Let me be the one to tell your story: How you arose each day full of promise and hope, how you worked to fulfill your dreams, how you overcame both obstacles and treachery, how you supported others in their quest for success, how you gained insight and wisdom, how you set examples by your speech and behavior, and how everything you thought, said, and did enhanced the lives of those around you. I want to tell that story. Of course, by your life you can be a better autobiographer than I can be a biographer. Now that I think about it, I believe you are the best one to tell your story.

“What surprises me is that the indigo dye process was discovered at all and developed independently so early in multiple parts of the world.” That’s a quotation from Jeffrey Splitstoser in an online article by Bruce Bower (ScienceNews). An archaeologist working on Huaca Prieta on Peru’s northern coast, Splitstoser was referring to blue-striped cloth found at the site in 2009. When Splitstoser says “early,” he means 6,000 years ago, about a couple of millennia before Egyptians dyed cloth indigo and three millennia before the ancient Chinese used the color.**
 
With all the world’s current problems, one might ask why anyone should care to dig around in an old set of structures in South America and why such a “discovery” of a few shredded pieces of fabric should be important in any way. Of course, ask either question to any archaeologist, and you would get a look of dismissal.
 
You see, we’re not the first of our kind to seek creative variety while wanting to rest on something securely the same. We love patterns while simultaneously we tire of them. More importantly, we are innately curious—thus the many questions arising from the mouths of four-year-olds. We’ve long known about the use of Murex, the mollusk that provided the purple dye (Tyrian purple) now associated with royalty and wealth. The Phoenicians kept that fashion alive and made money from the wealthy throughout the Mediterranean. But on the coast of Peru? It wasn’t the Murex; it was plant dye, discovered, as Splitstoser points out, “independently.”
 
Now think of your current status. You most likely have some colored clothing. You most likely didn’t dye it yourself unless you wanted to tie-dye a T-shirt for some event. You also most likely haven’t rummaged through Nature looking for dyes—or edible foods. You have most likely lost some of your toddler-age curiosity: You certainly don’t put just anything in your mouth as you did in your toddler-hood. You’ve been both taught and given. There’s little in your physical setting that you don’t in a macro way understand, and unlike a toddler, you might more likely be hesitant when you encounter the “unknown.” Secure inside the small encyclopedia of the familiar and busy with its details, you have little time in your life for experimentation. Who cares where purple comes from? It’s available in cloth, plastics, and metal coatings.
 
The people of Huaca Prieta didn’t have what you have, so their lives were largely experimental. And before them, way before them, humanity was in its toddler-hood, curious and in the business of putting entries into the encyclopedia you now daily read in your surroundings. Imagine that no one ever taught you what foods to eat. You wander around hungry, pick up a plant, and munch. Poison. Too bad. Some of those primitive Diderots died that way. Your encyclopedia of recipes is relatively safe as a result.
 
That people long ago experimented has significance beyond the discovery of purple dyes. They made the mistakes in their curious explorations that we don’t need to make. We know in our adult lives what plants to eat, where to get the chemicals we use in food and fashion, and what is dangerous.
 
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you are curious. Maybe you will add a new “color” to human fashion or an entry or two to the encyclopedia that others in the long distant future will read. Don’t expect them to give you more than passing credit, however. I’ve never heard anyone express gratitude to the ancient discoverers of purple dye.
 
*https://www.sciencenews.org/article/oldest-indigo-dyed-fabric-found?mode=topic&context=43&tgt=nr
 
**J.C. Splitstoser et al. Early pre-Hispanic use of indigo blue in Peru. Science Advances. Published online September 14, 2016. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1501623. 

One wonders: With all the data and sophisticated software, how can meteorologists get so much so wrong so often? Lots of ruined picnics, games, and even out door weddings, all spoiled by faulty forecasts. But actually, there’s a better question to ask: How can meteorologists get anything right at any time when the phenomenon they predict is the result of an invisible moving fluid?
 
And that’s what all of us run up against when we try to predict the behavior of others. Yes, we get it right sometimes, but too often we miss the forecast. Too much of what we are is invisible and fluid. After undergoing thousands of years of evolution and facing the same kinds of daily circumstances, shouldn’t anything we do be predictable? One might think so, but that we get anything right about human behavior is a wonder in itself.
 
