According to an article on Geology.com* Earth gets about 44 lightning flashes per second yearly, sometimes more. Some places have more strikes than others. Relámpago del Catatumbo, the phenomenon of nighttime lightning strikes over the Catalumbo River as it enters Lake Maracaibo is intense. Sailors on the Gulf of Venezuela call the strikes Faro de Maracaibo because they serve as a natural “lighthouse.” In 1595 light generated by the strikes thwarted a surprise attack by Sir Francis Drake as he tried to sneak his ships toward colonial Maracaibo. Supposedly, a watchman saw the outline of the ships against the background of lightning, giving the residents warning of the impending attack.
 
Relámpago del Catatumbo makes Lake Maracaibo the world’s lightning strike capital with 232 lightning strikes per square kilometer per year. The lake gets thunderstorms almost nightly (297 days per year on average). Want to avoid being hit by lightning? Don’t go out at night during your Lake Maracaibo vacation.
 
The Democratic Republic of the Congo has five sites that make the top ten list for lightning. As you can guess from experience, lightning is ubiquitous, and we know, thanks to Ben Franklin, what it is. We still can’t predict the exact place where it will strike. So, there’s reason to be concerned. Between 1959 and 2003 in the United States, 3,696 people died from lightning strikes; many more were injured though the USA does not house a place that makes the top ten list for lightning.
 
In Chicago Heights, Illinois, crime strikes at the rate of 111 per square mile or per 2.6 square kilometers. Think about that: One has a good chance of being the victim of a crime in Chicago Heights just as one has a good chance of being hit by lightning at Lake Maracaibo, site of the world’s most intense and frequent lightning. Place really does determine lifestyle, doesn’t it?
 
Three thoughts: “What is better than presence of mind in a railway accident? Absence of body” (Punch, vol. xvi, p. 231. 1849). “Where’s the best place to be when someone throws a punch? Elsewhere” (Rev. Robert P. Connolly, Priest and Se-Jong Tae Kwon Do Grand Master). “Better to determine place than have place determine you” (Conte, this blog).
 
 * [1]   Earth's New Lightning Capital Revealed. Ryan Connelly. Published on the NASA website, May 2016.
 
[2]   Where are the lightning hotspots on Earth? Rachel I. Albrecht, Steven J. Goodman, Dennis E. Buechler, Richard J. Blakeslee, and Hugh J. Christian. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. In press, early online release accessed May, 2016. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-14-00193.1.  

Voltaire satirized Leibniz’s “best-of-all-possible-worlds” in Candide. His character Pangloss’s argument for optimism in the face of one tragic event after another is that “everything is for the best.” The philosophy of optimism derived from Leibniz and other eighteenth century thinkers was eventually reduced to abstraction: A worldview that assumed an underlying purpose for a greater “good” that excused travesty and tragedy, injustice and cruelty, corruption and greed. If the world, Leibniz argued, had been created by a perfect God, then that world had to be perfect—even if humans could not perceive the nature of that perfection.
 
Off and on over a period of 170 million years Earth was a giant snowball. That period of glacial extremes began about 750 million years ago, long before multicellular life began to leave a fossil record. A group of researchers* interested in finding a cause for the rise of multicellular life in the Cambrian Period, recently published their research indicating that “Snowball Earth” glaciation led to an increase in ocean phosphorus, one of the six elements essential for life (The others are hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur; think HOCNSP). With more phosphorus available, plants (many cells unified) proliferated, increasing photosynthesis with a resultant rise in oxygen. A mere 30 million years later: TA DA! The Cambrian Explosion (of life) occurred because a key nutrient was weathered from Earth’s rocks by glaciers and their melt waters and sent to the oceans. Noah Planavsky and his colleagues report, “Our work provides a mechanistic link between extensive Neoproterozic glaciations and early animal evolution.”
 
