While Lucy was roaming ancient Ethiopia, another human ancestor was in the neighborhood. Some three million years ago—give or take a week—Australopithecus was represented by two species. Lucy, the well known species afarensis, and Jane Doe of the species deyiremeda occupied the Afar Triangle. Two hominin species occupied the same place simultaneously. I wonder whether or not their relationship was friendly.
 
Probably not. Why should I think thus? Today there is only one human species, and relationships are strained in most places where only slight human differences, such as beliefs or skin color, define dissimilarities. No, I picture afarensis and deyiremeda in conflicts akin at the very least to those of screaming teenage girls starring on a reality TV program because they are upset over the use of a makeup (intended pun) case.
 
So, one day way back when in the Afar Triangle two species’ paths crossed over a bit of edible something on the ground. They could have shared. They could have broken “bread” together. They probably chose conflict. Somehow they passed that response to billions of their human descendants.
 
Deyiremeda means “close relative.” Close, but not the same species. And here we are three million years later—give or take a week—all the same human species, and what do we daily see? Conflicts over matters small and large. When it comes to peaceful relationships, big-brained bipedal Homo sapiens with all its technological advances and supposed wisdom really hasn’t progressed much from its hominin ancestors. In matters of behavior, we are their “close relatives.”

“What if everything made sense?” I ask.
 
“Fool,” you say, “the proposition is self-contradictory. If everything made sense, then whatever anyone did or said would have to be logical to everyone, even that which we now perceive to be illogical. And we can logically show that, since even logic is ultimately not logical, something has to be illogical, and, in that sense, not make sense. We know what makes sense because we know what doesn’t, regardless of any logician’s or mathematician’s arguments to the contrary. Tragedies, for example, interrupt lives, and their intrusion into seemingly sensible lives is often inexplicable. ‘Why me?’ or ‘Why them?’ is not a question that we easily answer after a tragedy, such as a random act of violence or the chance encounter with a pathogen or an oncoming truck (probability is not an absolute).”
 
“Yet, we seem to live our lives as though we want everything ‘to make sense.’”
 
“What?”
 
“Two things are going on here. One has to do with categorizing the stuff that defines our character. The other has to do with how that stuff changes, but keeps a large semblance of its initial meaning. Humans love to see patterns. Maybe that’s why computer-driven images of fractals are so mesmerizing. We look for patterns, and we categorize. The categories and patterns that we recognize clothe our worldview. We squeeze as much of this clothing as we can into the suitcase of meaning for our trip through life. What we carry seems to make sense. We personally packed everything, didn’t we? We must have had a reason? We rarely take something out as we continue to pack more into the suitcase. Once we establish what fits into patterns we recognize, we look for inclusion, and we don’t realize that we alter the packing arrangement, making our own shifting fractals of meaning that play on a mesmerizing screen. Throwing something out of that bag is an admission that we made some mistake, that we had included the senseless in the suitcase. Sorry for the mixed metaphors, but if you look in the suitcase you now have, you’ll discover something.”
 
“Now, what do you think I’ll discover?” you ask.
 
“That during the journey the suitcase has been banged around. The contents have shifted. The socks that were once in a neat stack are now mixed in with the shirts. The categories are all a-jumble. They aren’t mutually exclusive. The senseless is the sense of the arrangement. You’ll have to go picking through everything to find a piece of meaning here or there. If everything made sense during and after the life journey, then nothing at the end of the journey would be different. Why make the trip?”
 
“Exactly,” you respond. That’s why I called you a ‘fool.’ Only the foolish want everything to make sense. ‘Sense’ changes. ‘Meanings’ change. ‘Patterns’ change as we include or exclude. That trip you talk about has many stops and many opportunities to examine what you initially packed.”
 
I add, “In her book on category theory, Eugenia Cheng writes, ‘rationality is a sociological notion’ (155).* Then she says, ‘Well I believe it’s a good thing to be aware of what you’re assuming.’ In a sense, what she argues that what makes sense makes sense. We can mix metaphors or stick with just one; it’s your choice. The suitcase full of categorized meaning will be jumbled during the trip. The fractals of meaning seem to change, then repeat, then change, sometimes changing only in scale. The suitcase is full of axioms; it is full of assumptions that remain largely unseen even though they are there organizing and reorganizing the socks and shirts. What makes sense makes sense only because you want it to make sense. You’ve been taught what makes sense. On that teaching, you make more sense in scales large and small. And everything makes sense until it doesn’t. Now, back to my question: What if everything made sense?” 