Like meteorologists, we get our human forecasts right only about half or little over half the time. We complain when rain spoils our picnics, games, and out door activities, but in making more mistakes about human behavior than any meteorologist makes over weather, we still don’t decry our own erroneous forecasts with the same intensity as we complain about those of the meteorologists. Human weather is every bit as tough—possibly even tougher—to predict as is atmospheric weather.
 
We can, of course, do what the meteorologists do: Give estimates. They tell us that there’s a 30% chance of precipitation, or 40%, or 100%. Usually, the percentages above 60% are fairly accurate. Somewhere in the region under question, there will be precipitation. But below 60%, well, they’re probably making more guess than science. And you and your predictions? “He’s got a 50% chance of losing his temper. She has a 70% chance of being upset. They have a 20% chance of staying together.”
 
We certainly would like to have accurate weather forecasts, but we might trade them for a few very accurate predictions about each other’s behavior. “If it rains on her wedding, she will definitely cry.”
 
Time to be mindful of our predictions about one another. The atmosphere is a fluid in motion, but its constituents—molecules of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, water vapor, and other gases—though invisible are all quantifiable. The constituents of human behavior will never be completely quantifiable, regardless of our efforts to make them so. The data can be thrown out as soon as someone says, “The rain made our wedding day special.” 

If you climb Jockey’s Ridge on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, you will come to a perspective where your eyes are just below, even with, and just above the dune’s crest. On a windy day, you will see a low haze moving rapidly just inches over the dune; it’s not fog. As you walk into the haze, you will both see and feel the composition of the haze: “Bouncing” grains of sand picked up and dropped in a repetitive process. The grains will sting as they impinge upon your skin. Lifted by the wind, the sand grains undergo the “bouncing” phenomenon known as saltation. It is by saltation that the wind created and now moves the dune, the largest such structure east of the Mississippi River.
 
Saltation can occur in any environment with an unconsolidated surface. Sand, pebbles and cobbles in a streambed undergo the process during turbulent flow. The greater the energy, the bigger the “bounce” and the larger the particle that does the bouncing with the current.
 
Now established, Jockey’s Ridge changes slightly with each wind, but it remains largely in place because the wind blows sometimes seaward and at other times landward. There’s little net change to the overall dune, at least not in the eyes of the casual observer, one, for example, who might climb to the dune’s top to learn how to hang glide during a vacation. Movement is more easily noticeable in smaller dunes than on a well-established mass that covers more than 400 acres and that rises about 100 feet above sea level. Jockey’s Ridge appears to be nearly 7,000 years old.
 
That’s a long time for something that is unconsolidated to remain in one place. Empires, religions, and political philosophies have risen and fallen during those millennia, all carried off by the current of moving humanity. The dune, with nothing cohesive to bind its constituent quartz and other mineral grains together, has endured. The winds of saltation moving it without moving IT: Seaward and landward, pendulum-like, the mass of sand is today what it has been through the rise and fall of the Egyptian, Persian, Alexandrian, Roman, Incan, Ming, Holy Roman, and Ottoman empires. They’re all gone; yet, they were supposedly during their time—at least in the minds of their constituents—consolidated.
 
It might be worth our efforts to take a mental walk up an imaginary Jockey’s Ridge to wonder a moment or two about those grains bouncing in the wind, first seaward and then landward, and then repeating the process. Opposite directions for those grains moved by something as invisible as the wind. And at the top, as we feel the sting of bouncing grains, we can ask ourselves about the underlying mass of humanity whose surface bounces in whatever direction the wind blows.   

It happens during car crashes and during collisions in sports: The brain alters its perception of time. Life becomes a slow motion movie. Certainly, the opposite also occurs when we watch a pot of water come to a boil. Skip the latter dilation of time, and concentrate only on the slowing—and stopping. A camera catches a water drop hitting a puddle. Concentric waves freeze in crests and troughs. We assume that they are, in fact, not frozen because everything we experience in the macro universe changes, some things changing more slowly than others, but all ineluctably moving and changing.
 
Our ancient ancestors could freeze time in statues and paintings. We can do it with smart phones. With little artistic skill, anyone can stop the planet, preserve an instant in a place, and keep, for whatever it’s worth, entropy at apparent bay.
 
