“He’s this.” “She’s that.” It’s our way of handling human complexity. Not to sound too “new age,” but we have a tendency to take the wave function of a life and collapse it into a particle we can understand. We take a continuum of a person and reduce it. In this we are all reductionists. And we are especially reductionist when we encounter conflict or when we want to make another’s life understandable.
 
Since we can’t put everyone on a couch for psychoanalysis and since most of us are untrained in the process, we take the easy path; we collapse the life-wave into a point. Interestingly, we determine what point best represents the entire wave, thus our simplified analyses of others.
We’re not necessarily at fault in this.
 
If someone labeled you, would you be happy? Probably not. If someone took a single aspect of your life-wave and collapsed it into a defining (and definite) point, would you agree with the analysis? Again, probably not. Each of us would claim a complexity that others could not possibly know. There are barriers that separate all of us from one another. That’s the reason you can call yourself an “individual.” Think of this the next time you label someone with a point-label. 
 
Of course, each of us has a history and behavioral tendencies. But even a series of events in one’s life doesn’t necessarily define a life. We all encounter events that impress or don’t impress, ideas and their antitheses, moods and their opposites during our lifetimes. Each of us is a seeming unending addition problem, and many of us become obsessed with subtraction—“That was me in the past, but I am a changed person now; I don’t do that anymore.”
 
So, we might all be a series of waves in our New-Age-Think, but we see our own wave train as partly erasable. We can eliminate points. We believe we can take a wave in our past, collapse it to a point, and eliminate it from the wave train of our present. Shouldn’t we allow others to collapse their past waves to points that they, too, can eliminate from their current wave trains?
 
As everyday reductionists, we apply New Age Quantum Psychoanalysis* to others, but not to ourselves. I’m not advocating the latter; I’m just noting the former. You’re not a cliché; neither is anyone else. You’re not an easily collapsible wave function, either. Any momentary observation of another that seems to collapse the life-wave into a point fails to recognize that the wave continues as the point is observed. Otherwise, a biography could be three words: “He is ‘this.’” Or “She is ‘that.’” Such a biography would ignore that it is correct only for the reductionist observer, the same observer who, in seeing just a collapsed wave, misses the continuing wave trains of an individual’s life. 
 
 
*Did I just make that up? No. You can read all about it at http://thejournalofunconsciouspsychology.com/blog/2013/12/01/quantum-psychoanalysis/ ;
at http://thenightshirt.com/?p=3483 ; or at
http://internationalpsychoanalysis.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/GargiuloThePsychoanalyticUnconsciousinaQuantumWorld.pdf .
And I’m sure you could find a number of other such sites.

What if life were as simple as spa music? Just a few repetitive notes or themes; hardly a recognizable tune; not something destined to become an ear worm; definitely no catchy lyrics or hummable melody. 
 
Episodic. That’s what it might be. No crescendo to speak of, and therefore, little to label “dramatic” or any of its corollaries: Catastrophic, tragic, draining. 
 
Yeah. I agree. Boring. Maybe okay for the duration of a massage or facial, possibly okay for a short read or meditation, but stretched out over a lifetime? Boring.
 
You know what you say. “I just need a rest from IT ALL. I just want some peace and quiet. I don’t want to run to put out another fire. I want some time off.”
 
Hey, look at me. You’ll get “time off” when you’re off time. Before you are off time, enjoy the crescendos. Put out the fires. If not that, then what? An unsingable tune? An unhummable sequence? A life without ear worms? 
 
What if life were as simple as spa music? Would you truly prefer it to the cacophony and challenges you face daily? Would you prefer it to the interesting never-know-what’s-going-to-happen-next life you now lead? Go ahead; experiment. Turn on some spa music on YouTube, sit back, and do little or nothing. In fact, use the spa music as a background for a meditation on whether you want to sit much longer listening to spa music.

Do you live “with purpose”? Hold on. I have another question. Is there purpose in Nature? “Whoa!” you say, “I know where you are taking me from the get go; you are probably going to ask me whether or not the universe shows purpose.”
 
“Actually, no, at least, not originally. But now that you brought up the potential direction of this little essay, I might consider asking what you put into my mind. I debated the title and the direction here. This could be entitled ‘Cats Run Wild’ after an article published by  Phys.org (June 25, 2018) about Australia’s feral cats’ killing spree.* The animals, according to those who studied their diets, kill one million reptiles every day. Yes, I blinked, also, when I saw the number. Australia, the land of lots of strange, dangerous creatures has become the land of wild cats, ravenous wild cats. Can’t imagine that the lizards have long to live at that rate of demise. Strange how we have altered ecologies both on purpose and by accident. So, what do we do now in Australia? Obviously, cats would not be there had we not introduced them into the land of marsupials and lizards.
 
“ ‘Kill the cats,’ I can hear someone say, whereas someone else says, ‘Good riddance to lizards. Who other than the oddball likes reptiles?’ And that’s the dilemma. Do we prefer the ecology we created by chance or the ecology that we have replaced?” 
 
“Do reptiles serve any purpose?” the person in favor of the cats’ lizard buffet asks.
 
“They can kill insects,” the person in favor of catricide says, “you just can’t allow an invasive species to decimate an endemic one. You have to purposely cull the cat population.”
 