*Eugenia Cheng, How To Bake π. Basic Books, 2015

Tesla was brilliant and highly knowledgeable; he spoke a number of languages, was a ceaseless worker, and was inventive. His abilities and skills did not translate into inordinate wealth, but rather into a reliable electrical system and into motors that billions of people rely on today. Cars worthy of his name should be as reliable as the man whose memory they supposedly honor.
 
Tesla would turn over in his grave. Self-driving cars named after him have crashed. So far, crashes by such self-driving cars reveal that perfecting a machine’s behavior isn’t just a matter of deduction and science as one might think. That seems ironic. All machines work according to basic Newtonian mechanics, and such mechanics are the product of deductive reasoning. If the actions of a machine are still at least slightly unpredictable, how much more so are the actions of humans?
 
When he was student, Nikola Tesla was challenged by Professor Pöschl who, in response to Tesla’s ideas about eliminating sparking from DC devices, said that Tesla would “accomplish great things, but he certainly will never do this [eliminate sparking].” In his account of that classroom encounter, Tesla wrote, “We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willful effort of the brain, is futile.”
 
Deduction serves us well, of course, and Tesla, a true scientist at heart, did not discount it. He knew his math, and he used it to solve electrical problems. But he was chiefly an inventor, and inventors rely on their Muses. It was during a walk with his friend Szigeti that his muse gave him the solution to Professor Pöschl’s sparking problem. Tesla wrote, “The idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed.” He had an “Aha!” or “Eureka!” revelation.
 
You might not be an inventor, but you have had your share of such moments, times when insight flashes through your brain like a branching bolt of lightning. True, you might deceive yourself: Some of those “insights” might not conform to reality. We all have conflicting Muses pulling us in different directions. But occasionally, one clear and truthful Muse gets her message to you.
 
Cultural mores and patterns are the auto-drive mechanisms of any society. Most of us wander through social settings under complex influences to which we simply react: There are stimuli and responses, and many of the latter are learned. But every so often, you have your own special moment of revelation when some aspect of your life becomes instantly clearer. Such is the experience of people who abruptly cease harmful addictions or reject their previously harmful behaviors. Such is the experience of people who suddenly “see” a truth previously masked by their acquiescence to some autopilot’s control.  
 
The personal value of your eureka insights lies in how they divert you from a collision toward which you are heading on some seemingly logical and automatic setting.   

There’s no doubt about it: Affluent people follow trends, and trendy places attract trendy people. Just look at big city bars, restaurants, and dance venues that are a tough ticket. “Everyone” wants to be there and to be seen there. You’re in, and “you’re in.” It’s evidence that we often let place define us.
 
But any kind of place can define us. Places have either a gravitational field or Dark Energy. Places can both attract and repel.  Gravity is a fundamental force, and, though it’s not been called such, Dark Energy appears to be another fundamental force. That’s what makes someone who helps people somewhere off the map of trendy worth attention, someone like Jozef De Veuster, later known as Father Damien of Molokai, and then, after his death, Saint Damien. Let’s keep his story simple: He served lepers in Hawaii, helped Hawaiians with the disease improve their community, and eventually died of the disease. His work influenced Gandhi and inspired others to take on that fifth fundamental force, the repellent Dark Energy.
 
You can, no doubt, name others who, possibly where you traverse, also gravitate toward places that repel others. They are those who somehow overcome the repellent force in places with epidemics like Ebola, or in rough neighborhoods, or in poor ones. One wonders what force pushes them into places with Dark Energy.
 
What would the world be if “Everyone” thought such repellent places were trendy? That would, of course, require us all to exert a force that overwhelms Dark Energy.

Now we know that astronauts with extended visits to the International Space Station come back to Earth with some degree of eye impairment. The retinas get flatter, possibly from a buildup of fluids in a head that is not subject to the up-and-down that our planet’s gravity imposes. What would longer stays in space do to an astronaut? A journey to Mars and beyond takes a long time in a weightless environment. Yes, astronauts will get taller in microgravity, but will they be able to play basketball on Mars if they can’t see the hoop? What good is it to get to Mars if you can’t see the planet? Might as well just send a rover with cameras.
 
The spaceship environment changes its occupants. We can apply technological solutions to the physical challenges, and some of those, such as wearing a Russian Chibis suit, might work to reduce the loss of vision during a long spaceflight. However, there’s no guaranteed solution to this newly discovered vision impairment yet.
 
We’re always adapting to environments, even to the seasonal changes we experience on Earth. But we have now both created and moved into environments that kept humans at bay for 200,000 years. We can live at the South Pole and under the ocean for extended periods. We’ve literally made environments under the assumption that no place is a “Forbidden Planet.” The universe is ours as soon as we find a way to explore it. We’re always in the design stage of new “towers of Babel.” It isn’t just Nature that abhors a vacuum, it’s us. We abhor a human vacuum. We’re sucked into every human vacuum.
 
