Stupas, sikharas, steeples, and minarets dot our planet. So, let’s play the “what-if-a-visitor-from-another-world-asked-you-about-these-tall-structures?” game. Knowing that your species has a wide variety of religions and that beneath those structures people practice their faiths in various ways, you would say…what?

“Uh, well, hmm, you see, people around the world accept that there is a Being superior to the beings on this planet. No, I don’t mean the kind of superiority that you exhibit because you are technologically superior to humans. I mean that people believe that even you, with a different origin, are inferior to some Supreme Being or Supreme Beings.”

“You mean,” the visitor says in English, that there is a smarter being somewhere?”

“No, it’s more than that. Not just smarter, superior in type of existence and, in fact, responsible for all existence. Also, the people beneath stupas, sikharas, steeples, and minarets believe that this Being can affect life on this planet. They pray to this Being to ask for favors, or protection, or healing, or maybe even a victory in war or in something as seemingly silly as an athletic endeavor.”

The visitor scratches its large head with one of its six appendages, and asks, “Does the Supreme Being answer the prayers?”

You stumble a little over conflicting thoughts, but reply, “Not always. Some prayers seem to go unanswered.”

“How do you know whether or not the prayers that seem to be answered are not the product of chance or coincidence?”

“We don’t know for sure, but sometimes strange things occur, things that cannot be explained by chance or coincidence, such as a recovery from a chronic or even terminal illness.”

“If I understand you, Earthling, you build these structures so that you have a place to pray to the Supreme Being. Do they have significance?”

“I guess there are several reasons for the structures. See that creature in the air. That’s a bird. On Earth we say birds of a feather flock together. Humans of like mind associate. Like-minded humans and those curious about their mindset go to these structures. And people actually travel just to see these structures not because they share the belief, but rather because they consider the structures to be a form of art or objects of historical significance. Humans also gather at these structures because they believe that their prayers are more effective when they are joint supplications. Also, the structures are connected in a hierarchy. Some are more important, bigger, and more elaborate than others. Almost all of them are tended by people who have devoted themselves in some special way to the Supreme Being.”

The visitor, somewhat confused, then asks, “If you are all humans, and if most of you believe in a Supreme Being, why do you have so many versions of belief and kinds of gathering places?”

“Through our history we have had individuals that have attracted followers to their vision of the Supreme Being. The stupas, sikharas, steeples, and minarets are expressons of cultures that grew around these few influential individuals. Ah! I just thought of something to tell you. Once a human accepts the mindset of a belief, it is very difficult to acquire a different mindset. There’s comfort and security in any tradition of belief. You might find this hard to believe, but humans have actually killed those that do not share the same belief, and they have at times destroyed the structures as a symbolic way of eliminating a competing belief.”

The visitor, pondering, says, “So, does the Supreme Being have consciousness? Is the Supreme Being aware of both the building and destroying of structures for Its sake? Is It aware of the killing.”

“One can only have faith. And, apparently, one can have only one faith.”

From a satellite, mountainous and rocky Arakaou in the Ténéré Desert in western Africa looks like an open black claw, and it contrasts with the tan sand dunes it seemingly is about to enclose. The sands, building into dunes more than 600 feet (200 meters) high, move closer to and into the rocky claw with each sweep of the wind. It is a slow-motion march to inclusion, each sand grain moving with the mass and unable to stop the push. 

There’s a Claw of Arakaou in everyone’s life. It awaits the individual sand grains swept by the winds of philosophy, culture, politics, or theology. Because everyone is finite, movement toward the claw is inevitable. No one has enough energy or time to push back against the mass of similar grains in the four winds. Oh! You might escape one, two, or even three of the winds, but the fourth will pin you inside the claw.

(Pic from hangglider at http://artgroupsdfw.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Paragliding-over-Arakaou-Niger.jpg )
(Pic from satellite at   http://www.earth-3d.com/?eid=6400058_NE_HWLL_01&title=Arakaou-Niger )

“Look,” she said in the morning. She was enveloped by fog, and she was noticing something for the first time. “What is that I can see between me and the house?”

“It’s the fog. You are looking at many little droplets. You are in the middle of a cloud on the ground.”

“A cloud!” She exclaimed.

“Yes, clouds are collections of many water droplets. Fog is a cloud on the ground. You can’t stand on a cloud as the Disney animations show. Peter Pan would fall through the many droplets just as you can walk through all these cool droplets.”

