Yes, resistance does impose a certain new strength on the resister, but that’s a holistic principle. As “wholes,” we survive either in a weakened state or a newly strengthened one. We acknowledge the latter by declaring a resolution to either avoid or overcome any similar challenge to our being or way of life. That works for “personality” and “character,” but, alas, not so much for our constituent makeup. The stresses of life can wear down our cells by oxidation and inflammation. As they succumb to the stresses, cells age.
 
All the while we exhibit resiliency to stress on a holistic level, we slowly succumb internally. That’s been the history of life. Not much we can do about it, right? Maybe. Is that the reason that we place value in “moving on,” “getting over it,” “starting anew”?
 
And now someone has identified and is working with a possible anti-aging mechanism that was there all along, hiding among the constituents of our makeup. There is a protein labeled Nrf2, a transcription factor that, according to researchers working under the auspices of the National Institutes of Health at Colorado State U, might be coaxed into regulating the expression of protective genes in cells. Karyn Hamilton and Benjamin Miller are the co-directors of CSU’s Translational Research on Aging and Chronic Disease. The two want to understand and slow the aging process.* They acknowledge that exercise helps, but they want to develop an enhancer, something that gets Nrf2 to stay active. So far, the substance they and others have tested, Protandim, made by LifeVantage Corp., seems to work on male mice, but not on female mice.
 
“Just wander through any cemetery and look at the dates of births and deaths,” you comment. “The tombstones on average seem to show that for married couples, the females outlive their husbands. Maybe the best we can hope for is for males to catch up in longevity. No one is going to live forever, and possibly a very long life might eventually be an unhappy one. We might be able to handle life’s stresses on the cellular level, but on that holistic level? Day after day, I read the news. Most reports do little else than exacerbate levels of stress: Accidents, crime, murders, war—the news about them seems to be unending. We live in a stressful society on a planet of risks. And we cannot completely hermitize ourselves since the very stuff we breathe and consume can damage the constituents of our makeup. Where is that Protandim stuff? Can I get it from my pharmacist?”
 
Until people like Hamilton and Miller solve the problem of cellular degeneration, we seem to have little choice but to face stresses holistically: To solve the problems we can solve, to avoid unnecessary risk, and to operate daily with some sense that we can always “move on,” “get over it,” or “start anew.” Stresses are part of life. They affect us physically, but we’re more than just physical entities. Each of us is a laboratory testing a psychological “protandim.” The results of our daily experiments might someday be partly applicable to others, but our individuality often restricts our discoveries’ uses. What works for one doesn’t necessarily work for another.
Some people simply choose to age, to allow stresses to wear them down.  They have given up on finding a way to stimulate their emotional Nrf2. You aren’t one of them, are you?
 
Every stress provides a new opportunity to experiment in the lab of life.  
 
* https://www.chhs.colostate.edu/News/Item/?ID=382959

Apparently, my pancreas and liver supply me with lipolytic enzymes of differing characteristics. I’ve never really paid attention to either kind of enzyme, and you, unless you know body chemistry by hobby or trade, probably also haven’t looked into these biocatalysts. Out of sight, out of mind, right? And these little, but hard-working proteins do what they do, breaking down fat, don’t call attention to themselves unless they fail to do their protective jobs. They are like NFL offensive linemen. It’s only when they make a mistake like jumping offside at the beginning of a play or holding a rushing defensive lineman that the camera swings onto them and the announcer proclaims, “That’s going to be a costly penalty.” The running backs and quarterback, protected by the linemen, do acknowledge the grunt work and credit their success to the blocking up front. Anyway, back to the enzymes in you, as long as they do their job and block the harmful stuff, no one but a researcher notices their work.
 
Speaking of lipolytic enzyme researchers, who comes to mind but Dr. Rania Siam of the American University of Cairo? Dr. Siam has isolated an enzyme or two that do their blocking in the most trying of environments, those where one might not expect the game of life to be played. She wondered how extremophiles play in hostile stadia. We’re not talking angry fans of an opposing team. We’re talking extreme conditions that would seemingly prohibit life. As she explains, one of these environments is the Atlantis II Deep. It “is a brine pool in the Red Sea and is characterized by high temperature (almost 70oC), high salinity (7.5 times that of normal sea-water), high metal concentration and anoxia. Such extreme conditions make the Atlantis II deep an attractive site for mining for biocatalysts.”* So, that’s what she does, looks for the enzymes that enable microorganisms to survive where you and I would succumb to heat, salinity, lack of oxygen, and metal toxins. And she isolated enzymes that negate the toxicity of at least one metal.
 