What would Pangloss say? “The planet was covered by ice for millions of years so that life could eventually rise. See! There is a purpose for everything. Everything is for the best, and everything has a reason for being and happening: Some greater good in a world that is ultimately 'perfect,' the 'best of all possible worlds.' A world too cold to live on became the comfortable world of today.”
 
Hard to argue that the rise of life was a negative thing: If it were, we wouldn’t be here to discuss it, would we? After
 750 million years that ice world led to you. Is this not the kind of thinking that also gets us into specific trouble? Is this not where abstraction runs into the wall of reality?
 
Thinking that any event serves a larger purpose is not unusual. Our justice system is based on that principle. Incarcerate an individual to protect the society. Our military and clandestine operations also stem from such thinking. Probably, but I have no way of demonstrating this, most people would accept the principle that an underlying general “good” can be served by a specific “bad”: Dropping Little Boy did, in killing tens of thousands, hasten the end of World War II, a war that killed tens of millions. What were tens of thousands of lives by comparison?
 
So, we waver between two kinds of thought. When it is convenient for us to do so, we think an injurious action is only a temporary event that can support a greater benefit. One suffers. Many profit. You can search your own memories for examples. They abound, and in some of those examples, you’ll find yourself justifying something specific on the grounds it supports something general. The other kind of thinking is that a specific bad is a phenomenon in itself. It serves no greater purpose, no far reaching goal or perfect world. The specific “bad” doesn’t infuse an ocean with an important nutrient, and, even if it does so, there’s no controlling the unseen outcome in a world of so many cross purposes. It’s hard to get a big picture when all we really have is the little one, the moment before us, and the action or behavior of the present.
 
Just thinking.
 
*University of California -- Riverside. "New evidence supports 'Snowball Earth' as trigger for early animal evolution." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 27 October 2010. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101027133146.htm>. See the October 28, 2015 issue of Nature (Noah Planavsky, et. al.)

Don’t go grocery shopping when you are hungry. You’ll buy stuff you don’t need. Picture this even if you haven’t seen the movie: Jim Carrey, who plays Lloyd Christmas in the movie Dumb and Dumber, goes into a store with little money to buy necessities for a trip he’s about to take with Harry Dunne, played by Jeff Daniels. Harry tells Lloyd to be prudent with their limited funds, but Lloyd returns from the store wearing a large foam hat and carrying other items that would be, in almost anyone’s mind, foolish purchases.
 
Picture this even if you haven’t been to the Sahlgrenska Academy of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden: Karolina Skibicka, who plays a neuroscientist in real life, and others who also play neuroscientists in real life, published a paper in Neuropsychopharmacology on how and why hunger affects impulsivity. I can guess your thought here. If you know not to go food shopping when you are hungry, wouldn’t Karolina, who is probably a very bright person if one judges by job—it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure this one about brain surgeons—also know not to go shopping for food while hungry?
 
Here’s what the research uncovered: You’ve got a hormone lurking in your bowels. It’s called ghrelin, and it acts on the central nervous system when you are hungry. So, Skibicka and other researchers starved some rats and gave them tests. Guess what? They acted impulsively. Contain your surprise here.
 
As I write this, I am hungry. It’s before breakfast, and my stomach is empty. There’s no food near me save a cup of coffee. Now, thanks to Skibicka and others at the Sahlgrenska Academy of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, I know that ghrelin is acting on my central nervous system and causing me to choose a blog topic out of impulsivity. Thus, today, you are reading about something that my ghrelin chose on a whim.
 
Yes, we have uncovered many chemicals that influence behavior. Yes, we know that chemical imbalances in the brain can influence mood and thought. Now we also know that an empty stomach causes us to act impulsively. We have a scientific explanation. And now you know how smart your grandmother and mother were when they told you to eat. If those neuroscientists at the Sahlgrenska Academy of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden had been in your house when you were growing up, they might have devoted themselves to discovering something a little less obvious. Bon appétit. 

