Earth’s crust is a set of moving units called tectonic plates. Plate movements are responsible for mountain formation, including volcanic mountains, and they also cause earthquakes. Some of the plates are moving at a fast pace. What is fast? Australia, for example, is headed northward at a rate of seven centimeters per year. In contrast, most of North America is moving about one centimeter per year. 

Centimeters are little units. If you are used to the English measurements, think 2.54 centimeters per inch.  So, Australia is moving about 2 ¾ inches every year; let’s say three inches. A giant continent is moving and all the people seem to be unaware of the movement. But then, that’s the way on all the landmasses. The world’s surface is in motion, but unless there is an earthquake, no one feels the movement. Australians don’t sit around saying, “Can you feel it move? Last year, we were three inches south of where we are this year. Pass the vegemite.” All of Australia is moving imperceptibly.

No matter where you live, you are also traveling with a crustal plate’s imperceptible motions. And no matter who you are, you are also moving imperceptibly by the force of opinion or fact—or both—even when you believe you have never moved and that you will never move from your current intellectual position. The alternative to recognizing your intellectual movement is not simply remaining “in place.” The alternative is struggling to keep a massive landmass from carrying you along.

Want an example? Take the story of Robert FitzRoy, a vice-admiral in the Royal Navy during the nineteenth century and captain of the HMS Beagle, the ship that carried Charles Darwin to his discoveries about life and evolution. At first, FitzRoy, a highly intelligent polymath and accomplished individual, accepted, after reading Charles Lyell’s book on geology, that Earth was old, apparently very old, and he shared this with Darwin. FitzRoy, whose works and biography are well worth at least a casual reading, was a devoutly religious man who believed in the “absolute” truth of the Bible. He found through his explorations, however, that what he observed seemed to contradict a literal reading of the Bible and the interpretation by Bishop Ussher that Earth was young, just 6,000 years old in Ussher’s count. As Darwin’s work on evolution developed, FitzRoy was at first supportive, but after the voyage, increasingly unsupportive. Darwin published in 1859. In the following year, FitzRoy railed against Darwin’s work at a conference in Oxford.

And then FitzRoy, who had actually invited Darwin along on the voyage of discovery to avoid through companionship the depression that led to the suicide of his predecessor captain of HMS Beagle, cut his own throat. Apparently, the struggle between what he believed and what he knew had become one of the causes of his depression. He saw opinion changing, and he was powerless to stop it. When he had railed against the science of Darwin at the Oxford conference, he held a Bible over his head to the shouts of those who had rejected a literal interpretation and who had come to separate matters of faith from matters of intellect.

You are always on a moving plate that you cannot stop. The best you can do is to realistically assess the difference between what you believe and what you know and to estimate the rate at which you are imperceptibly moving or struggling to hold back a mass on which you are riding.

Quick! In what do you believe? 

I can probably pull a mind-reader’s trick here. I know what you believe. You believe that your chair will continue to support you. You believe that the roof will not cave in at this moment. You believe that you will not be hit by an asteroid. You believe you have a chance to win the lottery. All of these beliefs rely on the single underlying supposition that you are in or will be in the right place at the right time.

You are a believer in place. Now, I ask, what are the other core beliefs in your life?    

No, I’m not Thoreau, whose famous “Simplify, simplify” was parodied on Cheers when the bartender asked why he had to say it twice. In a complex world, Thoreau’s advice pared down by a bartender is an ideal that is hard for most to achieve. What does  “to simplify” really mean?

Thoreau wanted us to simplify our lives, but then the pencil-maker did not live out his life in a wilderness by a pond. No, he chose to leave Walden to return to the complexity of civilization, making occasional excursions into “Nature.” He did, after all the “simplicity stuff,” live in a house on Main Street for the last twelve years of his life. “Main St.?” you ask in surprise. Yes, keeping it “simple” was tough even for the guy who proclaimed, “Simplify, simplify.”

Remember the widespread joke proclaimed some years ago as the ultimate in jokes? In a shortened version:

            Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson go camping. At 2:00 a.m. Holmes wakes up Watson and asks him to draw a conclusion about what he observes. The sleepy Watson, looking up and knowing he is in the presence of a great master of observation and deduction, speculates about the many stars he can see, about the possibility of planets and life elsewhere, and about the potential for intelligent life in the universe. Watson then concludes from what he observes that such intelligence must exist. Holmes then says, “No, you idiot, someone stole our tent.”

Keep it simple. Just like Watson, we have a tendency to observe and conclude in imitation of some whose point of view envelopes us. We observe through the filter of culture that also acts like the multi-lensed eye of an insect. For Thoreau, part of the eye let in the light of Transcendentalism as proclaimed by Emerson and his entourage. Other parts of the eye saw the world through lenses of personal experience, including during his last twelve years, visits to the wilderness of Maine. All those fly-eye lenses added to the complexity of Thoreau’s point of view and his mundane business of graphite, clay, and pencils.