“You mean like a cloud in the sky?”

“Yes.”

“So, this is what the inside of a cloud looks like.”

“Yes.”

“Why do they look so white and solid in the sky?”

“Well, they are far away from you, and they reflect light. If you fly above the clouds in the daytime, they all look white because they reflect sunlight. When the bottom of the cloud looks gray, or blue, or purple, you are looking at a cloud thick enough to block sunlight. And because there are so many droplets, clouds far away have a kind of unity that you can recognize. In fact, you can even imagine animals and faces in the clouds, even though those animals and faces aren’t part of the clouds. You can find smiling faces, or mean faces, or scary faces in distant clouds.”

“So, when I see something that’s far away, it might look different if it were close or I was even inside?”

“You got it. Do you think that works with anything else, like individual people or groups?”

In Latin and traditional English grammar, verbs capture time by categories called tenses: Present, past, future, present perfect, past perfect, and future perfect. These six tenses cover the temporal components of language. The three tenses called “perfect” might seem a bit strange, but they are integral to our way of thinking of actions and states of being in a temporal way. Perfect means “complete” or “completed.”

Unlike the simple past as captured by “I baked a cake,” the perfect forms require an auxiliary, or helping, verb, such as have, has, or had, or will (informal) or shall (formal). The perfect tenses have varying degrees of past. The present perfect indicates something that was completed in an event that runs to the present: “I have baked a cake.” The past perfect indicates that the action is separated from the present by some duration: “I had baked the cake.” Then there’s the future perfect. Strange, isn’t it. Apparently an oxymoron this coupling of something that was completed with something that will happen! “By the time you get home, I shall (will) have baked a cake.”

We set many of our goals by the future perfect. “By the time I get through school, I shall (will) have….” “By the time I become CEO, I shall (will) have….” Why? One reason is that we need references for much of what we do. We relate things to orient ourselves. Another reason is that we have a certain confidence that we can predict the convergence of two events.

Now, what is your future perfect? 

Boundaries. We complain about them. We alter them. We expand them. Mental and physical boundaries are part of our character and fundamental to our existence. You won’t get beyond your skin. You won’t get beyond some kind of geography unless you move from time to infinity. Infinity has no boundaries and, thus, no geography.

Some boundaries are fuzzy, but you’ve learned to live with them. Fuzzy boundaries like your relationships or beliefs might be frustrating, but they are generally recognizable. Sharp boundaries like the walls of your house are easy to identify. You recognize differences in place by knowing boundaries. You can fly across a country like the United States, look out the window, and watch the landscape change from east to west or west to east on either side of the Mississippi River. The climate boundary is a bit fuzzy, but you see more green on the eastern side of the river than on the western side, where semiarid landscapes replace humid ones. Again, a bit fuzzy, but nevertheless a recognizable boundary: A boundary separates places.

You have always been a geographer because you have learned how to distinguish one place from another, mostly by experience. Your crib, your room, your house, your neighborhood, your city, your country. You’ve lived an expanding geography, expanding, that is, in a finite universe. And along the timeline and geography of your life, you have identified many boundaries. Some you cross; some, you don’t.

As a finite being, you have become an expert in personal geography. Knowing place, defining its limits, these are part of your character. You know that everything you are and do will be in a place that is more or less defined by a boundary or several associated boundaries. That is, everything except die.

We are bound to place throughout life. As long as we are alive, we have a chance to explore a new geography. Why, then, do some choose death? There is no knowable geography of infinity because there are no boundaries, not even fuzzy ones. Those who commit suicide make a choice between knowable geography—even fuzzy geography—and the absence of geography. Why would anyone, a geographer from birth, relinquish the very essence of what she or he is?

Want an argument against suicide? Base it on geography. Base it on the geographic nature of every living organism. Base it on the love of knowing, identifying, and dealing with boundaries. That’s the nature of life in general. For conscious life geography is a matter of staying within, crossing, or expanding boundaries.

Have a serious illness? Been hurt in an accident? Lost mobility to encroaching arthritis? Boundaries, all of them, but recognizable and possibly crossable. New geographies to explore. New choices to make about expanding finiteness. It’s better, in my estimation, to find joy in being a living geographer rather than to cross beyond both fuzzy and definite boundaries to go where there is no geography.  