Then there’s that darn eye problem. We can identify human vacuums, but once we enter them we chance becoming blind to our surroundings, shooting “air balls” that miss not only the basket, but also the backboard.
 
So, the environment into which you have moved is your Mars. You’ve moved in, and you believe you have filled the vacuum and adapted. But what is it in your new world that you can’t see? You might be shooting air balls and not even know it.

Stores sell electric candles that flicker. They never get smaller, but you have to supply batteries. Are we fooled? No, we recognize them immediately as artificial candles. Why use them? Given the trouble of dripping wax, the potential for fires and smoke, and the necessity to replace ephemeral wax, some people obviously prefer the convenience and safety of imitations. We’re good at pretending. “What a lovely table setting. I like the romantic flickering of the artificial candle. It looks so real.”
 
Edison once said that because of the electric light only rich people would have candles. That was an insight with broad implications throughout modern society. Candles, the mainstay of nighttime lighting for centuries, have become largely ornamental or sacramental. Unless there’s a blackout in your neighborhood, a birthday cake, or some kind of ritual, you don’t need candles. They are an addendum to and an integral part of ambience. And now you can combine pre-Edison technology with post-Edison technology. Wouldn’t Edison be amazed?
 
Think of how much of our technology is devoted to artificially capturing the sense of “the real.” Vinyl that looks like leather. Composite flooring that looks like solid wood. Artificial grass and decorative plastic plants. Synthesized meal replacements and flavors. “Hey! This really does taste like chicken! Try some.”
 
Lighting has come full circle, and so have we. We can have any style of electric light throwing off any number of lumens, and yet some of us choose to have one that looks like a candle and that throws off approximately the same amount of flickering light as the thing it imitates. The Past and the Present have joined to produce an offspring, a pleasing child who seems to be finding its way between darkness and light.
 
We are all children of Past and Present, all finding our flickering way between darkness and light. Sometimes we shun the full light of the present to rest in a light no brighter than an unsteady candle flame, unsure of whether we want darkness or light. Look around. You’ll see flickering everywhere. You’ll see the unsteady nature of human existence. And when the lumens increase, you’ll get a brief glimpse of illuminated paths you might take. But beware. In the flickering you’ll take one step or two under full illumination and another one or two in uncertainty and darkness.
 
It takes both assumption and daring to walk a path by modern candlelight.      

Ever been to Guatemala? Beautiful volcanic landscape subject to eruptions and earthquakes, indigenous people who survived a terrible civil war and now live in a territory infested by drug runners, and, oh, the backstrap looms. The Land of Eternal Spring, Guatemala has warm weather in the lower elevations and cooler weather in the highlands. Villages abound, surrounded by hillside coffee plantations and vegetable and fruit gardens. Although Zone 10 of Guatemala City is a banking and business center that hosted an international economic conference, poverty dominates the rest of the city and the rest of the country. Many villagers have no electricity. Some no indoor running water. Some no true walls to their homes, rather, some sticks for walls and a sheet of tin for a roof.  
 
And, did I mention the looms? Almost everywhere in the country you can find women kneeling and weaving, using a seemingly crude loom that appears to be some sticks. The loom, connected by a strap to a wall or post, hangs on a diagonal in front of the kneeling women. They sit on their ankles, a thin carpet separating them from the hard floor, often outside on a covered porch.  
 
What the women weave are works of art, sometimes just color combinations, but often a cloth with a story or with characters. The colors are mesmerizing. On a simple loom these craftswomen create a unified work, somehow, as they weave, keeping track of a pattern they complete.
 
Most of the women have very little education. In Guatemala the schools don’t educate everyone. Poverty and dearth of public funding limit opportunities. For the weavers, the loom is a path to earning money: Tourists have the money to buy the products made on backstrap looms.
 
And then, there’s the mechanical competition. What takes days to weave on a backstrap loom can be completed in short time by a computerized, electrically driven loom. What’s the difference? The machine-made blankets can imitate the beauty of color, pattern, and story of the handmade ones.
 
We do like to romanticize, don’t we? We prize the painstaking toil of an individual more highly than the machine’s product. Both might appear to be the same, but we place value on “handmade.” There are car commercials that stress the “handmade” care in the company’s production. Yet, we know that a robot, a numerical control machine, can produce a flawless copy, and another, and another, and…
 
Still, we look at the kneeling Guatemalan woman, see her manipulate the threads on her loom, and judge her work to be of value. It has small imperfections that the machine product rarely includes, and those, rather than detracting from the value of the work, seem to give the work more value. It is a work that transcends a single product. It is a work that represents a tradition. It ties us to a place. Pick up a cloth made on a backstrap loom, and you pick up Guatemala.  

