There has to be a better way to “save the environment” than by driving a wine-powered Aston Martin Volante convertible. But, if you’re a prince and you need to get around a giant estate in the summer, well, hey, I just said “if you’re a prince.” Eco-friendly Prince Charles has either purchased more alternative fuel cars or is the process of purchasing more to add to that decade-old DB6 MKII Aston Martin.* Anyway, the June, 2018, story by Anna Mikhailova in The Telegraph online, reveals that the prince and Kimbal Musk have arranged to add an electric car to the royal fleet.** Let me repeat that last word in case you didn’t read it: Fleet. How you doin’ with your fleet? 
 
Maybe it’s a test. The Green Prince is our Green Knight, you remember, Bercilak de Hautdesert, the guy Morgan le Fay transformed into the Green Giant to sell vegetables to King Arthur for biofuel and to test the purity of Sir Gawain (Did you cut yourself shaving?) Anyway, our Prince Charles has access to Bentleys, Land and Range Rovers, Audis, Rolls Royces, and, well, did I mention he was a prince? What’s obviously next? A Tesla, of course.
 
Prince Charles presents us with a green challenge? Look at all the wonderful things he does for the environment like drive a wine-powered or an electric car. Simple, yet somehow understated luxury and elegance, right? And you’ve got to have more than one, don’t you? Can’t show up in princely garb for some special event in a sports car. Definitely, that calls for a Rolls or Bentley—and he doesn’t have to worry about mechanical failure because his mum learned to be a mechanic during the war. (Don’t know whether she’s kept up on all these new-fangled computer-run cars, but she’s smart enough to learn; queens can be multifaceted individuals)
 
The prince is concerned about the environment. If nothing else makes him noble to people outside England, that fact should. It’s just that his version of environmentalism is based on the wherewithal to be ecofriendly while living in palaces large enough to enclose a village plus your home and while having garages big enough to house all the “naturally living” bush people of Namibia. Yes, the prince would like to “be one with Nature,” an ideal that was implanted in minds during the rise of nineteenth-century Romanticism and landscape artists. 
 
We all face a test of purity from a Green Knight, and the prince does as well. No, unlike Gawain we don’t have to bare our necks for two feigned blows of the Green Knight’s sword and one actual blow that simply nicks our necks (Did you cut yourself shaving, Gawain?). Any of us who say we are in favor of the environment face a daily test. What do we require for living the lifestyle we live? 
 
What’s your material and energy use? How much garbage do you produce daily through your lifestyle of convenience and relative luxury. Yeah! Luxury. How many cars are in your fleet? How many TVs, computers, radios, and other electronic devices do you own? How many of them run on standby, still consuming energy while you’re off driving your wine-powered Aston Martin? 
 
You could easily argue that all this is relative, that because you aren’t a relative of a queen, you weren’t born into inordinate wealth with a personal secretary dubbed “Sir” like Charlie’s. You don’t have the luxury of telling those who support this estate or that about having the royal cows feed on grass to save on flatulence that grains generate in those two stomachs. And you don’t have enough cash on hand to convert your aging Dodge, Chevy, or Ford into an alternative-fuel car you might use for limited mileage in summer. You would be right to make those points.
 
But, again, it’s all relative, isn’t it? Because the prince has all that stuff and manpower at his disposal, he can choose his green life; he can ostensibly pass test by Greenies. “I’m doing my best with what I have,” he might say. We can acknowledge that the poor guy was fated to have all that stuff and that his true nobility lies in how he tries to live a life of imposed luxury in a green way. He’s not hypocritical is he, if he was born a royal? 
 
And the rest of us? What’s our test? Are any of us somewhat hypocritical? There’s a Green Knight sent to test all of us regularly. He shows up once a week in a big truck—sometimes a green one—stops outside where we live, and picks up what we throw out. And he (or she) like garbage collectors everywhere, then takes what we have used and no longer need or want and drives it to a garbage dump, where it accumulates and accumulates and accumulates. 
 
“I drive a hybrid,” you say. “So, don’t accuse me of hypocrisy. I’m doing my best for the environment. Morgan le Fay doesn’t have to send anyone to test me. I don’t even use wrapping paper when I give someone something, and I put my groceries in reusable bags. I’m not the one killing ocean life with plastic.”
 
Nevertheless, she does. If any of us claim that we truly care for the environment and that we live “green” lives, we have a daily test with four questions: 1) What do we use? 2) How much do we use? 3) What happens to it when we’re done using it? And 4) How much energy do we consume in our use, including the energy required to produce and eventually store or destroy what we used? Many of us will come out of this test with a bit more than a nick in the neck.***
 
 
*English, Rebecca for the Daily Mail. Prince Charles converts his beloved Aston martin to a green machine…run on English wine. June 30, 2008. Online at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1030611/Prince-Charles-converts-beloved-Aston-Martin-green-machine--run-English-wine.html
 
**Mikhailova, Anna, Exclusive: Prince Charles planning to add electric cars to royal fleet. The Telegraph, June, 2018. Online at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/06/15/exclusive-prince-charles-planning-add-electric-cars-royal-fleet/
 
***Thanks for turning off your computer or tablet when you have finished reading this. You know that other people just leave theirs on for convenience. The seven or so billion of us have two billion computers, some more efficient than others, but none of them are as efficient in energy and carbon savings as one that is turned off. 

Apologies to John Donne for the parody, but don’t ask on whom the quoll tells because it tells on you, or at least on your “wise” species. The Australian marsupial quolls became an endangered species when they developed an appetite for invasive poisonous cane toads. So, humans intervened to save the quolls by transplanting them to a couple of islands called Astell and Pobassoo in 2003. On the islands, the quolls recovered and proliferated. Then, in a typically prideful move indicative of our belief in our superiority over Nature and in a demonstration that we can “fix” it, Christopher Jolly of the University of Melbourne and some others decided to reintroduce some of the island quolls into Kakadu National Park.*
 
It seemed to be a reasonable move. And they had guaranteed that the quolls wouldn’t die off because they swallowed poison. They had trained some of the quolls not to eat cane toads, so what could go wrong? 
 
Murphy’s law, of course. If there’s potential for an unintended outcome in any human interference with Nature, chances are pretty good that that outcome will occur. Dingoes ate the reintroduced quolls. The “island” quolls had no innate fear of dingoes, no sense that the scent of a dingo meant danger. The reintroduced quolls were less wary of the predators. 
 
What’s to say? It seems that a more reasonable approach in reintroducing any animal species is to make sure it knows its predators. But who foresaw the weak link in the chain made by human decisions? Humans introduced the invasive frogs, humans tried to save the quolls, humans reintroduced the quolls to the mainland, and now humans have to figure a way to make island quolls aware of dingoes. Of course, all the “fixing” implies that there aren’t other dangers reintroduced quolls might have to face, dangers for which they are ill prepared.
 