Imagine a camera perched on a tripod outside the universe. It stops the expansion and puts the entire universe in a single place at a single time. That’s what from the inside of the universe the COBE satellite did. It took a “picture” of the early universe. Not the most sophisticated of sensors, the COBE satellite’s image was surpassed in resolution (detail) by the WMAP platform* and then by the Planck Surveyor launched by the European Space Agency. So, now we have a nicely detailed image of the universe when it was just an infant, about 370,000 years old.**
 
You are in that picture. No, not the current “you” in your process of realizing your potential, but the seminal you, your constituent subatomic and atomic makeup and the energy that drives it toward that realization of potential. Were it possible to get a snapshot of an earlier moment—it’s not—you could see unity not only in your forming constituents but also in everyone else’s, a family picture for which the photographer doesn’t have to say, “Okay, everyone move closer together.” In that early photo everyone is already close, so close as to be united, or, rather unified. Everything and everyone unified just before the Big Bang, though there would have been, in the absence of time, no “before.” Unity everywhere—and nowhere.
 
Those frozen moments we preserve with smart phones, ancient sculptures, and paintings, are our way of capturing the ostensible unity of place’s constituents. The image of the Echo of the Big Bang, the Cosmic Microwave Background, gets close to freezing that moment when all of us were unified. Since that moment, however, everything has been in the process of forming temporary unities in an unstoppable expansion toward dis-unification. Every picture you take, though subject to its own disintegration, is a unification in stillness. Every image, every statue, every painting serves as a reminder that everything and all of us were once unified.
 
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background#/media/File:Ilc_9yr_moll4096.png
**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background#/media/File:PIA16874-CobeWmapPlanckComparison-20130321.jpg

​In his brief Gettysburg Address, Lincoln ironically said that the world would “little note, nor long remember what we say here….” Of course, what he said is one of the most, if not the most, enduring speeches. Today, Gettysburg is virtually a shrine to the “brave men” who “gave the last full measure of devotion.”
 
Not all battlefields have similar standing, but maybe they should. The problem is that except for Antarctica, every continent has its share of remembered and unremembered battlefields. The number of places where humans have lost their lives either defending or attacking is large. So, why should Gettysburg be a special place? Why is its ground, in the words of Lincoln, “consecrated”?
 
There are other places, both on land and water, that we remember sufficiently to consider highly significant because of battles: Marathon, Gaugamela, Lepanto, Constantinople, Waterloo, and Midway. Although we report on battles we consider significant world-changing events, other battles, however horrendous for their loss of life ended in just that and little more. Loss of life: Verdun comes to mind. Verdun was not a strategic locale, but both sides committed arms and men in ever increasing numbers until the casualties were overwhelming. Neither side gained anything significant.
 
One could argue that Gettysburg did not affect world affairs, but the defense of the Union led to its eventual continuation. And few could question that the survival of the United States was a world-altering event. Amazing how a seemingly small town in Pennsylvania was the place of a pivotal battle!
 
In fact, no. It’s not amazing. It’s the nature of battles. Forces gather, sometimes without time to choose place. Place seems to choose its own destiny. Numerous battles have occurred unintentionally or have been turned on the nature of place. The setting dictates the battle’s beginning, its process, and its ending. A muddy field was Henry V’s ally in his victory against the French at Agincourt in 1415. Gettysburg’s hills and intervening lowlands shaped the battle, and its location had the North ironically approaching the town from the south and the South approaching from the North.
 
Lincoln did not have to note that the world “can never forget what they did here.” The battle turned the Civil War and preserved a country that would become a superpower. But every place—short of the snowy world of Antarctica—has probably been in the proximity of a battle that the world has neither noted nor, if noted, long remembered.
 
You might now live in a place once “consecrated” by the deaths of those who fought for what they believed to be significant. In North America ancient battles could be more than 15,000 years old; in Europe and Asia older; and those in Africa well beyond our knowing in the depths of our prehumen ancestry. In all those battles, those who died never achieved the realization of that supposed significance for which they fought.  
 