How is it possible for any organism to survive in such extreme circumstances as the Atlantis II Deep? Again, lipolytic enzymes. But these chemicals aren’t just helpful for life-forms. “Who cares?” you ask. She would say, “Glad you asked. Using lipolytic enzymes as biocatalysts in industrial and biotechnological processes is estimated to be a billion dollar business. Their applications in industry include, and are not limited to, biodiesel formation, pulp and paper industry, detergent industry and flavor development and therefore, the demand for novel lipolytic enzymes is increasing continuously.”*
 
For the rest of us, that is, the people who ask, “Who cares?” Siam’s study seems overly specific. But you might guess there’s a lesson that stretches beyond the industrial practicality of her work. Though not as extreme as the conditions of the Atlantis II Deep, the conditions inside your body warrant the grunt work of the enzymes up front. Your overall wellness and success as an organism depends on their largely ignored work. And that’s the way it is with all the human catalysts in your life, the people who, without acknowledgement, make your life easier—maybe even make your life possible. They are sometimes known and sometimes not: Mothers, relatives, friends, and, yes, even fellow workers and bosses. Without their work up front, you meet a series of obstacles that you cannot overcome alone. In the most trying of circumstances, we all need some “human enzymes” that make few mistakes and that work for our success without asking for or seeking recognition. Our successes have largely depended on their unacknowledged catalytic work.
 
Maybe our own efforts will someday be the catalyst for the successes of others. We might not have the mass of an NFL lineman, but if we can just get in the way of whatever wants to prevent the running back behind us from breaking a long run toward a touchdown, we provide a necessary catalysis. That temporary action of ours might just give the running back time to decide on a new direction, just as Dr. Siam’s enzymes might enable a new industrial process in conditions once thought to be impossible to overcome.  
 
* http://dar.aucegypt.edu/handle/10526/2839?show=full
 
Care to know more? There’s a long history of studies on lipolytic enzymes, for example, the 1933 study by Sobotka and Glick at http://www.jbc.org/content/105/1/199.full.pdf

A Komodo dragon is a dangerous reptile. Its bite is laden with bacteria. Herein (as they say) lies the irony. Its blood contains a natural peptide whose synthetic duplicate, labeled DRGN-1, is antimicrobial. Apparently, DRGN-1, according to Monique van Hoek, “is able to kill bacteria, reduce biofilm from a wound, and promote wound healing.”* Imagine. As bacteria increase their resistance to standard antibiotics, the blood of a predator that infects its prey provides potential cures.
 
Sources of healing can be found in unexpected places. The wounded should never give up looking.  
 
https://www.researchgate.net/blog/post/komodo-dragon-blood-inspires-new-antibiotic

There seems to be a disconnect between those who lie on the periphery of our lives and our empathy. That’s probably not unusual. We are only finite, and we have limitations, including, we might say, limitations on empathy.
 
From both near and far the world incessantly overwhelms us with stories of injustice, hardship, and tragedy. How can we have enough compassion to embrace all those who suffer? Don’t we have concerns of our own? We do, of course. Aren’t we islands of identifiable self-concerns?
 
The seas around such islands are very rough with waves that erode our shores. Ships are foundering all around, but we don’t have enough rescue boats to reach those far from shore. Plus, we have to worry about the inundation of the island, with too much empathy drowning us in feelings of helplessness. Yet, remembering the words John Donne wrote in 1624, we say, “No man is an island/Entire of itself/Every man is a piece of the continent….” How can we reconcile such connections to suffering humanity with our own needs? A tinge of guilt runs across our synapses. “Her (His; Their) condition is sad, but what can I do?” we say.
 
One at a time. Send out a single rescue boat. If that’s all we have room for in our empathy, that might be an indication of some level of compassion sufficient to quash feelings of both guilt and helplessness. Falling short of a universal empathy because of our island life, we have brain cells that, in recognizing the suffering that daily occurs, seek a self-deafferentiation so we can spend a little effort on our self-concerns. If those cells didn’t separate themselves or close themselves off to our center of empathy, the brain might have only one purpose: Empathizing in a world drowning in tragedy.  
 
Deafferented neurons provide another service, allowing us to become just a little selfish, a little self-centered as a mechanism to ward of waves of hopelessness and helplessness. As I wrote above, don’t we have concerns of our own? Yet, each of us has at least one rescue boat to launch; some of us have more. But no one has enough. Distant ships will always founder. That’s a reality all of us islanders must eventually accept. When it comes to our empathy, we by necessity of self-preservation live on islands.
 