Place doesn’t require your consciousness. That might be one of our contemporary problems. We believe we can always shape place by thought. Where did we get such thinking?
 
Well, we might have derived the importance of mind over matter from our own reasoning. But there are some mind-only philosophical traditions in the backgrounds of both western and eastern cultures. Yogācāra, a branch of Tibetan Buddhism, stresses mind and consciousness: Nothing exists outside the mind. Yogācāra is analogous in some ways to the philosophy of esse est percipi of Bishop George Berkeley, the proponent of immaterialism.
 
You might have heard of Samuel Johnson’s refutation of Berkeley’s philosophy. Johnson, speaking to his biographer Boswell about Berkeley’s claim that “to be is to be perceived,” a claim that makes matter dependent for its existence on mind, kicked a rock, and said, “I refute him thus.”
 
Place had to precede human consciousness. Although evidence for life on Earth  derives from microscopic fossils about 3.5 billion years old, there might have been older life elsewhere in this or other solar systems; yet, the universe is 13.8 billion years old. No solar system existed until well after the Big Bang. If consciousness is associated with life, then it did not emerge until a place was available for its emergence. I refute Berkeley thus, and I don’t have to hurt my foot on a rock.
 
More importantly, the understanding that place can be independent of our individual consciousness allows us to adapt to what we encounter. We might be able to physically alter place, but in each encounter place exudes its effect on us. That elevates one kind of consciousness to the fore in our survival: An extended meaning of proprioception that I prefer to call proprioceptiveness.   
 
Thus the folly of human risk-taking: Mind doesn’t make a dangerous place safer unless it imposes restrictions on movement. First, a context: When Ishmael seeks to sign onto the Pequod for its upcoming whaling voyage in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, he interviews aboard the anchored ship with Captain Peleg, one of the ship’s co-owners. After a bit of bantering, Peleg says something like, “Okay, so you told me you want to go a-whaling to learn about whaling and to see the world. Go look over the side of the ship and tell me what you see.” Ishmael looks out over the ocean and reports that he doesn’t see much else but water running to the horizon. Peleg then says, “Can’t you see the world where you stand?”

Second, some true stories, rather long, but maybe worth the read:
 
​Two events in August, 2011 seemed to emphasize the significance of proprioceptiveness. Wing walker Todd Green, son of aerial stuntman Eddie Green, attempted to move from a plane wing to a helicopter strut while both were moving 200 feet above an air show crowd at the Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Michigan. He seemed to know where one hand was, but not the other. Green fell to his death after a momentary grab of the strut.

Half a world away on the same day as the air show, Branch 15 of the Revolutionary Court in Tehran sentenced Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal to eight years in prison as convicted spies. The two, traveling with Sarah Shourd who was released after paying $500,000, had crossed into an unmarked section of Iran as they hiked in Iraqi Kurdistan on their way, they said, to the Ahmed Awa waterfall. Supposedly, they carried a GPS unit.

Why should I relate these two events? They do have something to do with the nature and chief theme of this website. Green purposely put his life in jeopardy to make money. He had practiced his craft as aerial stuntman and had thrilled crowds as his dad had for many years. But he was human, and there aren’t many of us who have not spilled a glass of milk, tripped over a curb or step, or stubbed a toe on a rock. Just the slightest proprioceptive mistake is all it takes to make us momentarily clumsy. When you are 200 feet from the ground or 200 feet from a hostile country, a simple slip can have dire consequences that cannot be undone by mind.

Life isn’t a tour through a land of peace and love on an isle of happiness. There are risks; there are bad people; there are places that harbor dangers both physical and societal. A place fraught with the dangers of war and either a cultural hatred for or a cultural distrust of westerners does not lend itself to a comfy holiday daytrip for three Americans regardless of their reported empathies for the people of the region. You have to know where you are, and you have to know that you cannot shape place simply by wishing or thinking.

Let me throw one more group into the mix. Hormiz David, Ramina Badal, and Ninos Yacoub took a July, 2011 day trip to Yosemite National Park where they climbed over a guardrail to enter the water of the Merced River 25 feet upstream of Vernal Fall, a 317-foot precipitous cascade. They did not know where to plant their feet in the high spring flow of snowmelt water. They ignored a posted danger sign. David, Badal, and Yacoub (and Bauer, Fattal, and Shourd) compounded proprioceptive errors with mistakes of judgment or with mistakes born of naiveté and ignorance of history of place. They were ignorant that where they died, just 1.5 miles from Happy Isle Nature Center, was the site of ten such deaths in the previous ten years. 