Is there a lesson? Sure, probably several. Nature is a bunch of things, right? Like rocks, and trees, and air, for example. Nature is also a bunch of processes, interactions among the bunches of things in sometimes very complex ways that range from the micro- to the macroscopic. And many processes are cycles and sub-cycles with intermixed occasional influences introduced from “outside”—sometimes as abruptly as an incoming comet. 
 
I don’t know about you—but I can guess—but I have a tendency to see the “obvious,” such as the decimation of quolls by their feeding on poisonous frogs for which they had no evolutionary training. And I, like those Australians who tried to save the quolls, would have looked for the most immediate causes of the most apparent consequences. 
 
Object and process. We’ve become involved with both, but we’ve found that every time we use or alter objects, we also involve ourselves in some process. Take several examples: We love our beaches, don’t we? We vacation on them. We build on them. We destroy their dunes. And then we try to “fix” the problem. We build  slatted “snow” fences, for example, to capture sands to make new dunes, and we restrict access to those reestablished dunes. Or we widen beaches through the construction of groynes (rock piles built perpendicularly to the beach face), hoping to capture sands transported by the waves in the surf zone, usually in a prevailing direction. So, we stop the movement of sands in one place only to find we rob the sands from a place farther along the beach where the longshore transport of sands would have deposited them. Or we build on cliffs at the bottoms of which waves constantly cut, only to find that our eventual choice is limited to shoring up the cliff temporarily or moving the building; sea cliffs have always formed and have always been undercut. “Clods,” to use Donne’s word, “will be washed away by the sea.” Our belief in our foresight and mastery usually comes at great expense and ultimate loss of the stability we sought.
 
In almost every instance of human control of nature, we find the root of future problems whose solutions exacerbate natural changes and disruptions. Nature has always changed, and organisms like quolls have come and gone through processes unrelated to the recent invasion of interfering humans; check your neighborhood for living dinosaurs or giant sloths for proof. 
 
Nature always bounces between equilibrium and disequilibrium in its objects and processes. Weather under high pressure eventually gives way to weather under low pressure; calm gives way to storm, and vice versa. In our observation of the obvious and our desire to make it permanent, we impose either consciously or accidentally, something or some process we believe to be “better” than the prevailing circumstance.
 
We’ve been living a trial-and-error existence during the entire history of our species, and the errors won’t stop just because we think we have learned our lessons. In its objects and processes, Nature still has lessons to teach. 
 
So, now, if you want to keep quolls on the mainland of Australia, you have to figure a way for them to survive under the threat of dingoes. You have to go out of your way to “educate” quolls. You just caused yourself another time-consuming, money-consuming task that offers no guarantees that in teaching quolls to fear dingoes, you might introduce another unforeseen disequilibrium, like a runaway quoll population and possibly some disease they might carry to other animals and humans. 
 
Homo sapiens sapiens? Don’t ask on whom the quoll tells; it tells on thee. 

*Warren, Matt. This endangered Australian marsupial was set to make a comeback--until it stopped fearing wild dogs. Science, June 5, 2018. Online at http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/endangered-australian-marsupial-was-set-make-comeback-until-it-stopped-fearing-wild 

Compliance meetings predate the modern world of businesses, industries, and university athletic programs. Think Inquisition. Galileo and Giordano Bruno suffered because of noncompliance, the former in an imposed “house arrest,” the latter in being burned alive. At the very least, those who are guilty of noncompliance suffer some exclusion from the compliant. “No one gets back in ‘here’ until he or she complies; no one gets to participate without complying.” At the worst, those who are guilty like the victims of ISIS lose their lives, some by fire in actions no different from those that cost Bruno his life. The world hasn’t changed. 
 
This isn’t a matter of traffic rules to which we adhere to avoid crashing into one another. It’s a matter of free-thinking. We could look at ancients who suffered because of noncompliance, Socrates, for example, and wonder whether or not we really are any different. Take a social tour of universities today. You might not see a requirement to drink hemlock tied to noncompliance, but you will see exclusion demanded of those who don’t comply with political correctness. 
 
We pride ourselves on our ability to think rationally and to understand, but throughout civilization’s rise, a common principle has bound any majority: Compliance, the enemy of free thinking. Every group has its rules of compliance, written or unwritten, spoken or unspoken, yet always “understood” by the group even when such rules are ill-defined.
 
Look around social media. An “Inquisition” is still active. Whatever the “dogma” and whatever the commonly held beliefs, those who don’t comply are subject to expulsion of some kind, exiled or virtually imprisoned because of their noncompliance. Free-thinking is generally a myth. From ancient to modern times, free-thinkers and the noncompliant have been ostracized.
 
Here’s a “should” that seems to me an action necessary if we want to break free from compliance: All of us shouldexamine the dicta of compliance to which we adhere in our interactions and in our thinking. The bond of compliance that enables societies to rise also quashes the freedom of individuals to think as they will.  
 
We could say that we are the product of societies that rose and fell through both compliance and noncompliance. The Soviet Union, for example, no longer exists because of noncompliance. Yet, no one is free from the rules that bind. As noncompliance overturns a compliant society, a new compliance evolves. We’re locked in a cycle, and the only way out personally is by examining why and how we individually comply. In examining our own compliance, however, each of us has to consider the consequences of noncompliance. 
 
 All societies have been and still are Orwellian; every year is 1984. The irony is that in the very places where free thinking is either promulgated or assumed—universities and the Press—any noncompliance seems to be punishable by exclusion of some kind. Thinking freely buys the noncompliant a cup of hemlock.  

Surfers, we say, ride a wave. But do they? This might seem a little silly, but it’s a matter that physicists take seriously. What is a wave? Consider again. In an arena or stadium, a crowd “does the wave” that appears to circle the stadium.
 
Science books simplify water waves by three properties: Length, height,* and frequency. Length is simply a measure from one wave crest to the following crest. Height is the vertical measure from the deepest part of the trough that lies between successive crests to the elevation of the crests. Frequency is a repetition in a given time. We are familiar with all three properties because we have all seen waves on water, and most of us have seen waves on an oscilloscope, either in a hospital or in some video or movie. And we have all noted that another common property of waves is that they occur in “trains.” So, surfers, hearing that a wave train is characterized by crests of great heights, hustle to the beach to catch that perfect “wave.”
 
Back to the first question: If the defining properties of a wave include the distance between two crests, then how do the surfers “ride a wave”? And what is the amount of water involved in the “wave”? 
 
“What do you mean?” you ask.
 
There’s obviously a volume of water through which a wave moves, the water itself serving as a medium through which the energy, typically from storm winds, moves. And the same water that transfers the energy of one wave train can transfer energy that produces other wave trains simultaneously. In the “train” one crest usually catches the attention and effort of the surfers. In a crowd doing the “wave” in a stadium, there’s obviously a collection of individuals. Which individual constitutes the wave? Each? Some? All? Strange. But we focus on the overall effect, the “crest,” rather than on any individual. 
 