Is it not ironic that the very part of the brain that reaches out to others, the part that empathizes, is the anterior insular cortex?* The island cortex!
 
http://www.mountsinai.org/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/researchers-identify-area-of-the-brain-that-processes-empathy

You are immersed in an invisible universe. Doubt me? Turn on the radio. Without that device you have no way of knowing that radio waves are engulfing you. You can’t “see” them, but your radio can. It can receive what your eyes and ears cannot, the invisible bands of electromagnetic radiation sent from towers and satellites to bathe Earth in a cacophony of anthropogenic messages and sounds. And, if by chance all human communication fell silent, the radio would still pick up the messages of the universe. Invisible to us but audible over an AM radio is the static that comes from the cosmic microwave background (CMB), also known as the “Echo of the Big Bang” discovered by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. Pay close attention to the static you hear as you dial between AM stations: Some of that is a noise from 13.8 billion years ago.
 
You are immersed in another kind of invisible universe, also. Doubt me? Look at the face of someone undergoing depression or thoughts of suicide. Without a device to look into the psyche, you have no way of hearing the personal background noise, the “Echo of Mood.” Much of what anyone is lies hidden until you find the device that “receives” information. Building such a device is more difficult than building the first radio. You have to be a new Marconi of the psyche.
 
If you go to Cape Cod’s eastern shore, you will find a state park devoted to the remnants of the Marconi Station. Before gravity, wind, and waves destroyed the cliff on which the towers of that station stood, the station picked up the distress signal of a ship in trouble in 1912. It was the Titanic, and the signal, sent at a time when radio was new and response times were turtle-slow, fell on ears that could not prevent many from drowning as the ship foundered.
 
With regard to the human ships in danger of foundering, either those that hit massive objects like icebergs or those that develop slow leaks, you cannot help unless you have a receiver that first recognizes the invisible cry for help. It is time for invention. It is time for a sensitive receiver that enables you to rescue a friend or relative. Listen for the background static. See whether or not you can make sense of it just as Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Labs made sense of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Yes, they were puzzled at first and even helpless like the people at the Marconi station listening to the SOS from a sinking ship, but through perseverance they uncovered the meaning of the invisible static.

Kazimir Malevich’s White on White presents me with a puzzle. After tens of thousands of years of art development from cave paintings through geometric Greek pottery designs and then through highly representative statues and portraits, an artist chooses to paint a barely visible tilted square on canvas.
 
No, the painting isn’t itself the puzzle to which I refer, nor is the artist’s argument for creating it. So, if you are an artist or critic, don’t start sputtering irregularly that I’m one of those simple country folk without the knowledge or wherewithal to understand modern art and that as such I am one of the Great Uninformed. Rather, the puzzle for me lies in human responses to White on White, to discussion in dead seriousness about Malevich’s work, to critiques with philosophical overtones, and to its placement in a museum for observing by heads tilted like some puppy trying to understand a strange object.* In those responses I find puzzling hints about what separates us from other animals, about our claims of superiority.
 
Do you believe our superiority over the animal world lies in our ability to reason? A puppy tilts its head when it tries to grasp the nature of an unknown object, but a dog that sees food on the other side of a fence can reason how to get to it. Dogs and other animals seem to have the ability to plan and carry out plans. Know what I’m getting at? Apparently, in the animal world there are numerous examples of problem-solving that can be attributed to some level of reasoning.** Of course, you might argue that humans can reason about something abstract, something not associated with a need, something impractical, something like White on White. Is that what separates us from the animals? They act out of need as we do, but we also create needs.
 
Among the needs we create are solutions to problems more sophisticated than obtaining food on the other side of a fence. Many examples, including environmental problems of our making and flighty mathematical whimsies, demonstrate this “superior” human ability. No other species can reason about White on White, and no other species can plan how to reason about a painting. There! Isn’t that an argument for human superiority? Planning how to plan to reason? We can even make a hypothetical fence on the other side of which there is nothing but hypothesis, and people can spend their lives planning how to reach it, as string theorists do. There! That’s got to be evidence of our superiority. No dog can see the strings we envision on the other side of the quantum fence, a fence for which we have no practical plan to circumvent (no experiment to demonstrate).   
 
That brings me to the matter of purpose. Does White on White fulfill a purpose? Malevich said he created suprematist works of art, that is, works based on and exhibiting the “supremacy of pure artistic feeling.”*** Ah! Now we have a possible solution to my puzzle. We are superior because of suprematism: A banana is a banana, and we are superior because we are superior. A bit circular, but not any more so than a critic telling me, “I understand this White on White thing and you don’t because you don’t. I can discuss this on a level of reasoning you country bumpkins can’t understand. But, I will allow you to go to the museum to tilt your head quizzically—that is, whenever you aren’t too busy trying to figure out how to get food that’s on the other side of your everyday fences. Art doesn’t have to have a purpose you understand, but in this painting the purpose is the expression of ‘pure artistic feeling.’ Bumpkin that you are, you think it’s just a white square.”
 