To mimic Peleg, “Couldn’t you see the waterfall from where you stand?” Or, in the case of Bauer, Fattal, and Shourd, “Couldn’t you three see another waterfall, say one in the Alps near an Austrian ski resort where you wouldn’t be put in jail for allegedly spying?”

This is not an essay advocating the life of a hermit crab hiding in a shell. It is simply a reminder that place exists outside the mind. Consciousness doesn’t create place, but consciousness, particularly proprioceptiveness, reduces risk and prolongs life. Remember: This is NOT your practice life.

In baseball, groundballs present a challenge. Like snowflakes, no two grounders are alike. Bouncing over grass and dirt (or even over artificial grass), one grounder differs from another because of the initial force delivered by the batter whose bat contacts the ball in variously partial or full ways and in various vectors. The ball then bounces relatively nearer or farther from the point of contact and continues to bounce over slight-to-great irregularities in the surface that absorb different quantities of energy.
 
Through practice, infielders assume a general predictability to groundball bounces, largely determined by their familiarity with grounders over many surfaces on different baseball fields. They easily recognize a series of “true” bounces. But, as anyone familiar with the game knows, “bad bounces” occur. They are always possible, so players need not only some general sense of the way grounders behave, but also quick reactions for the unpredictable bounce, such as one caused by a pebble or divot on the field.  
 
Bad bounces can change a game. One did so in the Yankees v. Pirates 1960 World Series, when a bad-bounce grounder off the bat of Bill Virdon struck the throat of Yankee shortstop Tony Kubek on what might have been a routine double play in the seventh inning. Kubek fell, and the runners were safe. On ensuing plays the Pirates scored, taking a 9-7 lead. Although the Yankees tied the game, the Pirates went on to win the game in the bottom of the ninth on a famous homerun by their second baseman Bill Mazeroski. The Yankees might have won had it not been for the bad bounce that allowed the Pirates to keep pace with scoring of the Bronx Bombers.
 
That bad bounce changed the game, just as bad, or unexpected, bounces change your daily game. Experience allows you to field most of what comes at you, but the playing surface always has that unexpected pebble or divot that variously absorbs the energy. Occasionally, you’ll miss one because of a bad bounce. If you do what you practiced, you’ll likely not make a mental error, but a physical one is a possibility. Fielding grounders with 100% efficiency is rare.
 
Infielders are told to play the bounce rather than have the bounce play them. Often that means aggressively charging toward the ball to intercept it during the most opportune part of its bounce, as it comes up toward your glove. In contrast, you don’t get to choose bad bounces, but you do get to react to them. And that’s where the mental game comes into play.  
 
In everyday life you have to field a number of bad bounces. Some will hit as one did Tony Kubek. Nevertheless, charging aggressively whatever comes at you is a better policy than waiting for the ball to hit that divot or pebble. Practice fielding the true bounces, but prepare to deal with the bad ones.
 
  

So, there I am, responsible for watching someone’s dog for a couple of days. “Let’s go outside,” I say. “I have some yard work.”
 
Outside is definitely in the dog’s vocabulary. She runs to the door. We go out. I pick up a digging bar, a shovel, some bags of garden soil, and a number of plants that I intend to place on a hillside. The Golden Retriever watches, wanders around the yard a bit, exploring, and then returns for a few moments to watch again.
 
I’m sweating. It’s a humid, hot day in July. The ground is rocky, so I use the heavy iron digging bar as much as I use the shovel. The dog watches. The dog becomes bored. The dog goes off exploring for a bit, and then, bothered by the heat, goes to the door to wait for a human door-opener. She goes into the air-conditioned house. I remain outside, sweating as I toil with the soil.
 
Which one of us is the smarter? She is bothered by the heat, so she seeks shelter. I suffer through the heat to complete a job of my own making. If the dog could reason like a human, she might ask why, in the middle of seven acres of woods and wild plants, a human deems it necessary to dig and plant. Won’t nature do the work on its own?   
 
There’s no profound observation here. First, just questions: Is my desire to alter the natural setting a result of a human need to control place, to create as I believe nature could never do on its own? If my answer is yes, then why do I—and so many others—attempt to fashion a “natural landscape,” balanced, yet a bit random-looking? Second, small observations: When I imagine seeing through a dog’s eyes, I see the world as it is: Much of it largely beyond my control, some of it useful and beneficial, parts of it dangerous or, at least, inconvenient, and finally, a large part of it mysterious. When I look through human eyes, I see only what I would change.