The fourteenth century poem incorporated into the requiem Mass warns of that “day of wrath,” in Latin, dies irae. Seems that many of us don’t have to wait for some Day of Reckoning for a dies irae, that is, at least for some in Los Angeles. Ironic, isn’t it? The City of Angels finds itself on top of the road-rage list published by AutoInsuranceCenter.com from an analysis of Instagram posts. Then there’s Hawaii. Yes, the whole state. That island Paradise ranked first among states for road rage. Oh! And if you’re wondering about when the moment of “wrath” occurs, think 6 p.m. and the day of wrath is itself Friday. Let’s begin the weekend in dangerous anger.
 
Think that with this knowledge drivers will put some brakes on rage? “Probably, not,” you’re thinking. But what about you? Gotten a little perturbed by a distracted driver who blocks your journey momentarily? Just a little miffed?
 
In the poem sung in Gregorian chant, incorporated into works like Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, and played over many YouTube stations, the haunting repetitive melody begins with the dire warning. Earth will lie in ashes. But within its many stanzas, there is some sign of hope in a plea for Mercy.
 
Is mercy a concept we’ve lost on our highways? Are they the conveyor belts of rage and judgment? Are we better at self-control when we stand still, encompassed by a single place? Is it the moving? Does anger emerge from incessant decisions and distractions: Accelerate, decelerate, stop, avoid, turn, read signs, miss objects and animals, turn on wipers, turn signals, place coffee cup in holder, hear the phone, answer…. “Lord, save me from all these temptations!”
 
                                    Liber scriptus proferetur
                                    In quo totum continetur
                                    Unde mandus iudicetur.
 
Basically: the Book of Consciences is going to be read; drivers will be judged, probably by the police as well as other drivers (Okay, that’s not a literal translation).
 
Yet, drivers blatantly yell, “Go to Hell!” playing god on a dies irae of their own making. No mercy, lots of rage, particularly at 6 on Friday the dies illa, the “dreadful day.” And in culmination of a week of work and the long history of humanity, drivers in the City of Angels or on an island Paradise act as Judges whose tuba mirum is a prolonged blast of a car horn. Some even emerge from their moving sepulchers to summon other drivers to mutual wrath and perdition.
 
Here’s a thought. Given to road rage? Read the poem, if not in the original Latin, then in translation. And listen to the chant. Or, listen to Berlioz’s ending to Symphonie Fantastique. In his version, the tubas start the theme with an ominous sound, but the work ends rather joyfully in an uplifting manner. Mercy can ride the same highway as wrath. Mercy can also be a destination, even on “the day of wrath” because everyone travels on a road of life until that dies illa.

In the sense that all generations pass, time is, if not a healer of all wounds, an eraser for the dead. Within the sphere of the living, however, time is both chancy healer and eraser. Pain and suffering do not easily submit to time’s doctoring or erasing.
 
For the living, pain and suffering present an Either/Or for well being, making us waver between action and inaction: Either: “I should do something about this”; Or: “I’ll tolerate it because it will probably go away.” With time, pain from a bump diminishes as swelling decreases; learning and reason offer ice to hasten healing.
 
Emotional suffering rarely seems as susceptible to healing or erasing as physical pain. Instead of a clear Either/Or between action and inaction, emotional distress elicits: “I should act, but I’ll tolerate IT as long as I can.” Often, any attempt to merge action and inaction prolongs the suffering. Time takes, well, what can one say? Time’s doctoring takes time and has no predictable outcome, no guarantee of healing or erasing other than death. Action, I advise, is better than inaction.  
 
There’s a common use of place as a metaphor for emotional and physical pain. “I’m in a ‘bad place’ right now.” It’s always a matter of changing place, isn’t it? The metaphor is a product of our reality. We are shaped by place before we have the experience and learning to shape place. Place’s control is deeply rooted: Live in a desert, expect dryness; live in the rainforest, expect moisture; in the city, expect traffic. It’s only later that we learn to control environments like these through irrigation, indoor dehumidifiers, and traffic lights. All controls on place require expenditures of some kind. Place imposes an economy of action.
 