Purpose, either implied or stated, is one problem with our approach to the world and our assumed role in its processes. It doesn’t matter whether or not one is atheist or believer, that word, purpose , keeps popping up in conversations. When we want to justify our position on Nature, we refer to some teleological argument. Yes, even those who claim to act in the name of ‘pure science’ usually interject the notion of purpose, usually masking it in the ‘role’ an organism plays in a complex ecology. 
 
“Ecologies are naturally balanced,” you say, “until humans come along and tip the scales.” Someone else says, “This is the way Nature made the Australian ecology, lots of reptiles. It took Nature millions of years to make it this way, to build a food chain with equilibrium.” Yet another person asks, “Isn’t any ecology just a collection of organic and inorganic stuff that accreted by accident? Isn’t equilibrium a temporary state? Doesn’t disequilibrium lie just around the corner with the next ‘natural catastrophe’? If an organism goes missing or the inorganic substance changes, say through erosion, it’s a matter of chance; there’s no purpose in the change. Only people can act purposefully.” 
 
Is the applicability of the word purpose valid only in regard to conscious beings? So, does your pet dog do something “on purpose”? Does it have a level of consciousness sufficient to include purposeful action? What about a seal that saves a human from drowning, as in the case of Kevin Hines, who tells the story of his attempted suicide? Hines jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge in 2000, and, though badly injured, survived the fall. Too hurt to swim, Kevin was about to drown when a sea lion pushed him to the surface “on purpose” and repeatedly until a rescue boat arrived.** 
 
Now that I think about animals seeming to act purposely, I’m beginning to wonder about those cats. Are they serving a purpose we don’t know? Are the reptiles? Did the humans who took cats to Australia have a long-term purpose in mind? “Let’s get rid of the reptiles on this little continent.”
 
Now, you’ll interject, “The first cat owners introduced the cats into the continent without realizing the consequences of their actions. They probably took the cats with them either because they liked cats or because they knew cats would eliminate mice and rats. Who could have foreseen that cats would escape into the wild and proliferate? Who would have guessed they would develop a taste for reptiles? Those people weren’t really acting to purposefully change the ecology of Australia.”
 
Let me put it on a personal level: I confess I have feral cats. Well, I really don’t have the cats. I live in a woodsy area next to a 450-acre park with more woods. There are feral cats in the woods. I don’t feed them, don’t pet them, don’t take them to a vet, and generally don’t pay any attention to them unless they walk by chance in my path. They seem to survive winter after winter after winter, their offspring having more offspring. And they kill birds, and mice, rabbits, and moles. I don’t have to worry about mice trying to get into the house when the cats are in the neighborhood. So, I welcome the presence of the feral cats whom I do not have to feed or care for. They’re feral. They serve my purpose by reducing the field mice population.
 
“They serve my purpose,” I repeat. I don’t have to poison mice or trap them. Isn’t that the way most of us see “Nature”? Take a national park, for example. “Ah! What beauty! I could picnic here at least once a summer,” a visitor says. The natural setting, the ecology in place, certainly serves ITS purpose of preserving the beauty of Nature and places to picnic, not to mention providing the setting for millions of photos that further preserve the purpose for which we designate an area: Scenic beauty and ecological conservation. We set out to preserve—with consciously chosen qualifications—Nature “as it is unspoiled,” we say—occasional discarded aluminum can notwithstanding.
 
Does a national park serve ITS purpose? Or does it serve a temporary purpose of mine or yours? Is it a “wild area” if we control it with park rangers and restrictions? Is it an unfettered natural ecology if we “reintroduce wolves,” for example? Is it wild when we add signs that say “Stay on the paved roads, paths, and walkways.” “Don’t feed the bears.” “Don’t harass the wildlife.” “Don’t litter.” “Don’t abandon your unwanted cat; they’ll eat the lizards.”
 
Pay attention to the word purpose as it occurs in discussions you have or witness over the next week or so. How many arguments stem from an assumption of purpose either in Nature or in ostensibly random events? Is there a purpose in the actions of feral cats and their ravenous devouring of Australia’s reptiles? Is it to eliminate reptiles? And if the cats succeed, will that mean their purpose is to eliminate themselves by eliminating their food? What will they eat when they empty the lizard buffet? 
 
Is there a purpose in any genocide? In any attempted conquest of the world? Yet, generation after generation imposes someone or some few who invade and devour. Had Hitler been successful, over what decimated world would he have ruled? Some 50 million people died during WWII. Or what about a local human ecology. In every neighborhood gang war, what purpose will be fulfilled? Look at the short-lived rise of the Islamic Caliphate called ISIS or ISIL or Daesh. They were the analog of Australia’s feral cats. They overran a region for a short period, and then, their “food” consumed and the ecology disrupted, they became the hunted and the decimated, now represented by small leftover groups hiding in the rocks.  
 
Note that there is no way to demonstrate a relationship between what is purposeful in your eyes and what happens in the universe, in Nature, or in human affairs when one looks at the “big picture.” What purpose did the slaughter of WWII or the Caliphate serve? 
 
“Are you saying with Sartre and maybe some nihilists that we live in a meaningless and purposeless world?” you ask. 
 
“Not necessarily,” I respond. “Rather, I’m suggesting that when we speak of purposes, we speak from faith of some kind. We want the world to be explicable, and identifying a purpose helps us to explain what is ultimately inexplicable. That even if the world is inexplicable, it might be purposely so. Most of us just don’t like the idea of an arbitrary world of meaningless events, but in reality, there’s no way to demonstrate, for example, that the Australian cats and lizards serve a purpose. We impose purposes on both natural interrelationships and on human relationships. We have some justification in assigning purpose to human behaviors, I suppose, since we believe we have that sophisticated level of consciousness we term ‘free will.’ But we rely on belief in assigning purpose to lizards eating bugs and cats eating lizards.
 