But if feeling isn’t reason, how does one hold a rational discussion about its artistic expression? Am I missing something? Is it just that I can’t see what’s on the other side of the fence? Is this then the solution to my puzzle? We can purposely invent what we don’t need, declare meaning beyond reason and proof and see the un-seeable beyond imaginary fences? Does our superiority lie in the unnecessary? Does the unnecessary give us purpose? Needlessness and purposelessness explained by imagination: Are those the qualities and process that most separate us from the other animals?
 
 
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_on_White  
 
** https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20212-elephants-know-when-they-need-a-helping-trunk/
 
*** Malevich, Kazimir (1927). The Non-Objective World. Munich.

Are we handing over our power over place to mindless forces? Our tie to places has engendered rules and policies, supposedly all designed to help us cooperate, to help us use place without conflict. Among places we use in common are metropolitan areas, some that tens of millions of people share. Within those communal categories lie various forms of public transportation. Buses, trains, and planes require us to share space, so we set up rules of use that we believe are tied to commonsense. 
 
Commonsense probably dictates that a police force isn’t necessary to remove a paying legitimate customer from a seat on a plane because of an arbitrary decision to overbook a flight. The case of a passenger’s violent removal from a United Airlines flight because the company wanted to use his seat for an employee seemed to be a violation of his contract to fly in that seat and commonsense. Why was he chosen? Randomness? If so, on what basis is the randomness justified?
 
What if the decision to remove him had been the responsibility of some AI? Then what would have happened? Would an artificial intelligence have sent in the police? It might have, of course. But why? Isn’t AI supposed to overwhelm us with its superior computing power, eventually taking positions of authority? Should the use of shared place, no matter how small, be subject to pure reasoning that AI generates?
 
Computer decisions are based on a set of unshakeable rules. In contrast, human decisions are never easy. The rules that govern our decisions are somewhat mysterious. Think of any important decision you have made, such as sacrificing for a loved one or a stranger. Think of deciding to date someone. Is there an algorithm that you want to make that decision? Even those who subscribe to online dating services still have the matter of personal, face-to-face interaction to weather.
 
You run an airline. You have a policy. You follow it unflinchingly. You thrown some passenger from a purchased seat. Something’s wrong. Policy derives from polis, “city.” The word is obviously related to “police,” and in that relationship it implies some kind of enforcement. But the making of policy is arbitrary and often affected by the emotions of policy-makers. If those same emotionally affected policy-makers make the rules for an artificial intelligence management team that will unwaveringly carry out policies, where will human commonsense and compassion apply?
 
No two people who walk onto a plane, make a purchase, sign a contract, or enter into some other type of interaction are the same. We can use statistics, strategic plans, and rules to make decisions about the two, but their needs and desires, failings and successes, and purposes will always exceed the understanding of a simple policy algorithm put arbitrarily in place by the emotional creatures that relinquished their commonsense to an artificial intelligence—or even to a martinet manager.
 
The artists, novelists, scientists, philosophers, psychologists, and technicians who have considered this problem are numerous and insightful. In 2001 HAL, the AI, travels with astronauts. HAL decides on the basis of reason that the astronauts are an unnecessary burden on the ship’s resources. HAL decides, in effect, to remove passengers from their seats.
 
Apparently, human HALs have always existed in their policing of shared place. Now, the humans who rely on AI to make decisions they believe will eliminate arbitrariness, fail to realize that they arbitrarily make such decisions. That makes AI decisions ultimately arbitrary.  

Let’s say you want to study pottery from long ago. You are specifically interested in studying the piece for its composition and any clues it contains about its construction.  You could break off a piece, powder it, and then analyze, but in doing so, you will have partially destroyed the object. That’s not a good practice for rare artifacts. What if you could examine it without any destruction? Well, you can. You can X-ray the thing or subject it to a Time-of-Flight nondestructive neutron diffractometer. Don’t have access to either? There’s a parallel in our trying to understand the development of and makeup of one another.
 
That’s the same problem we have in trying to understand one another without somehow changing our underlying makeup. We want to dig up the artifacts of an individual life to understand how one gets to be the way he or she is at the moment. However, our interactions always disturb the essential nature of one another.
 