Likewise, the “place of pain and suffering” also imposes an economy. One can choose to avoid active doctoring, letting time do its slow and unpredictable work; or one can choose to alter the environment by some kind of expenditure. Without action, place controls us; ‘dryness,’ ‘humidity,’ and ‘traffic’ continue to shape lives.
 
The place of pain—physical and emotional—can only be altered by experience and reason that lead to action. Ice does decrease swelling and hasten time’s healing.
 
“I should act” is not a social ‘should’ in matters of emotional pain; it is not a response dictated by cultural mores or patterns. It is rather a dictum of survival and well being in a harsh emotional environment. Rather than wait for Dr. Time to heal or erase, change the place of pain: Irrigate, dehumidify, or install traffic lights. Or, simply move.

You know the routine. You seek knowledge, so you climb some mountain in Nepal or Tibet, walk humbly into a temple or monastery, and ask some old guy in a robe to explain the mysteries of life. He looks at you as though you’re an incarnation of Ziggy and says, “If you seek wisdom, my child, go…,” and then his voice fades, and he dies right there on the cold stone floor under the thin air of the Himalayas, leaving you with a brief and incomplete explanation of the meaning of life.
 
“Shoot!” you say. “I’ve come all this way for meaning, for answers to my most intriguing questions, for THE answer to the meaning of existence, and now I have only a long trip back down the mountain. It took me a long time and great expense to get here. I learned everything I could in the valleys below before seeking knowledge in the great elevations of the mountains.”
 
Then, on the way back toward the frenetic world from which you came, you give in to noise, turn on your I-Something, and hear Robert Parker singing “Addicted to Love.” The rhythm of the song gives you a light step over rocky paths to the world below, and, when you arrive in some village, you see the people going about their daily business, all unaware of the failed pilgrimage that you just made but moving about in their daily routines, all of them certain that what they do has meaning. As you walk past stark homes and shops, you are possessed by an earworm that you can’t shake, “Might as well face it; you’re addicted to love…Might as well face it; you’re addicted to love…Might as….”
 
More than 13 billion light years from Earth once lay an object that died in an event so explosive it sent gamma rays streaming through the universe. Then on April 29, 2009, the Burst Alert Telescope on NASA’s Swift satellite detected the radiation from that object, now labeled GRB 090429B and believed to be, if not the most distant, then one of the most distant objects ever detected. The gamma rays had traveled for more than 13 billion years and, luckily, the Swift satellite was in the right place at the right time and looking in the right direction to detect them. Had NASA not sent Swift into its high orbit through great effort and expense, no one would know about the burst of gamma rays from GRB 090429B.
 
GRB 090429B is the old dead monk. It had a secret that has lasted for almost the entire life of the universe. For a moment or two GRB 090429B made brief, incomplete statements. By the time we climbed to the heights of a satellite, the old object was probably “dead,” that is, radically altered from something that could send a cryptic message across a universe. Gamma ray bursts are like that. Powerful and brief, they give their meaning to a conscious being who just happens to be in the right place at the right time, in this case, the NASA scientists and by proxy, the rest of us. Otherwise, the meaning of any old celestial object just passes through the universe, never lingering or waiting for consciousness to come along and never waiting to be replayed on an I-Something. The old universe gives us chances to understand it, but we aren’t always around to hear the old monk’s last incomplete lesson.

You could make extraordinary efforts searching for the meaning of existence and of life. You could read many books on wisdom and visit many acclaimed wise people. You could climb every mountain and seek out every wise monk on the planet, but if you aren’t in the right place at the right time, the message might never reach you; or, if it does, it might be a fragmentary thought that escapes your understanding, such as St. Paul’s “and the greatest of these is love.” Your best tactic is to keep your mind open like the gamma ray detector on the Swift satellite listening to the passing messages, however fragmentary and fleeting they seem to be. The Burst Alert Telescope doesn’t know from which direction a fleeting message might come; it just keeps looking. When it does detect something, it becomes the I-something of NASA scientists.
 