“I have no way of knowing whether or not the seal that saved Kevin acted purposely. Maybe the sea lion was playing, and Kevin was its ‘beach ball.’ I’ve seen individual humans act ‘on purpose’ without knowledge of larger consequences in mind. I don’t think Hitler thought Germany’s nearly complete destruction was a possible outcome. I don’t think he operated with either purpose or purposelessness that could be knowable only after the fact of the war. I don’t think those who introduced cats into Australia just as those who introduced rabbits into the same land, those who introduced pythons into the Everglades, or kudzu into the South, acted with purposeful foresight. I think much of what we call purpose is a recognition of history, a history that includes, for example, the deaths of Australian lizards and the eventual decimation of feral cats. If we can’t ascribe ‘purpose’ to many human acts and interactions with other humans and with Nature except through history, then is history also the mechanism for finding a purpose to the universe?
 
“You’ll no doubt want to say that there is purpose in the cats’ eating lizards. Cats have a self-preservation instinct, so they fulfill the purpose of staying alive by eating whatever is available. That places purpose solely in the realm of the individual cat. So, also, lizards eat insects. Insects are there on purpose to serve as food for lizards. Individual lizards eat to survive. There is no larger purpose in the Australian ecology.
 
“Anyway, I started this thing because I saw that story on the cats, and then you had to come along and throw in the stuff about a ‘purpose’ in the universe that led me to a discussion about a devastating war that included an attempt at genocide. Sorry if I didn’t address the issue you thought I should address. But, again, if nothing else comes out of this, maybe both of us should pay attention to the assumptions about purpose in our conversations.”
 
 
 
*Australian feral cats kill a million reptiles a day: study. June 25, 2018. Phys.org online at https://phys.org/news/2018-06-australian-feral-cats-million-reptiles.html
 
** https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11448514/San-Francisco-bridge-jumper-says-sea-lion-saved-him.html

You might not have been paying attention at the time, but some teacher along the way probably introduced you to Emerson through his Self-Reliance, in which he advocated one’s thinking for oneself.* For you as a kid struggling with peer pressures, the message should have rung true, but then, you were a kid struggling with peer pressures.
 
Thinking for oneself isn’t always easy, what with all the voices that tell us what and how to think. It might be, in fact, a nearly impossible task. Apparently, it was a problem way back in Emerson’s time, also, at least it was according to Ralph Waldo.  
 
Can we really “think for ourselves” when just about every thought is a compilation of what we learned directly or indirectly. Is self-reliance just a myth? Are some people who seem to be in control as independent thinkers either lucky that no one challenges their thought  or merely arrogant enough not to care? 
 
“What do you think?” you ask.
 
“First, we should probably ask what self-reliance means. I can see categories and conditions. How many of us are completely self-reliant? Second, we should look for examples. Let’s do the second first. Take Mick Dodge, star of the reality show The Legend of Mick Dodge on the National Geographic Network. I’ve seen an episode. Mick’s out there finding berries and other edibles in the Hoh rainforest. But Mick seems to have a Dutch oven and some glass jars. There’s an episode in which Mick makes hard tack, that indestructible bread of old. His Dutch oven has a wire-wrapped handle that eliminates the need for a pot holder. It looks, therefore, like an improved Dutch oven, such as the one might have bought within the last twenty years or so. He has a Mason jar of flour. A jar of honey. And—where did he get it?—a jar of oil (canola? olive? Wesson?). Nick mixes his ingredients in the oven with a stick (very primitive), and then asks the cameraman, “Do you want to lick the ‘spoon’?” He then makes a pit in sand and a fire nearby, putting embers in the sand pit, sticking the pot on them, adding a few more embers to the top of the oven, and covering the whole with sand and bark to conserve the heat. There! That’s self-reliance, isn’t it?”**
 
“That’s not a good example,” you say. “Mick Dodge has equipment produced by others—the mason jars, the oil, the honey, and the Dutch oven; therefore, he isn’t completely self-reliant. He’s just a guy who knows something about surviving on what the rest of us would call ‘the minimum.’ When products serve his purposes, he relies on them. Why didn’t Mick make an oven of stones? Why didn’t he cook out some oil from a strangled or clubbed critter? Vegetable oil! In a Mason jar! This guy is hardly an example of pure self-reliance. But I’ll admit that I couldn’t live like him. I’m not dressing in rawhide.”
 
“I guess I could go to Namibia to follow some Bushmen into the wilderness to see how they survive, but then, I guess they rely on one another for survival. ‘It takes a village,’ they say with clicks. I guess true self-reliance in physical matters is difficult, tales of Robinson Crusoe being fictional accounts for the most part, with any ‘real’ self-reliant lifestyles being relegated to temporary circumstances. Where’s a feral child when you need one to make a point? Truth is, living a feral existence doesn’t necessarily lead to a state of Noble Savagery one might envision in an Emersonian way and in the vision of nineteenth-century poets. Not that eating berries, roots, and shoots isn’t all right for some, but in a world crowded by seven billion of us, getting away from conformity and dependence of some kind is nearly impossible. Two people make a society, so the life of a complete hermit is the only truly self-reliant existence, and if one comes by the hermitic life after exposure to the world of people, then any ‘self-reliance’ takes on a studied form.
 