It’s hard to “keep it simple,” especially when we know that at some point we have to accept life’s complexities. We live a paradoxical life: We might try to think simply like Sherlock Holmes, who could cut to the very essence of an observation with an astute deduction, but we cannot, with all our relationships to both people and places, disengage ourselves from complexity for more than just brief escapes into the wilderness. Just remember that Thoreau did not sleep under a tree. He built a cabin. It was a simple structure, but it was, nevertheless, a structure.

You don’t have to “complicate, complicate” like Dr. Watson. You don’t have to see more than the essence, but you will never completely simplify your life. Keep it as simple as you wish and can, but accept the complexity as a necessary part of living on Main Street.   

Humans know how to exploit any environment. Exploitation is the reason we have survived as a species for 200,000 years. Initially, it’s a matter of utility: Need a tool? Pick up a rock, chip it, and there, you have a tool. Discover that rocks contain metal; pick up more rocks. Soon you have a mine. Then you have a mining industry that supports a sophisticated tool-making industry. Need some food, find some grubs, or seeds, or fruit. Want more of the same? Use the tools. Cut the inedible stuff down, and then dig the soil, plant, grow, and harvest.

St. Lucia is a pleasant island. One of the Lesser Antilles, the island is a volcanic pile highlighted on its western coast by its famous twin peaks called the Pitons. In its interior, a tropical rainforest covers steep slopes of quiescent volcanoes. Throughout the island, however, St. Lucians have cut down the inedible stuff to grow bananas. With no appreciable mining or industrial complex, the St. Lucians rely mostly the tourism that makes up more than 50% of the economy, and they rely on banana crops. St. Lucians eat lots of bananas. If you grew up on St. Lucia, you would eat lots of bananas, also. “What’s for breakfast? Bananas again?”

Now tell me. If you were on a tropical island trying to support a population of 200,000, what would you do to survive? What would you eat? It would not be the inedible parts of the rainforest. No, you would eat bananas. Lots of bananas. You would use your tools to cut and plant. Of course, you can’t survive on bananas alone. So, you would grow more bananas than you could eat, and you would sell the excess. With the money you would buy other foods produced by other people exploiting their surroundings, say on one of the nearby continents. You might even import butter from New Zealand.

The penchant for exploiting surroundings is driven first by the need for food and shelter. On the most primitive level of our ancient ancestors, place was defined by its potential to fulfill those two needs. You might argue that you have more sophisticated view of place than those who lived thousands of years ago and that you care for your surroundings because of other considerations, such as aesthetics and preservation of what is “natural.” Long removed from your ancient ancestors, you decry those whose satiation and comfortable surroundings engender overexploitation. “Save the planet,” you cry. “Save the place.”

You are upset that the use of place initially serves as a survival mechanism but morphs into overexploitation. But once people begin to overexploit a place, how does one stop them from growing more bananas? “Well, I care for the planet. I want a sustainable future,” you might say. You are probably genuine in your concern, but take a quick look around.

Look at your place. Do you live in a single room? Do you have only one electronic entertainment device, such as a single radio, single TV, single MP3 player, single computer, or single game player? No? You mean you have a clock radio, a powerful sound system, a car radio, and a cell phone, Ipad, and Ipod with Itunes? All of them? More than one of each? You have more than one TV? What was that you said about all those others out there who are overexploiting place? Want to add your mountain bike, your roller blades, your scooter, your skateboard, your skis, your small car, and your larger car. Have just a few outfits? Have just a couple of pairs of shoes?

How does one stop people from growing more bananas on an isolated island with limited resources? They get tired of just eating bananas, and they need other foods for complete nutrition. People in other places have those foods. People in other places have access to aluminum, iron, manganese, and other metals. The people of St. Lucia might grow bananas, but they don’t make TVs, or cars, or computers. They grow bananas. They replace primitive rainforest with plantations.

But then, maybe this is preaching to the choir. You probably grow your own bananas in a simple local exploitation reminiscent of your ancient ancestors’ use of place. And you probably tilled the soil with a rock you chipped. Right?

Bananas. They are rich in potassium. Pick one up in the grocery store the next time you are in Anchorage or Helsinki.    

Doric capitals on columns extend support of the overlying pediment beyond the diameter of the columns, and they do so in a relatively understated simplicity. Ionic capitals carry the support, but they do it with a sculpted scroll. Corinthian capitals add flair, panache, and elaborate decoration. Sutures on fossil ammonite shells often show the same kind of development. Genera of the ancient relatives of octopuses and squids grew through time simple suture patterns that evolved into complex patterns. Sentences formed by elementary school children are simple. Sentences formed by adults—though this is an arguable point because so many fail to progress linguistically for various reasons, including the failure of educational systems and cultural attitudes against intellectualism—are usually more complex; and, when they emerge from the heads of pedantic and pompous academics, sentences can be as ridiculous as the one that you are, if you are still with me, currently trying to read.