In other words, if we ignore what quantum physicists tell us about “light waves” or “electron waves,” we can say “A single crest does not a wave make” in our world of common experiences. Two crests do, or two troughs do, but not just one of either. If a wave constitutes two of either, then a surfer rides the leading edge of a crest, the first or the second crest, but not both simultaneously. A crowd makes a moving “crest,” also. In both instances an individual water molecule or an individual fan, though necessary to the composition of the wave, doesn’t make the entire phenomenon. Yet, we commonly call a single crest a wave, and we might chuckle when a sole fan rises and sits repeatedly in a wave simulation. We seem to understand “wave parts” and partial waves. And we recognize frequency. A surfer can’t finish “riding a wave,” as we say, and immediately “catch the next wave,” meaning the following crest that “completes” the wave length and frequency. There’s a similar temporal limitation in a “crowd wave.”
 
There’s something in the definition of a water wave that seems to apply to how we measure one another. Yes, we’re always measuring people, particularly when it comes to their repetitive behavior, which we take as a defining property of their character.
 
     “The measure of a man is what he does with power.”—Plato
 
     “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”—Samuel Johnson
 
     “The true measure of a man is what he would do if he knew he would never be caught.”—Lord Kelvin
 
     “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times      of challenge and controversy.”—Martin Luther King, Jr.
 
     “The measure of a man is yada, yada, yada…”—Others, including you, probably
 
There are many kinds of measures when humans are the object of measurement, and all of them fail for the same reason that we aren’t really correct when we say that surfers ride a wave. If a single wave is a complex of two crests divided by a trough, how much more complex is the life of anyone that we reduce to the frequency of some recurring motive and behavior? 
 
Stand in a swimming pool with a measure and measure a wave. Waves don’t stand still, do they? As you hold your measure from crest to crest, the wave occurs by cycling through crest-trough-crest. You might note that while you attempt to take your measurement, other waves also pass beneath your measure. You might also note that just as the surface responds to the passage of energy, the water below is also responding. So, how do you take the measure? With respect to a single “wave,” you probably choose its surface manifestation. “Hey, all you intermixed waves, stand still. I’m trying to take a measurement here.” 
 
Oceans and big lakes have waves because of winds that transfer their energy to the water. Because there can be multiple storms, there can be multiple wave trains superimposed on one another. As we know, when crests coincide, they produce a “higher” crest; when troughs and crests coincide, they “cancel” some or all of the wave height. That coincidental merging makes the ocean surface movements very complex. But we, like the surfers, concentrate on a single dominating crest. 
 
Just as we ignore that moving complex of multiple crests and troughs with different frequencies, we ignore a similar complex when we “take the measure of a man—or woman.” We might say, “She’s definitely a Type A individual.” That’s not just a description; that’s a measurement, as is “He’s a bad actor.” 
 
As you know from experience and from your own personality and talents, people aren’t just the front of a wave, aren’t just the leading crest. Everyone’s life is a series of superimposed waves of motives and behaviors. We’re all sloshing oceans. If we choose to measure a wave—or a “wave train”—by taking its length, height, and frequency, we have isolated only part of the energy moving through an ocean. Similarly, when we choose to accept a wave “crest” as representative of an individual, we have isolated what we believe is the important measure. We take that as “the measure of a man” though we know that each “man” is a wave train of motives and behaviors.
 
We tend to see others as individual crests they appear to ride. We tend to ignore that in everyone there lies an ocean through which energy from multiple sources—often storms—passes. Think about that the next time you take the measure of anyone. None of us is just a crest or a trough. We are all superimposed wave trains. 

*Height is twice the amplitude. 

“When the minority viewpoint made up at least 25% of the population, it was likely to rapidly become the majority viewpoint….”* That’s how Roni Dengler reports the finding of Damon Centola, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist. And here’s the “kicker”: According to Yale sociologist Emily Erikson’s interpretation of Centola’s finding, personal preference is “’not just about what individuals want.’” 
 
That’s a scary thought. “We're being manipulated,” I say. 
 
You say, “No, maybe you are, but I’m an independent thinker. People only acquiesce to others’ thinking when they are already inclined to do so. If you have firm convictions and solid reasoning…well, you won’t just follow the dictates of a burgeoning crowd. I stay clear of mobs and mobthink. No one tells me how to think.”
 
“Maybe,” I respond. “Gotta be something to Centola’s study. He ran a simulation via a computer game with a couple of hundred participants, and the 25%-plateau appeared to be the tipping point for a minority opinion’s rapid spread through a population. Of course, that was an experiment. Centola had controls. In the ‘real world’ such controls are virtually impossible because of potential chaos in the system, that is, because of unknowns interacting, such as the effect of authorities, traditions, and new circumstances or events introduced from without. The ‘real world’ isn’t a closed system for long. Someone in North Korea, for example, is going to find out that the people in South Korea have greater wealth and freedom. Ideas from without can disrupt ideas that lie within. Some people fled Nazi Germany as Hitler rose to power after the a  Nazi way of thinking reached a tipping point. But give Centola some credit for the experiment. He’s given us a new way to examine our opinions and the actions they engender.”
 
“Still,” you say, “you make the argument against his finding when you point to the open system of opinion. In a free society, I’m under no obligation, so I don’t have to follow anyone.”
 
“Yes, but tipping points seem to have some historical validation. Ever fish for steelhead trout in Lake Michigan? Okay, I haven’t either, but if either of us were to fish for the fish, we would be demonstrating that tipping points are easily reached when there’s an innate penchant to do so. In 1893, people introduced California’s anadromous trout into the lake to enhance fishing there. If you recall from your ichthyology class, such fish, like salmon, can live their adult lives in the ocean, but can return to fresh water rivers to breed. They’ve got some control over that osmosis process built in that enables them to move between salt and fresh water. Well, according to a genetic study by Mark Christie of Purdue in West Lafayette, and Janna Willoughby, some of the introduced steelhead survived the move and adapted.** Freshwater fish need to take in salt, whereas saltwater fish need to eliminate it. Anyway, within a century, the steelhead introduced into the lake adapted in a rapid evolutionary jump. Within a hundred years there was a big change, but the geneticists think that change was brought on by genes already present in the fish, genes that switched on.
 
“So, here’s my take on Centola’s study. Every opinion, if taken to its extreme, seems to reach its antithesis. There are certainly enough revolutions that begin Leftist and turn, to protect their gains, Rightest. Think Cuba, Venezuela, and 1920’s Russia. Think of what Marx and Engels have wrought. Didn’t they envision an eventual society that needed no overarching government, a peaceful, cooperative society? Some 100 million deaths later, we can see how their ideal became a horrible real. Look at the exodus of people from Venezuela in the second decade of the twenty-first century. But sometime in their past before the switch to communism, enough people in these countries, probably about 25%, convinced the majority that they were on the right path to a better life.
 