Maybe, with the exception of Antarctica, all places have been, in a sense, consecrated in battles long forgotten, battles between cultures that no longer exist. Maybe, all places will undergo repeated consecrations as new cultures war. Gettysburg itself might in some long distant future become a renewed battleground where men will die for something of significance that they, like the soldiers buried at the Civil War memorial site, will never realize. Most places were probably “significant” enough at one time to serve as battlegrounds. Those of us who occupy those places might never realize that how we came to be, how we live, and how we view the world were all decided in such acts of “consecration.”

If you listen to the opening of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, you will hear a clarinetist do something that had never been done in “serious” music. The clarinetist plays a wailing glissando. Gershwin hadn’t conceived of the wailing glissando; it was the creation of Ross Gorman, clarinetist for Paul Whiteman’s orchestra. When Gershwin heard the sound during rehearsal, he insisted that Gorman open the piece with the wail, and it has ever since been a part of that famous American jazz concerto.
 
The clarinet isn’t a very old instrument. Mostly an evolutionary combination of older versions of woodwinds coupled with the sound of a distant trumpet, the clarinet appears in the eighteenth century. Though an integral part of bands and orchestras today, it is only rarely part of popular music in the twenty-first century. It was, however, often heard in popular music of the 1930s, 40s, and early 50s.
 
The clarinet is composed of pieces. One of those is the barrel that is located between the mouthpiece and the rest of the instrument. The barrel seems an unnecessary section. The mouthpiece has a vibrating reed; the third and fourth sections have holes and keys, and the flaring bottom bell casts out the sound. So, what about that little barrel? Well, as you know, length of an instrument affects pitch. Short piano strings that vibrate rapidly make high notes; long thick strings vibrate more slowly and make low notes. The barrel slides on cork washers or seals, enabling the clarinetist to lengthen or shorten his instrument by adjusting the barrel.
 
A piece that seems to have no obvious purpose in the eyes of the uninitiated actually plays an important role in the clarinet’s fine-tuning. A good clarinetist knows how to adjust the barrel just the right number of millimeters to make his clarinet perform in tune with other instruments. Without that slight lengthening or shortening of the clarinet, the sound will not meet the needs of the orchestra.
 
Now think. What slight adjustments do we all need to make so that the instrument of our lives works harmoniously with those around us? Is it a slight alteration in our voice, in our tone? A tiny change in attitude? A lengthening of time spent listening rather than speaking? A lengthening of praise and shortening of gossip?
 
Peace and harmony are ideals for human interaction. But in order for any orchestra, any society, to function peacefully and harmoniously, all the individual instruments have to be in tune. Each player has an instrument that, with slight adjustments, fits into the composition, but it is up to the individual to make those adjustments in concert with all the others in society’s main performance. Maybe someday humanity will slide into a glissando of cooperative performance. If it does, the music will be as novel as the beginning of Rhapsody in Blue once was.

​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cH2PH0auTUU 

Kong Rong was a witty second century warlord, governor, and writer. From youth he revealed an ability to make a quick comeback, some appropriate comment to counter the words of another.
 
During a series of crop failures Cao Cao, Emperor of the Wei Kingdom, banned alcohol. Rong, taking offense at the ban, wrote a sarcastic comment that then offended Cao Cao. The Emperor eventually proscribed Rong and his family. When Rong’s young children were urged to escape before they were killed, they supposedly said, “How could there be unbroken eggs under a toppled nest?” Now a Chinese idiomatic expression, those words suggest that when harm comes to one in a group, then it comes to all.
 
In 1919 Incas died in the Cincinnati zoo. He was the last of his kind, a Carolina parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis), a New World parrot that once ranged from New York to Florida and west beyond the Mississippi. Incas lost his mate, Lady Jane, some months before, and with her gone his death meant the extinction of his species. There aren’t unbroken eggs under a toppled nest. From the time of the early North American explorers through the nineteenth century, the noisy but colorful parrots were hunted for their bright yellow head feathers, some of which ended up on ladies’ fashionable hats. And while the birds died during hunts, they were also losing their wooded habitats. So, for four hundred years people “toppled the nests.” Carolina parrots were a doomed group, and their social behavior of gathering where others of their kind had fallen, contributed to their demise. When harm came to one of them, the others unknowingly passed into the gun sights of the hunters.
 
Have the children of Rong given us a lesson? If we don’t protect one in a group, will all suffer? What group will next be represented by a lonely Incas? 