Why the tendency toward elaboration? Is IKEA the only place where simplicity reigns unchallenged? In fact, simplicity is one side of a pendulum’s swing. Elaboration is on the other side. There are still companies that sell chairs with claw feet and fleur-de-lis credenzas. That swing from simple to complex is a constant in our lives, also. There is a duality in us from which we derive solutions to daily problems by reducing or complicating.

“But why don’t you want to?” That’s you talking to someone. It doesn’t matter what the topic is. You want an explanation, and “why” posed to someone else asks for a simple explanation. In another circumstance, someone asks you, “But why…?” You respond, “It’s complicated.”

Unless we train ourselves or are trained by others to listen in depth to another, we usually seek a simple explanation to the motives, actions, and ideas of others. Thus, the straightforward song “Get over It” by the Eagles tells whiners and complainers to simply stop whining and complaining. In contrast, we see ourselves as more complex; it’s tough to just “get over it.” We see the need for developing an elaboration with respect to ourselves, something to support the bas relief of our lives.

So, we waiver between reductionism and complication. For others, the simple will do; they live “Doric” lives. For us, only the complex will do; our lives are “Corinthian.” What might happen if we could, in times of perceived dire need, just pretend to be sitting on an IKEA chair while saying to ourselves, “You know, I think I’ll just get over it.”

Pushed into Earth by warped space, we stay on our planet. Is there an analog for our emotional attachment to place?

We could argue that we acquire an affinity for place through experience, making our attachment an inside-out psychic phenomenon. Preferences might completely control us. But we could just as easily argue that place exerts a force on us. What accounts for our affinity for new places? “This is beautiful.” Or, simply, “Wow!”

All five senses are involved in our attitude toward place, and memory plays its role in our wanting to return to a “favorite” place. But those new places? And on first look? Step to the edge of the North Rim for the first time to look at the canyon. Walk into a bed and breakfast in Charleston, Savannah, or New Orleans. What pushes us to the place? What force is at work?

We could also argue that first looks are incomplete looks. All great restaurants have garbage cans out back. A chip in the third step is not the first thing we see when we encounter a wide, spiraling staircase in a hotel or mansion. Seeing the chip comes later, and it can have one of two effects: The imperfection endears us to the staircase because it tells a tale, or it bothers us because it ruins an ideal stair.

Revisiting places puts memory to work exerting its own force on our affinity or repulsion. But those first encounters? Memory serves to connect what we were to where we are, but in those first encounters, there is no memory of being there, save the rare instances when parahippocampal and perirhinal cortexes provide us with the feeling of déjà vu.

Endearment to and repulsion by place appear to be the work of either or both of two forces: The force of memory and an unknown exterior force, a kind of dark emotional energy.

Seems that dissatisfied people often think they need to reinvent themselves. “If I could only start over,” they think. Dismantling the past, however, is impossible.  Anyone who seeks a renewal should consider an alternative approach to renewing a life: Pushing the “Refresh” button. The button initiates an update, not an annihilation of the past.

Why spend the time disassembling everything and casting it aside? A little updating might be all that is needed to change a life. The myth of a makeover is that it produces a new being. In fact, “something that was there” is being altered in a makeover. Remodeling a house doesn’t require destroying the whole structure.

Hit the Refresh button when you are a bit unhappy. Look at what is being refreshed, and keep that which needs no makeover or remodeling. Build on the existing structure. You’ll amaze yourself and friends. “Carly, what a magnificent change. I hardly recognize the place. It’s amazing how a few thoughtful changes here and there can make such a difference.”

Will you achieve perfection? No. But you should realize that there’s never a time when you cannot push the Refresh button or remodel the existing structure.    

Yes, it’s a big universe. More than a hundred billion galaxies, and that’s just a low-end estimate. Galaxies contain hundreds of billions of stars. And we now know that many stars have attendant planets, some possibly Earth-like. Back on Earth, people number over seven billion. Easy to get lost in all that, easy to feel insignificant, except you can think about it, and thinking about the Big IT makes you significant.

Maybe consciousness exists elsewhere in the universe. We know that it exists here; you are proof. I’m beginning to think that all this universe stuff is just for you. Take away all other consciousness, and you are still there, conscious, thinking. Pretty significant, I’d say.