“Now you’re probably thinking that I’m off target, off topic. But there were in the pre-revolution stages, the idealists who were in the minority and who had to work to get to the tipping point. When they reached it, the population favored them and adopted their thinking because there was, in fact, something of the truth in what they advocated, something that lies in everyone’s mind: That no matter what the current status is, there’s always a desire for things to be ‘better.’ In other words, we hold antithetical thoughts as we ride a teetertotter. When the opinion-holders on the other side reach just the right weight, they can tip the board the other way.
 
“Tipping points are real, it seems. Take the recent study of rocks in Ethiopia by Scott Maclennan.*** We have good evidence that Earth has on occasion become ice-covered. Not talkin’ Northern Hemisphere. I’m saying thewholeEarth, even the tropics. And Maclenann’s study suggests that a ‘snowball Earth’ occurred rapidly 717 million years ago when a tipping point was reached. That tipping point? Apparently, when ice cover reaches 30 degrees latitude, it’s destined to expand rapidly all the way to the Equator because ice reflects sunlight (changes the albedo of the surface) more than rock and water (Earth had no land plants 717 million years ago). That planetwide glacial event might have been as rapid as 1,000 years after the 30-degree-latitude tipping point was reached.
 
“So,” I say, getting back to Centola’s study, “it seems that tipping points can lead to very rapid changes: Steelhead trout in a century and the whole planet in a millennium. Now, imagine, the effect in people. I think it’s genuine. I think I might be manipulated without my knowing it, and I think the expression attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels: ‘If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.’
 
“We’re all, I hate to say it, a bit like steelhead trout. We can be transferred to a lake of opinion where we’ll adapt to think the ecology is normal because somewhere within, we all hold the gene of opposing opinion or a gene that finds it convenient to switch its purpose as survival and convenience—or social pressures—warrant.”
 
*Dengler, Roni, How minority viewpoints become majority ones, Sciencemag.org, June 7, 2018. Online at http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/how-minority-viewpoints-become-majority-ones
 
**Pennisi, Elizabeth, This saltwater trout evolved to live I freshwater—in just 100 years, Sciencemag.org, June 1, 2018. Online at http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/saltwater-trout-evolved-live-fresh-water-just-100-years
 
***Joel, Lucas, Ancient Earth froze over in a geologic instant, Science mag.org, June 7, 2018. Online at http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/ancient-earth-froze-over-geologic-instant
 
 
 

In June, 2018, two relatively well-known people committed suicide: Kate Spade, famous in the world of fashion, and Anthony Bourdain, famous in the world of food and travel. They weren’t the first relatively famous people to take their own lives. Lists of suicides are long, and the people on them range from the famous to infamous and include those known only locally. 
 
I haven’t taken a poll, but I believe the most common concept associated with suicide is angst. That’s what I hear when people discuss the subject. “She must have suffered from some hidden anxiety.” The term is at the center of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, and, though I’m not an expert on his meaning, I think he probably derived his use of the word from some innate fear, possibly one as simple as that which children experience in night terrors: “Mommy, there’s a tiger under my bed!” It is difficult for any of us to go through life without encountering, if only briefly, possibly in some feverish delirium, a sense of dread and anxiety brought on by a recognition (conscious or unconscious) of our finiteness. We can’t dismiss the feelings as insignificant because they come from a reality we all have to face: We live in a world of something, of things we can count, and we are destined for a no-thingness that I will call The Uncountable. 
 
Heidegger’s philosophy also centers on the principle of “no-thingness” that he appears to associate with a withdrawal from the “world.” Again, I’m not a Heideggerian, but on the surface his philosophy seems to encapsulate some of the feelings and circumstances that suicides experience.
 
That the countable world of things is on our minds is not a new thought. From our buying a new car or rearranging furniture or sock drawers, we are immersed in the countable. It’s a point that William Wordsworth makes in “The World Is Too Much with Us”:
             
            The world is too much with us; late and soon
            Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers…
 
Wordsworth goes on to say we’ve lost our connection with Nature, and he includes a line that seems appropriate here as he desires a condition that would give him:
 
            …glimpses that would make me less forlorn…
 
Apparently, in a world that is “too much with us” we are steeped in anxiety and are “forlorn.” The countable world can’t hide that “innate” angst; it surfaces, mostly unexpectedly. When people who seem to have “everything” commit suicide, we seek an explanation in some “hidden personal troubles.” But, in truth,  all of us have a common denominator that we hide: Anxiety, whatever its temporary cause, has an ultimate association with a dread of death. A world that is “too much with us” is one that has caused further anxieties: “How do I pay the bills?” “Who really loves me?” “What am I doing chasing wealth and fame?” “What if I lose my talent or long-practiced skills?” “What if I fail?” “When and where can I find a moment of rest and feeling of safety?” 
 
Obviously, I can’t match here the volumes that have been written about suicide and the reasons people take their lives. The experts—made “expert” through studies of suicide notes and interviews with those contemplating or failing suicide—have weighed in on the subject.  Nevertheless, I want to add a perspective I derived from a strange little report that just emerged, one that ties the rest of the animal world to the complex, angst-filled world of humans. Be warned that the following might seem a stretch because I base it not on a study of suicide, but rather on a study of bees and their ability to understand a mathematical concept.  
 
Depending upon further research by others, experimenters’ findings come and go, and the finding that bees understand the concept of zero might just be one of those that “goes.” In the meantime, let’s make much of a discovery by Scarlett R. Howard, Aurore Avargues-Weber, Jair E. Garcia, Andrew D. Greentree, and Adrian G. Dyer.”* 
 
Zero, nothing, nada, nil, not whatever, because of the whatin whatever. Anyway, it seems that bees, according to the experimenters, can be taught the concept of zero. And that amazes many (though some see possible errors in the experiment). Here are these tiny busybodies flitting from flower to flower to fill hexagonal storage cells we rob of honey for sweetening tea and toast, and we never knew that their tiny brains might be capable of some complex thinking or distinguishing. 
 
Do we need to rethink the concept of intelligence? Maybe redefine instinct? Challenge our young to do better in math? Experiment with human understanding of zero? And what in the world that is too much with us does this have to do with suicide?  
 
Can I show you a relationship among angst, zero, The Uncountable, Heidegger’s No-thingness, and suicide in a world that is “too much with us”?
 
Yeah. That last thing I said. Apparently, many who involve themselves in destructive behavior don’t have a concept of zero, as in zero life. Or, maybe they do. There’s a report by the CDC that suicide rates have increased by more than 30% in 25 U.S. states.** (Only Nevada has shown a decrease in suicides, but don’t take that to mean much: Nevada had a high suicide rate) Let’s do the math for a moment:
 
     Being alive = being-countably-alive = encountering angst, a common denominator of humans 
      
     Being dead = zero-being-alive = eliminating angst and a denominator of human existence
 
No doubt there are many reasons behind the desire of some to reach zero in this equation of life. Middle East suicide bombers believe that zero life on Earth earns some other quantifiable life, such as the commonly mentioned “eternity with seventy-two virgins.”*** Others, such as people lost in the anxiety caused by emotional and physical pain might seek to zero out the pain, either by engaging in unhealthful behaviors or suicide. You can probably enumerate other reasons for seeking zero life, of eliminating the anxieties associated with a world “too much with us” and a tiger under the bed. 
 