Maybe you will be the old monk on the mountain one day. Filled with wisdom, you will see a stranger approaching, someone in search of the meaning of life. Even if you can’t convey the wisdom you acquired before you expire, with your last efforts hand the stranger your I-Something. It does contain a wise thought from an unlikely source. “Might as well face it, you’re addicted to love.”

Forget self-esteem. Don’t even think about it. Don’t let others tell you about it. Don’t let anyone say, “Ah! You are really an important person.”
 
Esteem will find its way into your life, but only if you never look for it. Go about your daily business; go about your daily efforts to become wise, to have skills, and to acquire information. Go about your daily business as efficiently as you can; go about completing tasks and solving problems. Do not go looking for esteem.
 
Many people see esteem as something that can be imposed upon a person. Such thinking is the product of a corrupted egalitarian worldview. Everyone in an egalitarian society must have esteem according to contemporary culture. Otherwise, its very absence in a single individual would destroy the egalitarian nature of the society.
 
If you seek self-esteem, you set yourself up for disappointment. You might even despair. “Oh! Woe! No one sees how valuable I am.” No, don’t fall into that trap.
 
There’s a line from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that applies here: “Sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine.” Plow furrows, and, as you overturn what appears to be ordinary dirt, the moisture within will sparkle as you expose it to tomorrow’s rising sun.
 
Don’t look for esteem. It will follow you as surely as a furrow follows a plow.

Juliet, knowing that Romeo is a Montague, asks, “What’s in a name?” She then goes on to make the oft-quoted statement about “a rose.”

Sometimes names can be misleading. The semiprecious gem turquoise, for example, is not associated with the geology of Turkey; yet, its name derives from the French for Turkey. Seems that traders carrying the bluish mineral from ancient and medieval Persia passed through what is modern Turkey to, among other locales, the region now called France.

​Like turquoise, you have passed through a number of places, such as schools, towns or cities or rural areas, and regions. On your way through any place you might stop, spend some time, and pick up regional social characteristics. You might not recognize the stamp of place on you, but outsiders do: Idioms, indigenous dialects, and even common gestures. The point? You are, in a manner of speaking, a Montague, a recognizable entity in generalization.

What a shame? There you are, a highly intelligent individual with skills, talents, knowledge, and experience, and yet, upon being met by an outsider, you are limited to your “family name,” a name derived from generalizations about some place where you once spent a bit of your life or a group with whom you associated. Okay, let me tell you, Montague, why this matters.

There are many Capulets out there who will never see you as an individual, but that will, instead, mark you by group or place. Visiting New York from Steubenville, Ohio, or from Lebanon, Pennsylvania? Come from the Low Country? Spend some time on a farm in the Midwest or a ranch in the West? Serve as a logger in Medford, Oregon? “What’s it like out there in the unsophisticated sticks?” a New Yorker asks. Being treated thus is not pleasant, is it?

In turn, at some time you have been guilty of the same kind of bias. Of course, by any name turquoise is generally blue. It just doesn’t come from Turkey regardless of its name. Maybe you should get to know it more specifically as hydrous copper-aluminum phosphate, a mineral that occurs in different colors. Know, also, that not every ostensible Montague is an actual Montague.

Oh! Just remember: Not every bluish mineral is turquoise, and not every turquoise is blue.