Every day, someone on TV, radio, or the Web gives you collated data from thermographs, aneroid barometers, psychrometers, anemometers, radiosondes, and Doppler radar: These weather instruments provide the stuff of forecasts. You might never have a reason to use one of them personally, but you definitely reap the benefit of their use during stormy weather. 

There is one weather instrument that everyone knows how to use: The umbrella. Oh! It’s true. You might sit on one, leave it in the corner of a restaurant, or get it caught in a big wind, but those are mistakes and accidents. You know how to use an umbrella. You know to hold its shaft perpendicularly to ground in a drizzle and to hold it at an angle parallel to a driving wind. You know that it protects your head and shoulders, but that it never keeps your shoes dry. You know how to share it to maximize dryness for two. Yes, you are an umbrella specialist. Someone should pay you.

Sharing an umbrella is a noble venture. You know that each of you will have one wet and one dry shoulder. That’s the usual diameter of coverage for most umbrellas. You could, of course, carry a beach or patio umbrella around with you, but that would invite more people to seek partial shelter on the perimeter and make walking difficult. Look at that multi-legged creature moving through the puddles! Aliens from another planet! We’re being attacked!

As an umbrella specialist, you know that the tips of umbrella ribs can poke out an eye of a passerby, so you carry one of moderate size and move it vertically up or down to avoid blinding others on the sidewalk. There seems to be an umbrella protocol. All these strangers passing in deference to one another. No one poking out another’s eye. No one carrying an umbrella at a single height. Umbrella tops form not white caps on the sea, but “black caps” in waves about 6 to 8 feet above the sidewalk.

The random black cap waves are a model for cooperative humanity. The rain pelts all and is beyond our control. Each of us is going to get a little wet beneath our umbrellas, particularly as we move along under the umbrella wave. For some reason, the rain seems to bring out the humanity in us. Is it because it is beyond our control and that as a species we are like schools of fish, forming a mass of individuals that sacrifices to save? 

Most people (if not all) have some level of claustrophobia. Let’s put that in perspective.

Universe: Seemingly unlimited space. You should be comfortable here.
Galaxy: Takes us 250 billion years just to circle it once. Again, no sense of confinement.
Solar System: That trip to photograph Pluto took nine years.
Inner planets: Our closest neighbors are about 30 million miles away at a minimum. 
Earth: Close to 200 million square miles of surface.
Continent: Depends; North America covers about 9.5 million square miles.
Country: Try driving from Key West to Seattle.
State: Rhode Island is the size of Rhode Island.  
County: Neighboring towns are separated enough to have football rivalries.
City: Jacksonville, FL covers almost 900 square miles.  
Street: Have you met the neighbors down the block?
House: Multiple rooms, some of duplicate purpose.
Room: Big enough for a bed at least.
Shower stall: You can still move around, but you’ll probably step out to dry.

When we see where we are with respect to something larger, we get a perspective about our place. Shower, dress, and leave the house to see a cloudless night sky open to infinity. Openness. The vastness of place with no knowable boundaries. No edge to be reached, no wall, no visible endpoint.   

Now narrow down to something confining: A prison cell. Would you choose that? Some people do. In fact, some people repeatedly choose a cell as their primary place of existence.

As Dr. Christian Conte says in his 2015 TEDX talk to prisoners and staff of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a85YUfqSMJ4&feature=youtu.be), confinement in prison is a matter of choice by an individual, but it is a matter of societal concern that someone made the choice of self-confinement. It is also a matter of concern that across the nation about 70% of released prisoners commit another crime, making recidivism a major societal problem. Seventy percent of American prisoners apparently choose to return to a place they openly say they abhor, a place of limiting, claustrophobic confinement.

So, what if we thought of crime as a matter of choosing a place of extreme confinement? What if we learned from youth a definition that equated crime and claustrophobic confinement? What various motives drive people to shrinking the radii of their personal spaces? Why do their paths go out of and into a confinement? What can we do about changing the cycle of crime-arrest-conviction-imrisonment-release-crime-arrest-conviction-imprisonment? Obviously, at this time prison isn’t changing the attitudes of 70% of prisoners.

Applied to seemingly incorrigible prisoners in a maximum-security section of a state prison, Dr. Conte’s Yield Theory reduced violence in “the Hole” by a considerable amount in just six months. Yes, prisoners actually changed their behavior. That has to be good news. Some people who had chosen a life of confinement actually chose to expand their attitudes. If people that are considered to be the “worst” offenders can make a change even when confined to a claustrophobic place, think what might happen if parents, teachers, and neighbors applied Yield Theory in their interactions.  