But are all personal demises the same? Don’t bees sacrifice themselves for the sake of the hive? Do bees that sacrifice themselves for the hive do so with the thought, “Hey, count me in; I volunteer.” If their final act is altruistic, is it so because of a consciousness that we believe is now evident because bees can associate no-thingness and zero?
 
We could argue that the bee isn’t consciously choosing suicide, but rather acting from instinctive necessity, or necessary instinct. Zeroing out its life in defense of the hive is just a built-in mechanism evolution provided for maintenance of the species. We could also argue that nothing in the sub-human world equates to the complexity of human behavior. So, let’s say that there are categories of reasons for suicide.  
 
First category: People who choose zero for some altruistic purpose, say soldiers who throw themselves on grenades to save others. They aren’t really choosing suicide as much as they are preserving the lives of others, very much like bees that sacrifice their lives for the hive. But the same argument might apply to people who believe that by killing themselves and taking others with them, they serve some greater purpose than their individual lives could serve through living, suicide bombers, for example. So, it seems that in the first category there can be distinctions, all depending upon one’s perspective that he or she can actually accept a self-chosen death as a positive act.
 
Second category: People for whom life has become a physical, emotional, or mental burden.**** They ostensibly “choose” to zero out the angst in their lives, but we can never know the exact reason, even if we discuss it with those who survive their attempts. Our incomplete understanding derives from our inability to know all the influences in anyone’s life—including our own. We might even argue that circumstances beyond their control and their conscious knowledge drove them to suicide, possibly hallucinations induced by drugs or an undetected brain disorder. If the latter, then there is no attributable responsibility.***** Suicide, we might argue, isn’t a matter of one’s acting irresponsibly, but rather of one’s having no responsibility. Suicide eliminates all in a world “too much with us,” including angst over all that is countable like episodes of physical or emotional pain. 
 
We can’t know how many bees or humans have committed suicide or sacrificed their lives for others. If we have a rough estimate of humans, we’re at a tiny fraction of any estimate of the number of bees that have existed. We can’t even know the percentage of humans or bees that have killed themselves or offered their lives for some “greater” purpose, such as the preservation of other lives. And we can’t know the number of people who committed suicide because of angst that overwhelmed them like some addictive drug. Even in the CDC’s statistics, we could find some deaths dubiously attributed to suicide. 
 
Note that in those two categories, you (I’m assuming) find a distinction “with meaning.” But note, also, that you distinguish among your distinctions. The soldier who throws himself or herself on a grenade to save fellow soldiers, or the policeman who offers his or her life to save hostages, reaches a noble zero, and the nobility of the act can even be recognized by the soldier’s enemies. The suicide bomber doesn’t have the potential for universal acceptance though those behind the act probably see it as heroic. Zero seems to have variable meanings when one zeroes out life for a cause.
 
Are there distinctions to be made with respect to those who would zero out life for physical, emotional, or mental reasons? Knowing how much pain anyone suffers is difficult for most of us, even the most empathetic, to understand, but we all know the angst that derives from The Uncountable and the anxiety that derives from a world that is “too much with us.”
 
I don’t know what reasons Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain—or any other suicide—had for taking their lives. I’ll never know. I could guess that they had a concept of zero and that it played a role in what they thought suicide would accomplish. As long as there are humans, there will be suicide because as long as there are beds, there will be imagined tigers lurking beneath them; angst is probably innate and is only masked by the world that is “too much with us.” We might not have a chance to stop suicides driven by fanaticism, but it might be possible to stop those that might occur because of a world that is “too much with us” and an innate angst. We just need to teach children just as we taught some bees the concept of zero in a positive way. “Come here, bend down, and look with me under the bed. There are zero tigers under the bed, and zero children have been devoured by them.”
 
Wait! I’m not finished; I have to add a point. Bees and people share existence, but neither self-created. So, all beings with whatever level of consciousness they embody, find themselves already existing. There’s no “before” that anyone can verify for his own existence. One either exists or one doesn’t. And that applies to humans of various kinds of belief systems, including those who claim to have no belief. I find it interesting that both believers and atheists operate on very similar grounds when it comes to maintaining or zeroing out existence. No one makes “existence.” Everyone finds himself already “in existence.” Again, there are only two choices 1) stay in existence as long as one can and 2) hurry a departure from a world that is too much with us. Live with quantities or zero them.  
 
If Heidegger thought to paraphrase Descartes, he might have written, “I have angst; therefore, I am.” And if angst is associated with the quantifiable and qualifiable “thingness of the world too much with us,” then the ultimate way to eliminate angst is by leaving the Countable for the Uncountable. 
 
Believers believe in a personal Source of Existence for the universe, God or gods. Atheists don’t “believe” in a personal Source and look for some pre-existence process in quantum fields to explain how the countable came to be. For the latter, existence simply “is,” making it either the Eternal Now or a countable 13.8 billion years old. In either case, both believers and nonbelievers speak of “existence” and recognize it as both qualifiable and quantifiable. We qualify it in our many adjectives: Kate Spade was “RICH AND FAMOUS.” Anthony Bourdain was “RICH AND FAMOUS.” Both lived an existence that others perceived to be “DIFFERENT” from that of the poor commoner. But we impose qualifiers, whereas, in the matter of the ultimate quantifier, we see some objective countable number: You, for example, are a certain number of years old. Your existence is measurable, and it doesn’t matter whether or not you believe in a Source of Existence. There will be two dates on your tombstone, just as there are two dates on every tombstone, in most instances, neither date is a chosen one. The beginning date is not a choice. In the instances of suicides, the second date is a matter of choice. For those who “die naturally” (from age, accident, disease), the quantifying stops rather unexpectedly. 
 
So, no one gets a choice between becoming part of a world that is not only too much with us, but also one filled with angst and ending the quantities and the associated angst. It took hundreds of thousands of years until humans incorporated the concept of zero into math. That seems strange if we consider that bees probably understood the concept since before the demise of the dinosaurs, possibly as long ago as 130 million years. But maybe bees don’t have any angst—at least that’s our common thinking. How could they? How could they be as intelligent and self-aware as we are. Aren’t we “super self-aware” in comparison to all other life-forms? Aren’t we always aware that we exist and that we will sometime not exist as we now exist? 
 