Recent die-offs from a viral wasting disease in starfish along the Pacific coast of North America seem to have resulted from complex external processes, including ocean warming. Sea star wasting disease also hit starfish in cool waters off the coast of Oregon, calling the role of a single cause like warmer temperature into question.
New research also suggests a need for multiple hypotheses to explain dinosaur extinction. Dinosaurs seemed to be in decline during the late Cretaceous before a ten-kilometer-wide comet or asteroid punched the Chicxulub Crater into the Yucatan Peninsula. The extinction event also punched holes in Earth’s ecological niches, but not permanently. Nature abhors a vacuum, you know.
 
About ten million years after the dinosaur demise, primates began to populate the planet. They proliferated in forests under global warmth that lasted until the early Oligocene, and then multiple external circumstances changed their evolutionary direction according to K. Christopher Beard of the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute. Earth’s tectonic activity and other complex causes shifted the planet into a cooling and drying trend. Primate species adapted in part by moving west- and southwestward from once forested areas in Asia. During the stressful environmental changes new species arose, and, well, here you are, one of the replacements.
 
Die-offs and speciation are the way Nature keeps renewing itself. I know. This is too teleological to be scientific, but don’t you wonder sometimes whether or not there isn’t some Indifferent Law of Demise and Renewal? Many species succumb, and others take their places. Under this law Nature affords either a recovery of starfish or an eventual replacement in their role of eating mussels along the West Coast. Otherwise, mussels proliferate unchecked, defying another law: No organism proliferates long without some kind of limitation. Most such limitations are imposed from the outside.
 
For starfish the imposed limitation is a virus enhanced by multiple circumstances that we might be able to identify. For dinosaurs the limiting circumstances of extinction will be shrouded in some mystery. Yet, like today’s starfish disaster, the demise of dinosaurs was probably a complex merging of external forces.
 
In contrast to the recently estimated trillion species that now inhabit Earth and the probable trillions that preceded all our co-inhabitants, our own species seems bent on destruction from within. Nature doesn’t have to contribute. For our own demise we don’t seem to need an outside agent though such agents, such as bacteria, viruses, earthquakes, volcanoes, storms, and even asteroids, abound.
 
     Murder and war.
     Need I say more?
 
If there is an Indifferent Law of Demise and Renewal, it serves no species in particular. Renewal is a matter of filling niches. We vacate the planet; some other organisms take our place just as some new species will feed on mussels once eaten by starfish and just as primates underwent speciation that led to us. Nature does its thing—blindly. Kind of ironic that of trillions of organisms that have inhabited the planet only one seems to be not only capable of willful self-destruction, but also willing to self-destruct. Nature abhors a vacuum. Humans seem to desire one.
 

Life on a floodplain seems steady and uninterrupted till the waters from elsewhere surge over the landscape. Water from a large storm on a distant upstream highland eventually runs through a channel inadequate to handle the discharge, causing a flood.
 
Floods generated by distant, unseen storms have changed lives for millennia, but the lure of living near a stream has always been great. Large rivers provide easy access to water, and they serve as avenues of commerce, a convenience that attracts people to floodplains. Unfortunately, those who build along a stream do not always see their connection to distant highlands. Failure to understand that connection poses risk. Convenience makes every stream a River Lethe. Even streamside residents who have either experienced flooding or understand the potential for flooding seem to opt for convenience in spite of risk. (How soon they forget the last flood!)
 
Floods destroy property and life every year for four reasons: Not all flooding is predictable, so some victims never know of their immediate danger; people fail to make adequate preparations for potential floods; some fail to heed warnings; and  many who are aware of the risks still opt for building and rebuilding on floodplains.
 
All of us live on a floodplain of sorts, some closer, some farther from the banks of the stream. At times, all of us find ourselves inundated by actions at a distance. Are we really the wise species? Can we learn any lesson from life on a floodplain? What role does memory play in shaping our present and future?
 
No one can predict every flood generated by distant human storms, but everyone can study connections to people and events at economic, social, or political distance. Knowledge of what is happening upstream diminishes risk. Drinking from the River of Forgetfulness jeopardizes life. Safety on the floodplain of life requires incessant and inconvenient preparation and vigilance.