“Okay,” I admit, “I can’t think of a perfect example. But aren’t rich people self-reliant? Those of ‘means’ probably say they are self-reliant. They don’t need anyone’s financial aid, and, freed from that obligation, they can go in any direction they choose.”
 
“That seems to be true,” you acknowledge, “but they have the wherewithal to hire others to do their bidding. Is self-reliance a matter of economic power? If you’re rich enough, for example, you don’t have to have insurance to pay funeral expenses. Although, in a litigious society, a jury could award someone else all another’s wealth.”
 
“Well, then let’s address the first matter, the definition of self-reliance. Let’s limit it to thinking. Can one be a self-reliant thinker in any society without simply being cantankerous, stubborn, or elitist?”
 
“Now there’s something to consider,” you add.
 
“I spent some four decades in Academia and in government research, where I saw a good number of people who appeared to be self-reliant thinkers. In many instances, what on the surface seemed to be self-reliant thinking was, in fact, blatant pretension and arrogance. When there’s no accountability with regard to mistakes and even fudged and false claims, when tenure and unions protect one from consequences, supposed ‘self-reliance’ is easy. No risk, no true glory. Professors and government officials rarely ‘face the music’ in tests of their self-reliance. Everyone needs to remember Newton’s ‘standing on the shoulders of others’ comment. 
 
“Yet, I suppose that we could find some self-reliant thinkers in the Newtonian sense, those who stand on the shoulders of others but who think in a new way, who approach a problem in a novel way. We see examples in fiction, philosophy, and physics mostly. All those court dramas, where the lawyer takes an approach that almost gets him or her a night in jail for contempt, but that, by the end of the program becomes the reason for or against a conviction or an award.  Or, we see someone try to abandon an acceptable philosophy to think in a new way. Heidegger tried that. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, also. And physicists like Maxwell, Planck, and Einstein might stand as examples of self-reliant thinking, but as for all those who came after them…well, didn’t they mostly just elucidate and elaborate?”
 
You throw up your hands. “So, there’s really no true self-reliance?” you ask.

​“I wonder how Emerson would evaluate our current society. Are we the fulfillment of everything he warned against? He does have a couple of sentences worth our consideration, such as, ‘What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.’ That’s become a cliché, but it draws attention to our lives as framed by social media. Emerson also says that it’s easy to follow the ‘world’s opinion,’ and easy ‘in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.’
 
“So, I guess we can be as much Mick Dodge in the city as we can be Mick in the rainforest.” 
 
*If you want to reread the essay, you’ll find it online in numerous sites, including https://math.dartmouth.edu/~doyle/docs/self/self.pdf 

** http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/u/kdi9Ld0QAu2atUYfdOZVLRjqsM_VJNm1ectKu2BpkL17udVU42PqREqIsaJqGIe_JaKv0DxYE4U/

Everyone has the opportunity to be a John the Baptist. Do you know his story? You don’t have to be a part of the Judeo-Christian tradition to have heard of him. He’s the guy whose life ended shortly after a dance show more famous than any performance of the last two thousand years. John lost his head after the “Dance of the Seven Veils.” That dance and John’s fate has caught the attention of artists, sculptors, composers, dramatists, novelists, dancers, poets, movie directors, producers, and actresses like Rita Hayworth—my goodness, just about every fifth person on the planet has somehow touched on the story of Salome and the death of John. 
 
Poor John. All he wanted was a moral world. All he wanted to do was fulfill Isaiah 40:3 as retold in the Gospels. John the Baptist was the voice crying out in the desert. “Hey, I’m building a road here, a straight road for the Lord. That’s my job. I’m preparing for His coming.” In various biblical translations and retellings, the message is pretty much the same. John was preparing the way in the wilderness, in the desert. He was making a “straight highway”—not for himself, but for someone else.
 
Okay, this is about you, not Judaism’s prophets, Christianity’s Lord, or metaphorical highway construction. What gives you the opportunity to be John is the next generation. Those who tried to make a straight road through the wilderness for you did what they could. Since your path through life isn’t an easy one, you could say they failed to make in the desert a straight highway. Lots of ruts and twists. And now it’s your turn. 
 
Every generation going back 200,000 years or more has had the opportunity to be John. Every generation has had the opportunity to make straight the path through the wilderness, but we still travel somewhat curvy, potholed and even unpaved roads. Not even the rise of industry and technology has made the task easier. Forget your GPS, your theodolites and other surveying equipment, your air-conditioned heavy equipment, and your teams of civil engineers, this kind of road building is still a personal project, still one that involves the efforts of everyone in your generation.
 
Whether or not you have road construction experience, you’ve been given the job of John the Baptist by virtue of your being here prior to the next generation’s arrival. Obviously, the previous road-builders didn’t get the road quite straight enough to facilitate your travel without incident and obstacle. You can’t fault them entirely. Every generation takes some road construction tips from the previous generations, but each generation also makes similar mistakes. The wilderness is a tough go; there are distractions along the way, fellas and gals, not the least of which is a seductive dance of one sort or another. And then there are the occasional breath-taking natural views, the overlooks that make us want to stop just to capture a view of sunsets and sunrises forever, especially when we tire of road-building. “Can’t the next generation build the rest of this? I’ve come far enough. I’ve done enough work. Look behind me. That’s a pretty straight road—okay, don’t include that one section when I got pretty distracted by something along the way.” 
 