So, it seems that there are two ways to come by an understanding of zero. Bees get theirs through the absence of something measurable, and johnny-come-lately, we also have acquired such an understanding.****** We seem to have derived our understanding through angst and the notion that not just the quantifiable world, but also existence itself can be zeroed out. Most likely—but there’s no way to know—bees don’t wake up at night worrying whether or not there’s a tiger under the hive, so they don’t suffer angst. That means that the only way they sacrifice their lives—their existence—is in the service of others. 
 
Given that we have no quantifiable evidence that we get to re-enter existence should we decide to exit it, taking a life because of angst or anxiety about a world too much with us zeroes out the only opportunity to experience existence. Because such existence is finite, the logical approach would be to consider that this life isn’t practice, regardless of how much angst besets us, how much anxiety we experience. Maybe the heart of human existence, the very thing we should focus on for its own sake, is angst. It underlies our experience with existence from our earliest period of consciousness, from the very first moment we discovered that zero is not only possible, but also inevitable.   
 
 
 
*Numerical Ordering of Zero in Honey Bees, Science, 08 Jun 2018, Vol. 360, Issue 6393, pp. 1124-1126. DOI: 10.1126/science.aar4975 at http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6393/1124  
 
** https://www.newstimes.com/technology/businessinsider/article/The-CDC-just-released-staggering-data-on-the-rise-12977196.php
 
***All named, by the way, Sister Mary Milk of Magnesia
 
****See the difficulty in classifying? When death by fire was certain for people in the World Trade Towers, they chose an alternate death by jumping. It was a split-second decision and might have been more motivated by escaping one kind of death, rather than by actually “choosing” another.
 
*****Even in an argument that the overdose suicide was a personal choice, one has to allow that the responsibility to first try a drug isn’t the same as irresponsible behavior driven by an addiction to that drug.
 
******Thanks go to some people in India centuries ago.

Basically, the thought is this: A sculptor chips away unwanted marble. Another version of a version, this one attributed to Michelangelo: “To make a statue of Pegasus, I chip away all the marble that is not a horse.” No one really knows for sure where the statement originated or its exact wording, but both Michelangelo and John Ruskin have been mentioned as the wit behind the thought. A similar statement is attributed to Auguste Rodin.
 
As you sculpt your life from the raw materials of your talents, learning, experience, and environment, you have a choice of perspectives. You can look for the “form in the rock,” the “horse,” or you can look for whatever is not the form in the rock, the “not-a-horse.” All of us probably do both as any occasion inspires us to choose one perspective—or one method—over the other. Sometimes we look at what we don’t want to include. That’s a bit of a negative approach, but it saves us, for example, from going to jail or to rehab. At other times we look for what we want to include. That’s a bit more positive, and it makes us “goal-oriented.”
 
Those who spend their lives excluding might still make an admirable representation. In eliminating the “not-a-horse,” they can eventually reveal the “horse in the rock,” Pegasus for example. They just spend their time rejecting what isn’t the ideal they seek and eventually stumble on the ideal they seek. In sculpting, the approach is akin to running a null hypothesis. “I can’t see any relationship to the ideal form I seek in the rock before me.” Those who look directly for the form they desire, reach their goal through their skill and experience with rock, and by some ultimately inexplicable intuition tied to a bit of luck.  
 
Marble is a good medium for sculptors, but not all marbles are the same. No doubt you’ve heard of Tuscany’s Carrara marble, made particularly famous by Michelangelo. Then there’s the marble of Rutland, Vermont, also a “high quality” marble. Why this rock and not others? What makes a rock good for sculpting? Lack of cleavage planes helps. 
 
Not all rocks have such uniformity that they don’t split (cleave) along weak boundaries among layers of crystals. Marble, a metamorphic rock of “baked” limestone, exhibits this characteristic of non-layering--not all marble, but many marbles are "non- foliated," that is, containing no "leaf-like" layering. Other metamorphic rocks that are more durable than marble because of their composition, like slate, a foliated rock that is easily split for roof tiles and blackboards, phyllite, and gneiss, have cleavage planes. Marble’s weakness lies in its composition: It reacts when acidic rain hits it, revealing this propensity to dissolve in old, faded tombstones whose inscriptions are now impossible to read. Of course, there are rocks other than marble that also lack cleavage planes, such as some of the granodiorite quarried in Barre, Vermont, at the Rock of Ages quarry. A statue of granodiorite will outlast a marble statue in a humid climate with acidic rain.  
 
Michelangelo had to know that the marble block he chose for a sculpture lacked those crystal planes. As I wrote above, there’s a bit of luck involved in the sculpting process. Certainly, some cleavage plane could be hidden deep within the block that Michelangelo chose. But he seemed to have an eye for both rock and form. Now think teachers and trainers of all kinds. Their goal is to sculpt the intellectual, the performer, the athlete from the raw materials they see before them. With luck, they choose an apprentice with few weaknesses; they see the potential, the form hidden within. But they also have to deal with the marble they don’t want, chipping off bad habits or weaknesses to get at the more solid form. We do the same with self-sculpting.
 
All of us encounter unexpected “cleavage planes” as we sculpt our lives. Not all the forms we believe we can reveal in the “raw” materials of Self can be achieved. Uniformity makes some rock ideal for sculptures, but uniformity in humans is difficult to see or stumble on. Not all Carrara marble lends itself to sculpting. Every quarry has waste rock. 
 
So, we sculpt with what we have. Occasionally, we find a perfect piece of marble that we can use to make the form we desire. But all of us spend a considerable amount of energy just chipping off what we don’t want in the final product: Vices, for example. If we are gifted sculptors who have a bit of luck, skill, and persistence, we can produce a winged horse we can look on and say, “I sculpted that.”  

You’ve heard and possibly used the expression “Nature abhors a vacuum.” It makes sense in science fiction and suspense movies when a pressurized cabin is breached. Actors fly out. “Sucked out” of spaceship or plane. Air and objects move from areas of higher pressure to areas of lower pressure, and outer space makes the largest of vacuum cleaners with respect to a pressurized ship. Sure would be a convenient way of cleaning up the inside of your bedroom, wouldn’t it? Open the bedroom door and out fly the dust bunnies—and also that sock you lost about a year ago. “Was that under the bed that long?” you ask yourself.  
 
To say that “nature abhors a vacuum” is to speak teleologically, but most of us, even many physicists, don’t mind.* You might even hear an atheist (or if you are an atheist, hear yourself) say it. Alternative expressions are usually less poetic and more verbose. So, in light conversation we accept that we can say Nature has some purpose or preference, at least for the convenience of the moment or for expediency. 
 
Then there’s the expression “When your time comes” (or “If it’s your time”) to encapsulate the idea that you, like the dust bunnies or the evil villain (e.g., Goldfinger in Goldfinger), have a predetermined moment when the big vacuum of Eternity will “suck” you out of this world. Destiny is your destiny. There’s some agent (God, Nature, the Cosmos) that has determined when there will be a breach in the cabin of your existence. Nothing you can do about it. If it’s your time to go, then it’s your time to go. Again, you might even hear a scientist or an atheist say it. Definitely, you’ll hear the devout say it: “God has a plan.”
 
