in California. Some are blind faults, undetected until they release their energy; the 1994 Northridge, California, destruction is an example.
 
Unfortunately, we cannot stop the natural processes that cause earthquakes because most of them are associated with plate tectonics, movement of giant slabs of Earth’s outermost rocky shell. It’s not possible to stop the movement along the San Andreas Fault, a strike-slip fault, by pounding a rail spike into the rock. The movement might begin miles below the surface. Nor can we stop the vertical movement of normal and reverse faults, first because we cannot predict their happening and second because we have no technology to stabilize rocks breaking after a buildup of energy.
 
That breaks can be caused by tension, compression, or sliding is not unlike those breaks we know between humans. Sometimes pulling apart is the cause; sometimes, colliding; and sometimes, sliding past. We appear, in our emotional breakups, to be Earth analogs.
 
In Earth’s crust, minor releases of energy detected only by sensitive seismometers and slow distortions of the land called creep rob faults of explosive energy. A major break happens because no smaller releases of energy have reduced the tension, compression, or sliding. Faulting is inevitable because the movement is inexorable. Because the energy buildup might lie hidden deep below the surface, we can’t predict the precise moment of an earthquake in spite of a network of sensitive instruments placed around a fault zone.
 
What about those breakups in the human realm? Once again, we seem powerless to stop most of them. The energy that moves both sides usually builds up for years, just as it does in rocks within Earth’s fault zones, sometimes building up for decades, sometimes, as in the case of once friendly countries, for centuries. All analogies limp, of course, and one that compares a human breakup to one in Earth’s crust is no exception. Small releases of energy in the human realm don’t necessarily release any tension, compression, or sliding past. Nor does any analogy make predictability any easier in the human realm than it is in the geological one. No united couple on the verge of a breakup is destined like Earth’s crust to break and violently move apart. In planetary tectonic plates, movements along faults are inevitable; in human relationships all energy can potentially be redirected. There is no Law of Conservation of Energy in human emotions and relationships. Human and Earth breakups might, however, have something in common. Because Earth’s crust has variable thicknesses and rock composition, there is no quantitative scale we can use to say how much energy buildup rocks can take before they break in a particular place, and there is no quantitative scale for human breakup energy.
 
Pulling apart, colliding, and even sliding past are sometimes observable in couples by their words and actions. Yet, like blind faults, such as the one that struck Northridge, California, some sources of breakup energy lie undetected, at least by one side of a relationship. Like seismologists who, though powerless to stop an earthquake nevertheless keep studying faults and their movements in hopes of one day predicting the moment when breakup energy exceeds rock unity, couples need to listen to the ground. Knowing that an energy buildup is taking place might be sufficient warning that saves a relationship from a breakup. Even if the warning doesn’t stop the breakup, it might lessen the impact on individual lives. 

Understanding the faith of others isn’t easy, especially when it differs from the familiar faith of those with whom you have associated, such as childhood caretakers, teenage peers, and those embedded in a similar culture. Yet, even if you have never clearly defined any faith, you still have some sense of its general meaning: No one exists without some kind of belief. (Your chair will hold you; your monitor will stay on; your sky won’t fall; your worldview is correct)                                                                                                                                                                        
 
​For someone outside Guatemala, for example, understanding faith in Maximón would most likely be difficult. Maximón is a combination saint-god-devil whose effigies are variously dressed, sometimes with sunglasses, moved from house to house, paraded during Holy Week, and given gifts that include money and cigars. Yes, cigars. Apparently, Maximón likes to smoke.
 
This sunglass-wearing, variously and somewhat colorfully dressed, cigar-smoking demigod seems to be a combination of Mayan deity, Christian saint, and mythological gigolo—story goes that he slept with all the women of the village while the men were away. Faith in Maximón outside the Mayan highlands probably lies only in expatriates. If you have never witnessed a procession through the streets of Antigua Guatemala during Holy Week, you are probably thinking local firemen’s parade, Macy’s Day Parade, Rose Bowl Parade, or Olympic Opening Parade. Like those traditions, the Guatemalan parade is also a significant cultural event. Dressed in colorful garb to represent their individual villages, Guatemalans carry glass-enclosed sedan chairs with statues of saints through the streets for hours. That’s their faith in practice.
 
Now, let’s say a Guatemalan from the highlands, not familiar with American customs, comes to observe Macy’s Day Parade. Big balloon-characters paraded by people in colorful garb slowly walking through the streets for hours. Balloon characters! Could the Guatemalan presume a faith is on display? Could a believer in Maximón understand the relationship New Yorkers have with a balloon Snoopy, a cartoon character? Could one unfamiliar with the opening ceremony of the Olympics understand thousands of people in colorful uniforms parading behind one carrying a torch to start an elevated flame? Are the Guatemalans, the Macy’s Day and Rose Bowl Parades’ participants and viewers, and the Olympian athletes and audience in the stadium somehow expressing something unknowable outside their inner social circles?
 