Certainly, there are contemporaries of yours that do what they can to disrupt the construction. There are Herodiases with loyal daughters Salome who will influence someone to imprison or even kill those who would make straight the path. Some in every generation prefer the rough wilderness to a smooth path. Many in every generation don’t care about continuing the road. There are many wayside distractions, many places to stop construction. So, the “lords of the future” will face the same problems your generation faced and still faces.
 
But while you’re here, you might do a little road construction. Who knows, maybe someday someone will say, “My path was smooth and straight because of him.” Or, “My path was smooth and straight because of her.”
 
Get busy, Johnny or Johnnie. You have a path to straighten.   

Those who ponder the big question Why is there anything rather than nothing? seem to be hopelessly locked in a conundrum. There are variations of two basic answers, but neither the basic answers nor their variations answer the question to everyone’s satisfaction. Basic answer #1: A conscious deity or power fashioned Everything; #2: an eternal natural process produced the universe (or multiverse). Right! You can see that many variations of both have run through both great minds and not-so-great minds, and I’m in the camp of the latter, of course.
 
The common thread in both answers is that in spite of what those who hold answer #2 tell us and argue with complex equations there is an element of faith because neither answer is ultimately demonstrable. That holders of either answer dismiss their opponents’ answers has been a matter of intellectual debate and sometimes physical conflict for thousands of years. We all know that. 
 
Gödel has informed us that we can’t use any logical system, including a mathematical one, to establish its own truth. So, ultimately, everyone relies on some assumption or set of assumptions in trying to answer the “big question.” Maybe what we need is a merger of the two kinds of answers. So, here’s a proposal made not by this author, but rather by one of those “great minds”—if I read him correctly.
 
Augustine of Hippo was a follower of Zoroaster until he discovered Christianity. He then used Neoplatonism to elucidate the problem of the “big question.” Now, I’ll admit that in these few paragraphs I can’t elaborate much, but my goal isn’t a full explanation because I don’t believe any “true” explanation could find universal acceptance. Instead, I intend to provide yet another point of departure in your own journey of self-discovery. 
 
Augustine basically says that the Creator created the possibility for forms to exist. He does not lay out the mechanism, only that an evolving universe was formed. And he requires no pre-existing stuff. After all, if it’s the “Beginning,” then it’s the beginning. Of course, in the sense of modern science, he can offer no proof short of reasoning and scripture, but then, he did live a long time before Galileo rolled a ball down a ramp.
 
Cosmologists and quantum physicists would probably say that Augustine had nothing more than faith and a philosophy that has since gone out of favor as the bases of his argument. That seems reasonable to us because, well, we’re us; we’re “modern,” and we think “modern.” Yet, we might ask ourselves a question about how we pursue the answer to the big question. Are we not in some ways just Hortons seeking the ultimate Whoville? Maybe Dr. Seuss should be up there in the category of “great minds.” His story of the elephant might be the story of modern physics in its search for the answer we all seek. We’re like Horton, recognizing by their “sounds,” and not by direct observation, atoms, their parts, and the parts of their parts. We’re down to quarks now, and strings might be next—though the power and temperature needed to find them is just about the same as that associated with the Big Bang. By comparison, we’re splashing around in tepid bath water. So, we argue about the nature of Whoville’s residents: Are they discreet particles or fields. We do seem to know now that we’re all splashing through the Higgs field, some with more and some with less resistance. But the field? Is it eternal? If even black holes and protons will evaporate, then just about everything is finite. Is the field? Finite stuff has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Beginning from what? Beginning how? Maybe our science isn’t as “scientific” as we think it is. 
 
Like Horton, we’ve heard (and now, thanks to the COBE and WMAP images) and seen the Echo of the Big Bang, that is, the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation of about 2.75 Kelvins—more or less by a 100,000thspread over the early universe. We’ve been listening to the Echo of the ultimate Whoville, the sub-atomic sized initial universe that has unfolded into a Horton-sized cosmos with consciousness ever since Marconi heard static for the first time.*
 
We can pursue both kinds of answers in all their variations simultaneously. Such a pursuit won’t hurt. We can be both Augustinian and Higgsian. We can look for and argue for the existence of strings, but we’re all going to run up to the verbal conundrum we all face. If we call something a “beginning,” we imply “nothing” before. 
 
What if our conundrum is merely the product of the way we handle understanding through language? Scientifically, we have heard, like Horton, the smallest Whoville we’ve postulated or surmised from running the universe’s expansion backward to the Big Bang. But what if our ears, like Horton’s, just aren’t sensitive enough to hear what we would need to hear to confirm an answer? What if we can’t, no matter how hard we try, even with the guidance of someone like Augustine and the most sophisticated machinery we can devise, hear the voice of God?
 
*Turn on your AM radio and you can hear the universe’s beginning as you dial between stations. You can hear Whoville in the static. 

If the universe were a doughnut-shaped entity, light would circle. If you could wait long enough, you would see the back of your head. Of course, you couldn’t wait long enough because the universe appears to be 13.8 billion years old, so the next go-round of light would take at the very minimum that times pi; plus, the universe is expanding, so the doughnut is getting bigger—just as bagels and doughnuts have gotten bigger over the past few decades to satisfy our ever-growing gourmand appetites. Anyway, even if my math is all wrong, you still couldn’t live long enough to see the back of your head. For that, you need the more immediate presence of two mirrors that cut down light’s journey. And the problem with two mirrors is that your head gets in its own way. Guess we’re just stuck with a photo or a video taken by another to get that back view.  
 