No, we aren’t turning each other into some powder for examination, but in examining we add something of each to other.
 
No precious artifact from the historical development of another can be examined without interference. We have no nondestructive neutron diffractometer for character and character development. Whatever we dig up from personal history, we alter by what we are in the present. We always end up breaking or altering the vase (“vace” or “vahze”) of development. 

Like many others in an affluent society, I fight a repeated personal Battle of the Bulge, waging war at the front over which I have only tenuous control. My enemy is a shape, the semisolid geometry of my body that changes like an amoeba. The generals behind the warring parties in this battle are The Ideal and The Real.
 
Maybe, just maybe, I’m at my base weight and shape, that is, the weight and shape that a semi-active person of a certain beyond-my-prime age should be. Maybe, what I am physically is “less than perfect” because I have an ideal shape floating in the recesses of my neurons, some body shape I have mapped as having “perfect contours.” The battle, as I said, is between the ideal and the real.
 
Putting the battle of my personal bulge in this collection is, I’ll admit, irrelevant to your own struggles between The Ideal and The Real. But mentioning the war we all wage is relevant. No mental map is a perfect representation of the world outside the mind. Like flat maps of the oblate spheroidal world called Earth, our personal maps are lies of convenience.
 
You might, if you can’t remember your geography class lessons, ask what I mean by  “lies.” Just think of a round world and a flat representation of it. Try as any of us can, none of us can turn the peels of an orange into a perfectly flat representation of the orange—there are always gaps. So, too with flat maps of Earth. On flat maps we fill in the gaps by stretching the oceans and landmasses. Look at a flat map. The North Pole is a point, but on the flat map most people are used to seeing, the North Pole is the entire top of the map. Stretch-and-fill: that’s the process of making many flat maps of round worlds. Even the “ideal” map of Earth’s shape fails the truth test.  Globes are spherical, but Earth has a bulge at the Equator much like the bulge I fight to contain daily. Earth’s diameter pole-to-pole is less than its diameter Equator-to-Equator, measurements of diameters that differ by about 27 miles. Our planet is not the perfect sphere that globes portray, but globes are definitely convenient representations and certainly easier to make than something irregular like an oblate spheroid.
 
So, here I am, looking in the mirror and mapping a bulge that fluctuates, but that never assumes the shape of the ideal. Such personal mapping is a difficult process because of its object’s variations and because of our overprinting ideal shapes on real ones. By extension, shape is not the only battlefield front between the ideal and the real. Most intrapersonal battles are conflicts between what we think we are and what we really are. We desire, we hope for, we expect, we imagine, and we even pray that the ideal manifests itself. The “real” rarely conforms to expectations, imagination, or prayer, so we superimpose the ideal.
 
Beyond physical shape lie the shapes of our lives, and these, too, are mappable. Do we map the real or the ideal? How much “stretching-and-filling” do we do? How do we distort our memories to justify how we got to where we are today psychologically as well as physically? If we can recognize the “stretch-and-fill” in others, can we recognize it in ourselves?

On August 5, 2009, a San Francisco psychiatrist died when he piloted his Cessna 182 into a hillside not far from the Napa County Airport. In 2010 the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that Dr. Kenneth Ira Gottlieb crashed because he lost situational awareness shortly after taking off. That a psychiatrist died “because he lost situational awareness” is both tragic and ironic.
 
Situational awareness is a psychological term. It is also an intuitive concept. Coaches want their players to be “aware” of the situation: How many outs, how many on base, how many strikes on the batter; How many seconds left on the clock, how many yards to a first down, how many defensive backs in the game; How many fouls for each player, how many people playing outside or under the net, how many three-pointers are needed. Knowing the situation enhances the players’ performances. Knowing the situation is a function of mental mapping, and it is a key to living without problems.
 
Mental mapping is not just the process of knowing the physical details of place. It is also process of knowing the quality of place. You could be located in a nunnery, but not find peace among nuns bickering over the folding of an altar cloth. You could be in a ghetto, but find wealth in the kindness of a grandmother. And you could be in the heart of academia, yet find folly.
 
Mental mapping is more than remembering where one put the car keys. It is more than establishing a pattern that enables one to navigate in the dark from bedroom to the kitchen for a nighttime snack. Effective mental mapping means incorporating all the elements of place, including its living inhabitants, its benefits, and its dangers. Most importantly, effective mental mapping involves a realistic understanding of how one fits into place, how one’s involvement in place effects a change in both self and place, and how one uses the elements of place to live successfully.
 
So, today, ask yourself: “What is my relationship to place and situation?” Your answer might be a key to living without problems.