With that as a context, all of us need to ask ourselves a simple question that has led to the most complex philosophizing and theorizing. Is Nature determined? Is your life determined? If it’s your time to go, can you do anything to change the calendar? Didn’t Jim Fixx die in the best shape? 
 
Well, you could argue that Jim Fixx, author of The Complete Book of Running and esteemed fitness buff, had an inherent flaw, like some Greek tragic hero, in his atherosclerosis and previous small heart attacks that he ignored. Had he paid attention to his arteries and not pushed himself—and his reputation that added to book sales—he might still be alive, showing up at very senior citizen races and being videoed for widespread YouTube distribution. “He’s just amazing,” we would all say. 
 
So, was James E. Fixx’s demise determined? Did the vacuum of Eternity take him at the appointed time? Did he have from the time of his birth in the 1930s a moment that was his time? Was Fixx fixed? Did his initial conditions, say some genetic penchant, determine his 1984 demise? 
 
Of course, there’s no way to know, is there? It’s a matter of belief. Even for atheists and physicists. Yet, there was Stephen Hawking, victim of ALS, who lived into his seventies, whereas famous tight end Dwight Clark—especially known for his Super-Bowl-winning catch from Joe Montana—died from ALS in his fifties as did Jim Fixx at age 52: Athletes succumbing to “their time” while a wheelchair-bound physicist seemed to defy “his.”
 
No, none of us can account for the coincidental juncture in the paths of a runaway truck (or a sudden heart attack) and an in-shape jogger. None of us can account for all the possibilities. We have enough to do in keeping the spaceship of our probabilities in order, accumulating dust bunnies and all. Each of us, however, is just a cabin breach from that big vacuum, so making teleological statements is generally acceptable. There’s no way to test the matter. “Had she not gotten on that space shuttle, she (teacher Christa McAuliffe) would be alive today. It was her time.” How do we know it was hers and not the time of one of the other astronauts? Was it their “collective time”? Silly ruminating, right? 
 
Gosh, I’m sorry to have brought up the topic. Now, you’re going to spend the rest of the day asking whether or not your life is determined or arguing that your life is not determined, that you have control. Frustrating thought! And you have me to blame. You had already determined how you were going to spend your day, and now, like some accidental breach in your day-ship, you’re being sucked into a thought from which you believed you were protected by strong walls of daily affairs.** 
 
“Do I determine?” you ask. “Am I determined?” you ask. “Can’t be the latter,” you say, “because I’m a sophisticated rational person. I know what I’m doing. Yes, it’s true that most of the 100 billion or so humans that occupied spaceship Earth are no longer passengers because they passed through the breach, and that like them I’m finite, but being determined is just a matter of chance for some, and not for me. Then, again, if it’s my time….” 
 
What are you going to do the rest of the day? Go for a run? Go for a ride? See your doctor? 
 
*Telos = “end,” “goal,” “purpose”
 
**Had you not opened this website to read this blog… Wait! Does this mean that reading this was determined? And by asking that, am I turning you against further visits? Or, was this visit a determined last visit? Now, I’m wondering whether or not I’ll even be around to write another blog. What if it’s “my time”? Or, what if it’s “your time” so that you’ll never see another brilliantly stated point of departure? 

You are walking along, letting your mind wander as you wander with me when you say, “Just for starters, consider this: Can you make a model of your life? Wouldn’t know where to start? I’m with you. When I look back, I see so many intricate connections and so many unknowns, that I can’t think how I would model my own life. And here I am, just a single small being. Imagine, then, the difficulty of modeling Earth systems. How could you get a handle on all of them, their interactions, and both their causes and effects? Models are easy when you can build them with Legos or model kits, but when you try to build them with formula and algorithms, something strange happens. You don’t know all that needs to be included; and you have to admit that any model isn’t the ‘real thing,’ rather just a representative of it. And computers don’t guarantee the correctness of the model, especially if you want to use the model to predict what a person or a planet might do next. I’m thinking of something Tony Rothman and George Sudarshan wrote in Doubt and Certainty: ‘A theory has few assumptions; a model has many additional assumptions as necessary to produce an answer’(p. 11).”*
 
Thinking your comment is a challenge and wanting to show that I would know “where to start,” I say, “Wait a sec.” I stop at the Walmart, disappear inside, and emerge with some glue and sticks. You watch me for twenty minutes as I sit on a park bench until I triumphantly hold up a little wooden structure that is a cross between a “stick figure” and a model airplane as I say, “There, that kinda looks like my life.”
 
“Are you kidding?” you say. “That’s a bunch of popsicle sticks glued together. It doesn’t represent you any more than twisted pipe cleaners or bread-bag ties make a Rodin.”
 
“Well, I just wanted to get the gist. Yes, I left some things out, like my interactions with my grandmother or my brief encounters with store clerks—oh! And that girl I liked in the fourth grade.”
 
“You see,” you continue, “that’s the problem with trying to model a single human life. Where to start? How much to include? Where to end?—especially if the person is still alive. And that’s where I have problems with modeling even more complex systems, such as a planet. We might get the ‘gist,’ as you say, but how does all the work put into a ‘gist-model’ really reveal reality? And how many assumptions did you include just to get the product you originally sought. Models of real people and models of whole planets require, as Rothman and Sudarshan write, ‘as many additional assumptions as necessary to produce an answer.’”
 
“I guess I misunderstood and took your opening comment as a challenge to build a model of my life. Maybe popsicle sticks and glue made a bad choice of materials. What about a Venn Diagram? How about a graph, possibly a pie graph? If you want me to aim for more specificity, I could write a poem, a novel, or a very detailed autobiography. Wouldn’t those meet your objections? They’re not mathematical, I confess, but aren’t they acceptable ‘models’ of life? Or what about a painting? I’m thinking of Martin Heidegger’s analysis of Vincent van Gogh’s 1886 painting entitled A Pair of Shoes. I think, if I recall properly, Heidegger says the painting captures the essence of the woman peasant who would have worn the shoes. It’s a simple painting, just a pair of clod-hoppers with partially unlaced strings and scuffed leather and broken backs. Basically, he thinks the artist modeled the woman’s life in the painting. Wouldn’t my popsicle-stick figure be just as suitable a model? Couldn’t I...er...Would a psychological profile help? Don’t’ you think any of those might serve as predictors of my future? And about that thing you mentioned about modeling Earth systems; wouldn’t some mathematical or computer model give us a pretty accurate representation of Earth, even one that we could use to predict Earth’s future, you know, like the models that the IPCC relies on to predict sea-level change or climate change?”
 