One of the analogs of Yield Theory is an onramp of a freeway, where drivers cooperate by yielding and merging. Psychologically, one practicing Yield Theory merges seamlessly with another already on a life path. Even if that path is headed toward crime or violence, the merger requires riding along without confrontation. It’s a subtle, persuasive technique that recognizes the commonness in humanity and the effectiveness of meeting people where they are on the road of life. A perpendicular onramp to a freeway would make a place of abrupt interruptions to the flow of traffic and increase the potential for collisions that destroy the vehicles of life.

The place where we meet each other can be a mutual path to openness and to expansive space and purpose. Most of us live our lives as travelers that go freely from one place to another in a universe that has a size of our choosing. Some, however, choose by their actions a limiting, stationary confinement. To merge with another traveler enables one to guide someone toward a place that can be less, not more, physically or mentally confining. (For more, see www.drchristianconte.com).

Do what Columbus did. Stand on the wharf, look out over the sea, and watch a departing ship disappear, bottom, middle, and top, as it passes the horizon. Of course, we know the planet is round (an oblate spheroid, actually), and we know the ship disappears in that order because it passes over Earth’s curvature. To think otherwise, to think that Earth is flat, means there’s a waterfall out there on the horizon, and strangely, ships slowly fall over the precipice of a very big infinity pool.

For Flat-Earthers, a returning ship seems to defy gravity. It appears top, middle, and bottom, rising over the powerful slow waterfall that drops into some unknown. Yes, for Flat-Earthers a waterfall seems to be what frames the oceanic horizon. Believing in a flat Earth challenges logic. Watching ships disappear and reappear at the horizon, one realizes that roundness explains observations. Roundness explains how ships can return. Flatness doesn’t.

As you know, you might frame this argument for a round world logically but still not get a Flat-Earther to believe. Why is that? Apparently, Flat Earthers, even if they take a cruise beyond the horizon of a ship’s homeport, won’t accept roundness. Belief dominates observation.

Not accepting the nature of the place where one lives serves little purpose except to satisfy some need for securing a belief. And that applies to those in places where social and professional interactions are inimical to one’s life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You can’t make a world just by thinking it. You can’t make a worldwide waterfall that plummets into who knows where and that keeps you bound to a place, afraid to explore. Falling off Earth is not possible. Your ship can return if you want, and there’s a continuous round world of places to explore if you choose not to return.

Places have character. Some are inhibiting. Some are dangerous. Some, not so much. Others, even beneficial. Get real about the place where you live, and see whether or not you are in the best place for YOU. Don’t keep yourself from exploring different places because of that imaginary slow waterfall on the distant horizon. 

One might think that life on an equatorial coral atoll is a pleasant business. What’s there to worry about? Take, for example, living in the Republic of Kiribati, a country composed of three sets of islands south of Hawaii. Ah! Tropical paradise. Eat coconuts and some fish. Life is a matter of relaxing in the sun.

Look at a map of the Pacific Ocean. Find Kiribati. Yes, it’s those little dots on which 100,000 people live. The Republic of Kiribati is composed mostly of low-lying coral atolls. The carbonate tops of volcanoes, coral atolls form rings in the water around the sunken tops of volcanoes slowly subsiding deeper. Eventually, Kiribati will sink as its volcanoes subside, and the country even now is waging a battle it has waged for the past 8,000 to 10,000 years (since the most recent worldwide continental glacial retreat) against a rising sea.

Eating just fish and coconuts that are supposedly good for you might get a bit old. Then you might have a problem with fresh water. It’s like forever to the nearest rainforest. Some of the islands get very little precipitation. As the ancient mariner noted, “Water, water every where/nor any drop to drink.” Fortunately, you could survive on coconut water.

So, there you are, living in paradise with an economy dependent upon a little help from the outside. Australia and other countries lend a hand, but what do they have to gain in all the charity? What if their priorities change? Some 100,000 Kiribatians might find living in paradise turning into life on a space station with no supply ships.

Kiribati is tropical paradise. Or, think again. Is it? No place is paradise, but every place can approach it. Place places limitations, but we determine how we use place within those fundamental limits. We, even in our most primitive development, have discovered how to use resources previous generations never knew existed. So, in Kiribati, coconuts are the source of copra for export. There’s more. Coconuts are now used in traditional medicine to treat about 40 ailments and supposedly have about 50 health benefits, including heart health. Coconut water, oil, and even coir have become trendy products.  