But if you could see an image light carries after a go-round of the universe, would you be startled to see yourself from that perspective? We are, with respect to ourselves, isolated in our point of view. We look out. And our perspectives just don’t come back so we can have an uninterrupted perspective on our perspectives. It’s only with the help of another—or of others—that we see all there is to see from a different perspective on our perspectives.
 
Much of what we know about ourselves is from our reflection off others. Much of what we understand objectively about our perspectives derives from a toroidal universe of ideas. Sometimes what we send out returns to hit us in the back of the head as an image we can’t quite fully see. But make no mistake; whatever leaves our forward direction is destined in some fashion and in some warped universe to return. And then we get to see—if only partially—what we are as the rest of the world sees us. 
 
Want an example? Of course, you do. Otherwise, you would simply dismiss this as esoteric sophistry. 
 
I don’t want to pin this on anyone, so, to make it as neutral as I can, I’ll make it a hypothetical. Here’s the story. A famous person, say an actor, makes a degrading tweet about another person, say a political figure. Reactions against the tweet come in the form of other tweets, both condemnatory and supportive. 
 
Perspectives return. We don’t know what our perspectives look like until they take that toroidal trip around the social universe. And then, when the journey around the doughnut of a social universe runs full circle, we see ourselves from a different angle. We see “parts” of ourselves that are hidden by our having eyes face only forward. 
 
Think before you tweet from a particular perspective. You will eventually have a perspective on your perspective because, as the saying goes, “what goes around, comes around.”    

Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1889. Should it be renamed Floodville? Since the time of the devastating flood that appears in history texts, the city has under gone floods in 1894, 1907, 1924, 1936, and 1977. Property destroyed. Lives lost. You can still go to, visit, or live in Johnstown.
 
Switzerland. I know. You’re thinking avalanches. All those high mountains. Think floods. According to the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research (OCCR), “Every seventh building in Switzerland is at risk of flooding, and four out of five Swiss communities have been affected by floods within the past 40 years.” 
 
Here’s the point as written by the OCCR: “Although floods can cause serious damage to those directly affected, most people tend to forget them rather quickly. Within a few years, they fade from the population’s consciousness.”*
 
Texas coast, 2017. Hurricane Harvey. At least 41 deaths. Highlands, Texas, recorded 51.88 inches of rainfall. Texas coast, 2018. June. “Southeast Texas is flooding again,” is the headline. According to a report by Faith Karimi of CNN, “Larry Wolf, of Port Arthur, said his home has flooded twice. ‘I’m to the point where I’m 75 years old,’ he told KBTV. ‘I can’t do it anymore.’”**
 
It seems that humans have suffered losses from floods since the Deluge, but we still build along coasts and rivers. Is there something in the brain that can’t remember or pass on information about floods? Or volcanic eruptions? Or earthquakes?
 
When I see a disturbed ant hill, I notice that the ants, when destruction isn’t total, rebuild. Some ants in the tropics will make rafts of interconnected ant bodies to float to a new location, typically one that will require them eventually to make new rafts to float to still other locations susceptible to floods. Are we like them. Have we rebuilt beneath Vesuvius? Beneath Vulcan Fuego in Guatemala? On the San Andreas Fault? 
 
In spite of the ostensible differences between people and ants, both organisms seem to suffer memory losses with regard to disasters. 
 
Is there something in the brain that says “If I dwell on what happened, I’ll never get anything done”? Is it “Well, he would have wanted us to play the game. We’re dedicating this win to his memory”? 
 
The realities of this life, including its many dangers, warrant our focus on the present and the future. But does rebuilding in flood zones, earthquake zones, and eruption zones make sense? I’ve walked the streets of Antigua Guatemala, to me one of the most beautiful of cities, and I’ve looked up at the 12,000-foot stratovolcano that towers over the city. No building can exceed two floors in the city because the residents don’t want to block the view of the volcano. The fertile soil in the area supports coffee plantations and vegetable and fruit gardens. It’s a great place to get an avocado. But it lies at the foot of a stratovolcano, the most destructive kind of volcano. It didn’t get to its great height and size without past eruptions, and there’s no evidence that highly destructive eruptions won’t occur well into the future. 
 
Are you thinking that the people in Johnstown, along the coast of Texas, on the San Andreas Fault, and on the sides of Guatemala’s volcanoes should move? You realize, of course, that there are economic and other forces, some political, that keep people in danger zones. Maybe those who stay where disaster is relatively common stay simply because they choose to forget the mayhem of their and their ancestors’ past. Or, maybe there’s something in the brain—all brains—that is wired to forget so that the present and the future always look promising.

Let's check back with Larry Wolf of Port Arthur in a few years. It will be interesting to see whether or not he and his neighbors  moved or rebuilt. 
 