You counter, “Again, I have to say with Rothman and Sudarshan that models include assumptions that modelers need to get the results that they want. You think your popsicle-stick model of your life has sufficient assumptions behind its construction to make me understand your life or your potential? You know, Heidegger’s interpretation of A Pair of Shoes isn’t the only interpretation. A guy named Meyer Schapiro, an historian, wrote that the shoes in the painting were probably van Gogh’s, and they, therefore, didn’t depict the hard life of a woman who worked long hours in fields. What if I look at some of the IPCC models to find that either there were ‘included assumptions’ necessary to reach the conclusions or ‘included data’ that were just convenient for the model’s construction and the desired prediction?”
 
“I think I get what you are saying. You want me to be cautious in accepting any kind of model because of the ‘included assumptions’ that the modeler has chosen. I guess that works for psychological profiles as well as for a big planet with complex interrelationships among its solids, liquids, and gases, all processed and re-processed by cycles, super-cycles, and external influences like the Sun. I wish you hadn’t brought this up. Now, I have to rethink how I could model my life or think about whether or not any life could be modeled. And I have to ask myself whether or not I know what kinds of assumptions others, like the IPCC people or psychologists, include in their models, especially when I hear or read 'the model predicts.' And with regard to the former group, those predictors of climate, I guess I should consider their massive modeling problem. The American Meteorological Society online includes the problem of ‘Connecting the Tropics to the Polar Regions.’* The opening statements on the site acknowledge that 'the relative roles of local versus remote forcings in causing the changes are being debated…the time is ripe for a detailed look at how the tropics and the poles are coupled climatically.' Now, I think it’s really interesting in light of your comments to look at what the news media and politicians keep telling us with such surety. It’s like watching a debate between Heidegger and Shapiro over the real meaning of A Pair of Shoes.”
 
*Rothman, Tony and George Sudarshan, Doubt and Certainty. Perseus Books. Reading, MA, 1998. 
** https://journals.ametsoc.org/topic/connecting_tropics_to_polar

“I was in the library the other day when I came across an old history book. For some reason, I picked it off the shelf—not that I was interested in what the English were doing in the fifteenth century—and randomly (or so I thought), opened the book. Probably, not by the same chance by which I stumbled across the book itself, I opened where someone had pressed a flower. ‘Coincidence? Some devilish fun by a long-gone student?’ I wondered. It was, after all, between two pages devoted to the Plantagenets and the Wars of the Roses. Anyway, there was the flat flower, its colors faded and its volatiles leaked into and out of the book. It was a bit crumbly, so I dared not touch it for fear that I would destroy what someone had for whatever reason preserved.
 
“And then I began to wonder about what I have long thought: If something isn’t personal, it’s virtually meaningless. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re saying, ‘That’s not true; I can find meaning in philosophy, math, or science. Those matters aren’t really personal, are they? I can use my higher faculties and think about their meaning; I can give them meaning; I can understand their meaning.’ And, of course, you would have a valid point.
 
“So, let me elaborate. When I say that if something isn’t personal, it’s meaningless, I am referring to our ability to experience it the way others might experience it. I can be in the midst of a cheering crowd relishing the victory of the home team, and I would ‘feel’ the moment as the crowd around me ‘feels’ the moment. I can go to a funeral, and with others jointly ‘feel’ the moment, the sadness, the loss. But I can also hear about a tsunami taking 250,000 lives of people I don’t know, and I might not be able to incorporate the experience in my being. Years after the loss of a loved one, there’s a lingering personal nature to the loss. Look around to ask who among your acquaintances currently experiences that loss of 250,000 lives. Get what I’m saying? If something isn’t personal, It’s virtually meaningless.
 
“Now you’re going to argue that you have had genuine personal involvement in distant tragedies like those terrible school shootings, the terrorist suicide bombings of marketplaces, and the assassination of President Kennedy, that you ‘feel’ those incidents. They have become personal. Let me grant you that, but it makes my point. When you can make something personal, you make it meaningful, truly meaningful. Even math. For example, I saw nothing of interest in trigonometry until I learned field mapping. Suddenly, I ‘felt’ trig. I understood trig. I incorporated trig into the way I saw objects and places. But that is of little interest to you, right? So, let me go back to the assassination of President Kennedy. The country at the time underwent a personal experience—probably not everyone did, but generally—over the loss. It was a ‘personal’ funeral like others people have attended for loved ones. It was meaningful. But what about President Garfield’s assassination? How do you feel about that? How meaningful is it, that is, how personally meaningful is it?  
 
“And so with the Plantagenets in that history book. Maybe if I reread Shakespeare’s plays, I’ll incorporate the stories into some personal meaning. Drama can have that effect on us, thus, all the wet faces during the last scenes of Titanic. Drama, indeed any form of artistic expression, can elicit a unification between observer and observed. But in a history book’s retelling of the Plantagenets, the pressed flower seemed to be more meaningful than the fall and rise and fall and rise and fall of King Henry or King Richard and all those others who rose to and fell from power in the fifteenth century. The pressed flower, even though I dared not touch it, seemed more real and elicited a sense of quizzical meaning: ‘Who left this here? Boy? Girl? Impish kid expressing a sense of humor? Romantic? 
 
“Did the flower have a lesson to teach that was more personal than the lesson in the book? Time erases meaning. That flower is not what it once was. Its faded color and two-dimensionality plus its lack of scent dictated that I could not experience what the person who once picked and pressed it had experienced. 
 
“Is time the only eraser? What of distance? Being far from the tsunami might have made the tragedy more intellectual than emotional. Are you beginning to think, ‘When I look around, I guess that many events, though seemingly emotionally charged and highly meaningful for others, really have little personal meaning for me. Gosh! Am I insensitive?’
 
“I ask myself the same question. I can’t seem to make the suffering during the Wars of the Roses meaningful. I have difficulty making personal the sufferings of others in distant lands. Is it because tragedies abound? Because the innocent suffer in numbers too great for my limited brain to comprehend? Because I’m preoccupied with local, more personal matters, the matters in which I find meaning because of my involvement?
 
“That pressed flower seems to make a statement about me if not about you. I guess I’m guilty of intellectualizing the meaning of something I cannot ‘feel.’ I can dispassionately say, ‘That’s terrible,’ when I refer to a tragic event or to a war long over, its dead unremembered. People died during the Wars of the Roses. Apparently, the best we can do all these centuries later is see them two-dimensionally, dried out, bereft of sweet odor, and crumbling.
 
“Some might argue that individually, we can’t spend ourselves emotionally on all the past or current tragedies large or small. To do so would make us ignore that separation of two kinds of meaning. One that is dispassionate; one that is personal. But for most of us the reality is that that which is not personal is not truly ‘meaningful.’”

Postscript: When the first large outbreak of Ebola in West Africa appeared to threaten countries outside Africa, people took the threat seriously. It could, they felt, hit them personally. In May, 2018, another outbreak hit the Congo. But the news didn't seem newsworthy until the victims multiplied. At the end of July, 2018, take account of how the tragedy becomes or doesn't become "meaningful."