It doesn’t matter where we live. There are risks and hardships. Your personal safety and success lie in minimizing both and creatively using resources. It doesn’t matter where we live and the seeming limitations of place. What appears to one generation as a limitation, might be an advantage to the next. You don’t live in paradise, but with a little effort, you might almost live there. 

Whether or not Dido was a real person is a bit veiled behind a time without Twitter and Facebook and by the destruction of her city and cultural records by the Romans during the Third Punic War. No electronic capture, no digitized existence of Dido substantiates her tragic life. Instead of a USB port, we have Virgil’s poetic account of her death at the Port of Carthage, where she committed suicide in anguish over her abandonment by Aeneas. 

Dido, a Phoenician princess in Tyre, having lost her husband to assassination at the hands of her brother, left that city to wander the Mediterranean, eventually founding Carthage, a North African Mediterranean city that became an empire and enemy of Rome under subsequent rulers. In Virgil’s Aeneid Dido meets a kindred spirit, falls in love, and has an affair. Her lover is Aeneas, a Trojan prince who survived the famous war that destroyed his city. Aeneas is driven by a goddess to found his own city in Italy. That city is Rome.

Bound by his obligation to the goddess, Aeneas obeys when he is told to end the affair and resume his mission to Italy. Dido, feeling betrayed, has her sister build a pyre on the pretext of burning the bed she shared with Aeneas. Distraught, Dido curses his descendants, and then stabs herself and dies in the fire that Aeneas can see from his ship. The rest, as they say, is make-believe history.

So, what do we have in Dido? She seems to represent many women who undergo tragedies beyond their control. Her brother assassinated her husband. The gods broke up her passionate affair. What’s a girl to do?

Dido chooses anger and suicide. But why? Okay, she couldn’t do much about her brother’s murdering her husband. And she couldn’t do much when the gods decided to break up her affair. But hey! She had other things going for her. She founded a city that would eventually become an empire to rival Rome, the city that Aeneas was destined to found. That’s a little payback, isn’t it?

Just meeting Aeneas was fortuitous, wasn’t it? I mean, there she was, in a small enclave that gave rise to a famous mathematical problem (I’ll get to that in a sec). And, And, And, this handsome guy comes sailing along. And, believe it or not, he’s also royalty, a prince. That’s fairy-book stuff. And, And, And, it’s not as though she didn’t have a good time while it lasted. They were very passionate, first in a cave and then on a bed—the one she burned.

Back in Tyre she had already survived the tragic death of her husband and hidden his wealth from her avaricious brother—she pretended to throw sacks of his gold into the sea. She had already “gone on with her life” by leading a band of people across the sea. She then tricked the people of North Africa into giving her a larger foothold on the continent than they imagined when she said she wanted only that which an ox’s hide could encompass—thus leading to the math problem of including a maximum area with a minimum perimeter. This was a woman with some smarts—she cut the hide into very thin strips (you could run your DNA to the moon)—and some leadership abilities. She supposedly abducted prostitutes on Cyprus to provide wives for the men in her entourage.

So, why the suicide? What drives one who has such seeming internal strength to acquiesce to a moment of despair when she had already experienced tragedy and survived? She knew there was a future of her own making when she left Tyre. Wasn’t there also a future, however unknown, in Carthage as well?

Too bad this smart woman didn’t live today. If she did, she would know about diodes. She would know not only about semiconductors, but also about conductors and insulators. You know what they do, don’t you? Conductors, obviously, conduct. A current flows through them in two directions like the passionate love between Dido and Aeneas. Insulators prevent the flow of electrons by providing a big “gap” that they can’t jump like Dido’s cool revenge on her brother when she hid her husband’s wealth. Semiconductors, or diodes, allow only a one-way current. Apparently, Dido was insulated during her first tragedy. Her love affair was obviously a two-way current. Then the Aeneas left, and she became a semiconductor. Here’s a sad part: Semiconductors can be blown out by too strong a voltage.

At one time she was an insulator. At another she was a conductor. In the end, she became a diode. All the current flowed in one direction. Feeling abandoned? Feeling distraught? Becoming a diode yourself? Time to realize that you were, at other times, both a conductor and an insulator. Don’t be like Dido. Don’t become a diode.