 
 
*Online at http://www.oeschger.unibe.ch/about_us/news/a_collective_reminder_for_forgetful_switzerland/index_eng.html
 
**Online at 
https://www.local10.com/news/national/southeast-texas-is-flooding-again

I think the idea of honoring Stephen Hawking with music by Vangelis is the product of a noble humanism. Given a lack of belief in a Supreme Being, humans still seek dignity, and music, art, and literature all provide the means to dignify the deceased. The European Space Agency will use its satellite dish at Ceberos, Spain, to send a Hawking memorial music-message to 1A0620-00, the nearest black hole that lies a little more than 3,000 light-years away in the constellation Monoceras.* While the message containing his thoughts travels outward to the heavens, the physical Hawking, by his own words a nonbeliever, ironically takes his final resting place in a church, the famous Westminster Abbey, where Newton, a believer, also lies in eternal rest. I confess (in reference to the saint to whom the abbey was dedicated) that I find the merger of believers and nonbelievers in a singularity of resting place to be particularly interesting. The believers accept a personal continuation ad infinitum; the nonbelievers think that Nothing is our destiny as we all eventually evaporate away in a universal black hole.  
 
So, Hawking has a traditional memorial in the abbey, but that other memorial, the music-message that ties his words to a composition by Vangelis, is destined to travel more than 3,000 years until it reaches its final emplacement (assuming the ESA’s aim is good—that black hole is a moving target). And then, when the message reaches its destination, its electromagnetic carrier waves will warp and change in the extreme gravity of 1A0620-00, eventually plunging into oblivion as lost information. Considering that the pyramids are memorials over 4,000 years old, I would have suggested some similar building for a longer lasting Hawking memorial. At the end of its three-thousand-year journey, the Hawking memorial music-message will be swallowed by the black hole.
 
Anyway, the effort to memorialize Hawking by sending radio waves to a black hole will never serve as a long-term memorial among believers and nonbelievers. Once gone, those electromagnetic waves will never return, and no one will intercept them on their way off Earth. Even if some alien life-forms with radio technology intercept the broadcast, we’ll never know because their return question “Who is Hawking?” wouldn’t come back to Earth during our lifetimes, though, if the sent message is thorough in depicting Hawking’s science in terms they could understand, they would agree that he discovered a relationship between thermodynamics and black holes and put entropy and black-body radiation into the theoretical picture. “Thank you, Stephen,” Gorp and Org might say on their distant planet.   
 
I’m sure that in the minds of the memorializers, the sending of the music-message seems appropriate. They’ll still have a memorial to visit in the abbey. I don’t want to be too cynical about the memorial service, but in addition to family and friends, some 1,000 people from the general public applied for seats at the memorial in Westminster, and I suspect their motives for wanting to be connected to the service. If that group includes the famous who are not famous for their work in physics, is it possible that showing up gives them a chance for some publicity? “Donald, stop with the cynicism,” you quickly interject. “They wished to be part of the service because they wished to remember a great man.”
 
“But there was a movie,” I declare, “and the famous do draw paparazzi and idolizers. Just saying. Sorry, but I suspect that some think attending is a way to rub shoulders with the rich and famous. I just also suspect motives when so many media representatives attend such an event.”
 
“Why are you even writing about this. Let the poor ALS-afflicted genius rest in the abbey and his music-message zoom to 1A0620-00 at the speed of light.”
 
“You’re right. He was a genius, and I always wondered how much more he might have accomplished had he not had the debilitating disease. Tying thermodynamics to black holes was something all the other geniuses seemed to have missed, and Hawking caught the connection. Hawking truly deserves everyone’s respect and a memorial of great significance.
 
“It’s just that the ‘show’ part seems to diminish the legacy of a great man. Not able to stand, he nevertheless stood head and shoulders above most of us, and in a paraphrase of Newton’s humble remark, ‘Hawking will be one set of shoulders on whom future physicists will stand.’ I think he was not only one of the great intellects, but also one of the hardest workers, a man who did not let a disability interfere with his work. That indicates to me a resilient person, and I find dignity in resilience.
 
“Yes, for a long time, physicists will work to elaborate Hawking’s work, but maybe there’s a lesson in his life that we should memorialize in a music-message to the stars. Could we not also send in an acknowledgement of his human dignity the message: ‘This is a man who did not let a debilitating disease lessen his persistence to understand the cosmos and explain it to the rest of us.’ Persistence in the face of adversity is the kind of message we’re used to associating with comeback athletes and successful wounded warriors. Why not associate it with a theoretical physicist? That’s the kind of message that reveals the positive side of a humanistic approach to dignity. 
 
“There are people who don’t have a religion and who don’t believe in God, but who exhibit in their lives the essence of human dignity that is defined as the noble pursuit of understanding and knowledge. Few, if any of them, will have their lives memorialized in a message to the stars, and very few of them will have stars attend their memorial service.
 
“Eventually, Hawking’s electromagnetic memorial will be destroyed, his words lost in the singularity he once explained. Probably, Westminster Abbey, like the Greek temples and Roman forum, will also have been destroyed or will have fallen into decaying ruins by the time Hawking’s message reaches 1A0620-00. Will the man, who wanted to explain the Theory of Everything, have come to Nothing? Will Newton, who believed in a personal eternity, watch as the black hole evaporates? What do you think?”    
 
 
 
*The black hole is also labeled V616 Monocerotis. 

It’s me, not you. Keep that in mind here.
 
Sometime before people put restrictions on who could take what from anywhere, particularly, dinosaur fossils from certain highly fossiliferous areas, someone—I don’t know who—extracted a large tyrannosaur footprint that has, through circuitous routes, come into my possession. I don’t know the location where the footprint was found nor the details of the circuitous route, but having the footprint, I can deduce much about both the footprint maker and the environment of the “trace” fossil. 
 