If you sit on the bank of a tidal creek in the American Southeast, you might see a remarkable sight. At high tide dolphins will swim inland in search of food. The creek’s water is not very deep, and, as you can guess, it gets very shallow—even empty—during low tide. Yet, the dolphins don’t seem to get stranded. They get back out to sea before the water drains from the creek.
 
Apparently, dolphins know when to swim out of the tidal creek. That might seem unremarkable to you, but take a look at any aerial photo of tidal creeks. They meander here and there. The path back to the sea is one that twists and turns. Not only do dolphins have to know when the water is receding, but they also must know how fast it drains from the creeks and which creek leads seaward.
 
We like to think of ourselves as the top brains on the planet, but in many instances, humans get themselves lost or stranded. That is particularly true with any of our vices and addictions. The geography of vice and addictions is a set of tidal channels subject to rapidly turning tides. Where the tidal creeks meet the sea they provide easy access as we seek the fish we crave, but those channels narrow. Not satisfied with the fish near the channels’ mouths, we pursue others farther into the creeks.
 
Are we as smart as dolphins, able to get out before being stranded? 

Bureaucracies are almost always—maybe always, I really can’t think of an exception—inefficient. They arrive at inefficiency through several channels: Proliferation of bureaucrats, delegation of power, and access to someone else’s treasure and resources. That’s particularly true of government, but it works in the private sector, also. Can’t buy just one paperclip, you know.
 
There are, of course, drawbacks to pure individualism. Not everyone can grow food or reap cotton and shear sheep to make clothes, find potable water, or construct a shelter that really shelters. Apparently, just about everyone participates a little in the grand scheme of society, even those who believe they have separated themselves from it.
 
Why do we create bureaucracies? We’re not the first. Ancient civilizations had them. Are they indication that pure individualism is a myth? Do they evolve as a natural consequence of society? Do they derive from the family? Are two people a miniature bureaucracy? Evidently, we see utility in their existence: The greatest benefit to the greatest number—with, of course, some collateral pain.
 
Delegation. That’s the problem. As soon as someone delegates responsibility to another, a bureaucracy springs forth, full grown like Athena from the head of Zeus or Dionysius from his thigh. And maybe springing forth like a god from a god is the proper analogy. Bureaucracies require the presence of Zeuses. Out of their heads they produce Athenas, heady offspring who dream up tasks, causes, allocations and Dionysiuses wasteful in debauchery. Out of their heads and thighs: one after another after another after…  
 
When even honest and talented government agents seek to accomplish a task, they seek efficiency, but they usually delegate. Delegation leads to further delegation. Family members might do the same, delegating, for example, someone to do the shopping, someone to mow the lawn, and someone to…. It all seems, as Jeremy Bentham might have proposed, perfect utilitarianism: The goal of giving the greatest pleasure and the least pain to the greatest number (whole family, community, country). That’s the supposed goal. But it differs from realty: Athena’s dreams yield in practice to the whims of Dionysius and his troop of satyrs.
 
Delegating is also our out, our way of avoiding the trials of individuality. It’s our way of saying, “Hey, I’d do this, but if you already know how and are good at it…” Delegating is our way of removing ourselves from the realm of responsibility. If something doesn’t work, we can say, “But I gave the task to…” Delegating is inefficiency in pursuit of efficiency. Delegating adds a layer.
 
Go reap some cotton, sheer some sheep, make some clothes, grow food, construct a shelter, and find both water and your individuality. True, you might be poorly clothed, a bit hungry, largely unprotected, and thirsty, but you will be an individual.
 
Eager to prove your individuality, you could volunteer for one of those TV reality programs that tosses people out in the woods for a short period to prove they are capable of surviving alone. Of course, those people get to return to “civilization” after “surviving.” The challenge to their individualism is short-lived. You could grow your own food, but if wheat is your chosen crop, prepare for attacks by the fungus called Stripe or the Sipha maydis aphid. Or, skip the survival stuff. Blend in. Acquire enough authority to delegate someone else to do the surviving for you, like growing food and making it convenient for you to eat.
 
Go ahead; delegate; form a bureaucracy. As with Zeus, an Athena or Dionysius will pop out of your head or thigh to do your work in a seemingly utilitarian and efficient way. Just don’t be upset if the bureaucracy can’t make everyone—possibly including you—happy.