So, let’s say you are not Guatemalan, have only recently been introduced to Maximón, and now observe the customs. Would you recognize the “faith” in the practitioners? And what would you presume about their “faith”? If mocking or demeaning is your response, you might be guilty of presumption, definitely in thought, possibly in action, maybe in feeling.  You might think that is a strange or inappropriate use of the word here because guilt implies faith of some kind or adherence to a code of ethics and morality. Presumption implies faith everyone can comprehend. Why?  
 
Presumption derives from praesumere, Latin for “to take beforehand.” Presumption implies taking for granted something you already believe or taking for granted your ability to set a standard: Your standard. Isn’t it true that your presumption inhibits your connecting with someone else’s faith and prohibits you from understanding a parade or a procession of colorfully clothed people carrying an effigy through their streets?
 
Presumption is an extreme form of pride, a know-it-all, almost omniscient frame of reference. It might be what keeps you from understanding another’s faith. It might even be the reason you have the faith you have. No, don’t go there: Even an atheist has a faith. Seems we’re all counted among the “faithful.” Do any of us truly know the nature of others’ faiths? Maximón, Snoopy, Olympic torch, a Nothing, or a cross.
 
 
 
 
 
 

No doubt there are circumstances that exceed our ability to fully anticipate their consequences, but some of us deify Fortune at the expense of our own control. Juvenal noted this about 20 centuries ago when he said that if we have foresight, Fortune has no divinity: We choose to make the goddess Fortuna a deity and place her in the heavens.
 
     Nullum numen habes si sit prudentia, nos te/ Nos facimus, Fortuna, deam caeloque locamus.
 
The “wheel of fortune” apparently spins at unknowable, variable rates, moving between “good” and “bad” luck. Anyone who has ever spun a roulette wheel knows the result: Random fortune, with the “good” coming from a “lucky spin,” and not, sorry to say, from insight, intuition, or foreknowledge. That wheel of fortune places us just a second and a space away from a car accident, preventing damage and injury, or it places us in front of a lottery ticket machine, pushing just the “right” button for the winning scratch-off. It also puts us in time and space with an accident or in front of a losing ticket.
 
Not all luck, however, is random. We know the stories of those who have “made their luck,” and usually those are tales of people who have taken risks in seizing circumstances where opportunities once dormant await their awakening. In 1899 a fellow named Edward John Phelps put this succinctly: “The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.”
 
We do have the ability to make both “good” and “bad” fortune, and in doing so we place ourselves in the heavens, not Fortuna.

Would that our lives would be free from dangers! Would that we might have no worries! Hey, are you afraid of mosquitoes that carry malaria, Zika, Chikungunya, Dengue and Yellow fever, Eastern Equine and St. Louis Encephalitis, and West Nile?
Scary stuff. Then there are spiders, the brown recluse and black widow. What about crocs in the Everglades? Want to swim in the ocean but are afraid of sharks and poisonous jellyfish? Then there are steps. Yes, steps, not in themselves much danger, but couple them on occasion with gravity, and Boink!
 
I didn’t even mention snakes. Sneaky, aren’t they? You’re sitting outside at a picnic, and there, uninvited and at first unnoticed, beside you, to use Emily Dickinson’s words, lies a “narrow fellow in the grass.” Well, there’s always that trip to Iceland you’ve been putting off. In probably one of the most famous chapters in all of scientific writing you can find your motivation for that trip to the Far North or motivation for continuing your happy life in the Land of Fire and Ice. The book in which the famous Chapter 72 lies is Tilforladelige efterretninger om Island, basically, The Natural History of Iceland by Dane Niels Horrebow. Dr. Samuel Johnson playfully mentioned the nineteenth-century work when he claimed he could recite the entire chapter from memory.
 
Let’s put you to the memory test. See how long it takes you to memorize the English translation of Horrebow’s entire Chapter 72. Here it is in full. Ready? Go:
 
            “There are no snakes of any kind to be met with throughout the whole island.”
 
So, even though you might get wiped out by a volcanic eruption on the island, you can rest assured that you won’t have to deal with at least one danger: Snakes. Packing your bags? Have your picnic in Iceland. Otherwise, learn to live with the dangers that surround you by anticipating what you can and holding onto the handrail when you walk down steps.

As authors of our lives, we have the potential to revise. Not everyone, however, recognizes the need for revision. Some think their work is done and that revisiting early drafts is unnecessary: “I’m happy with what I have written, and I’m comfortable with the product.”

In some instances, first drafts are probably good. Some are geniuses at the art of writing their lives. Some seem to “get it right” the first time: Fluid sentences in support of a solid plot on a unified theme written coherently. Are you one of those authors?
If you look at any work closely enough, you can see something worthy of revision. Maybe the work has too many complex sentences where simple ones would suffice. Maybe the opposite applies. Well, even if the work seems fluid, unified, and coherent, certainly there is no harm in revisiting it. A tweak here or there, a bit of reorganizing structure, or a plot shift might come from the muse of life. The sources of inspiration change with experience and age just as sure as generations of graffiti artists overwrite old graffiti.

​Those who despair to any degree should realize that they can pick up the pen at any time and start rewriting. Even those who are just slightly unhappy can do the same. No author is bound to produce a single edition. Each of us is an author whose story can be overwritten with a new chapter.

​Everyone can be a palimpsest.