Of course, there are those who would argue that my teleological take on things is just a bit too illogical, too reminiscent of ancient thinking, too “religious.” It might be, but still I can’t stop wondering about you and your grasp of Everything and your ability to express Everything. Without you—say the rest of us fell out of the universe—the universe would have no chance for any meaning. Just stuff interacting by the rules of Newtonian and quantum physics; meaningless except for what you impart to the universe. Regardless of those who argue that the universe is meaningless—their statements are, of course, contradictory because they have meaning within the universe—I know that you, and you alone, provide meaning. As others have noted, humans, made of the stuff of the universe, are the universe conscious of itself. And you, that special consciousness that can exist and see meaning or give meaning, make me think that this whole Whole is just for you.    

From experience and learning you know that bodies don’t move unless something moves them, and they don’t stop moving unless something stops moving them. Thank Galileo for that principle of inertia. If he were a psychologist, he might have applied the same principle to human behavior.

Isolated bodies behave in a single way unless something changes their behavior. So, friction intervenes to stop a rolling ball, changing its behavior. What about people? Isolated people have behavioral inertia. There’s no force (or reason) to change, to slow, or to alter direction (or behavior). That’s where you come in. Someone out there in the Land of Behavioral Inertia is isolated and moving along without impediment toward an eventual collision with… Well, think of it this way. Even a spacecraft like Voyager, traveling into deepest space beyond the solar system, will eventually run into something or will alter either speed or direction when it encounters the gravitation of another body.

Each of us can exert either a frictional force or a gravitational one. Each of us can alter the inertial behavior of another headed for a collision. If Galileo were a psychologist, he might urge us all to be intervening forces to prevent potentially destructive behavior. Just remember your Galilean physics: Isolated bodies in motion continue their motion unless acted upon by a force. Isolation might be good for spacecraft, but not for people with detrimental behavior.    

From our infantile fascination with our hands to our wandering as toddlers to see what lies around the next corner, we are inquisitive explorers. We want to know not only what is around the corner, but also why each place has a peculiar character. We might even want to know why a place exists. Asking is our brain’s heritage. To that inquisitiveness we add doubt. Doubt is our intellectual protection against slavery of the mind; doubt provides us with new corners to round.

What’s the Vatican up to these days? Why, the smart guys there held a conference on environmental matters, focusing especially on climate change. Hmmmmm. Theologians discussing the physical world. Seems they tried this once before with a guy named Galileo. He ended up having to deny his science just to earn house arrest for the rest of his life. Giordano Bruno was another guy who, like Galileo, ran against the consensus. They burned him. I guess the message is that disagreement isn’t acceptable in polite theological societies. Now there are some new Galileos and Brunos. They are called climate skeptics, and they are personae non grata in meetings centered on global warming.

Let’s shrink you to your toddler stage and put you in the Vatican meeting. You get in not because you are a supporter, but rather because you’re cute and seemingly harmless. Your stand on global warming or climate change is irrelevant. What could you, a toddler, know, anyway? But during the proceedings, you, as an inquisitive type, have a question. You want to know whether there’s a difference between what happened during past climate change that occurred without the burning of fossil fuels and the proclaimed contemporary climate change for which fossil fuels are blamed? Should you ask that question? You’re just trying to explore what’s around the next corner.

If you are a reader of this blog, you know that in 1315 northern Europe underwent a change in weather that led, over the ensuing few years, to a great famine. If you remember your history, you also know that prior to that “change” there had been a warming period that lasted long enough for modern investigators to give it a name: The Medieval Warm Period. And then, if you recall, a Little Ice Age supplanted the warm period, possibly giving George Washington shivers in the cold at Valley Forge. Also, you might recall that southwestern United States underwent, long before it was a country, a centuries-long drought that undid the civilizations of the Anasazi and other groups that had prospered under wetter weather. Ditto for people in Central America. So, there you are, sitting in a meeting where everyone is of the same opinion, an opinion that is sanctioned by a high theological body. And in your wobbling, toddler way, you want to round the corner just to get a look at a previously unknown place. Do you, having had that question pop into your brain, dare ask?

No matter where you are and no matter the company you keep, you have an obligation to yourself to ask when a question arises. It’s the toddler in you. In your short existence, asking is your way to explore place, cause, and effect. Preventing you from rounding a corner or from asking, even when it’s done by the highest theological authority with a consensus, denies you your exploratory nature and removes the safety mechanism of doubt. There’s an expression you probably don’t like applied to you: “We put him/her in his/her place. How dare he/she?” Or, “That’s something you’ll understand when you are an adult. You’re just a toddler now.”

So, when the Vatican denied Philippe de Larminat, a climate change skeptic, entrance to the conference on climate change, it guaranteed a consensus. It kept the toddler from wandering around the corner. Recognize that regardless of whether those who doubt the consensus that humans are changing climate are self-serving lunatics or reasonable people with doubt, they are, at the very least, just being the toddlers that we all were at one time: Inquisitive wanderers rounding corners doubting as they go as a protection against slavery of the mind.