The three-toed print puts the dinosaur in the suborder Theropoda, and its size, about three feet from toe to toe and back to front, makes me think Allosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, or even Maposaurus, though other members of the suborder also had big feet. The thickness of the fossil indicates that the animal was heavy because the impression was made in some silty mud, the silt giving a greater viscosity to the mud and a greater resistance to mushing (not a technical term). I can’t rule out that an Allosaurus from Utah’s bone bed, or some therapod from Alberta’s bed, or Montana’s bed made it; but it seems to eliminate any Argentinian monster like Maposaurus or Gigantosaurus because such a circuitous route to my possession would have meant a heavy shipment cost. I think I can reasonably assume that the print came from North America, probably excavated by some tourist and passed through family hands until someone said, “We have no place to store this thing. Wait! I know, let’s give it to Professor Conte. He collects rocks and stuff.” 
 
Although I don’t know where the footprint was found, I do know where it was not found, in Pennsylvania, for example. Cretaceous rocks are hard to come by in PA, and the Cretaceous was the time of the great therapods. Cretaceous rocks lie in the southeastern part of the state, and none are known to have produced large therapod tracks. Some therapods did, however, prance around in Pennsylvania during the Triassic, but their tracks indicate they were no larger than chickens (Did you read that some scientists think T. rex probably tasted like chicken?) So, looking at my dinosaur footprint, I know that it couldn’t have been found in the rocks of Pennsylvania, but that doesn’t mean a large therapod didn’t walk the streets of Philadelphia. For the last 160 million years, Pennsylvania has been a region of erosion, its once tall mountains reduced to hills with elevations no higher than 3,000 feet. Big therapod footprints, if they were here, were eroded away long ago.
 
You have made footprints in soft soils and beach sands, so you know the process. Step on something unconsolidated and, given your weight and the force of your gait, you’ll make an impression. Now imagine preserving the “hole” you made by filling it in with any material, say plaster of Paris or silt and sand or mud. Let the infilling material harden (or lithify), and then lift it as a separate unit from the material into which you stepped. Walla! A trace fossil. Your footprint preserved. Your toe marks appearing to be the reverse of your foot, the toes having made the downward impression and the infilling materials having made a flat surface. Thus with the dinosaur footprint I own. The middle toe is about six inches thick, and the infilling stuff is composed of silty muds. You have seen such material in coastal and inland swampy areas, where either tidal streams or freshwater streams have mixed muds and silts, in a mixed-energy environment. 
 
Okay, so where is all this leading? We all leave traces of what we’ve done and where we’ve been. And we use traces others have left to deduce something about their lives. I was able to say, for example, that the footprint maker didn’t live in Pennsylvania. So, we can deduce the negative, what didn’t happen. And I can deduce the positive, for example, that a large therapod made the footprint. Finally, I can say something about the environment of the therapod, that it was mostly likely an area of silty muds indicative of a marshy or swampy area into which other silts and muds could be washed to infill the depression in a mixed-energy environment (more energy carrying silts, less carrying muds). The footprint was a collecting basin for what was to come after it.
 
And so with lives. Have a southern dialect or a western Pennsylvanian one? It doesn’t matter that you’ve moved to New England. People can tell something from your trace pronunciation. Have a particular expression that you include in your writing. Bingo! Indicator of a region. Wear a certain style? Also, an indicator. Prefer a certain type of music or literature. Trace fossils from your past, and for others, trace fossils of their pasts. For each of these trace fossils we can also deduce the negative, as well as the positive. 
 
We’re all paleontologists when it comes to people we encounter. We make our deductions from the traces they carry with them. And, although we don’t always know the circuitous route by which they travelled to come into our realm and present, we can deduce something about that journey. We might be wrong, of course. We’re all known to jump to conclusions and to deduce from faulty premises. But given our experience with “human fossils,” with biographical details and probable histories, we usually come close to the reality that was and the journey to that reality. 
 
Yet. Yes, yet. We can deduce incorrectly. Sometimes we just want our deductions to be so undeniably correct that we will ignore the limitations imposed by our not being there when the traces we have were made, just as I could not have been around when some three-toed creature was stepping into silty mud somewhere that was an exception to the usual kind of environment that produces silty muds.
 
Obviously, any steps we take to uncover a past through deductions will require some infilling of our own choosing and will be influenced by the ground over which we have walked. Infillings will also be composed of the materials that we have at our disposal, materials that we have collected through our own experiences and cultural influences. The infillings, the deductions, might not date to or originate from the place at the time the footprints were made, since all infillings occur after some critter or person depresses the ground.
 
And one more thing: The footprint maker doesn’t have control over all that washes into the footprint. You—or some famous person, for example—might have followers you know little or nothing about. The infilling might say something about the post-impression event, but little about the event—or the maker. Take Karl Marx, for example. Remember his oft-repeated idea that people should contribute to society according to their ability and receive according to their need? Do you think that he would be happy that his economic and social philosophy led to the deaths of more than 100,000,000 people in the twentieth century? Wasn’t his ideal world supposed to be for the benefit of both individuals and societies? He made an impression. He didn’t fill it. Those who stepped into his footprints put in whatever materials they wanted, including something Marx never said, that capitalism was unjust or that communism was just. 
 
That means any deductions you might make about me might be more a product of your own steps and missteps. As you deduce a history of my life or any other person’s life, keep in mind that often the premise of the person making the deductions is “It’s not me; it’s you.” The premise should more appropriately be "It's not you; it's me." In the trace fossils of another's life, we might be looking at the trace fossils of our own.