Emma is 117 as of this writing and the last person born in the nineteenth century. Her story is news because her life touches three centuries, those artificial time units we use to mark alterations that exist only in our minds. There is, of course, no real difference between the last day of one and the first day of another century. They are consecutive days whose importance lies only in our fascination with round numbers, beginnings, and endings. Emma Morano has lived through the endings of two centuries and the beginnings of two others. She says she eats two eggs and some cookies for her daily diet.
 
Cookies and eggs! If my own mother, whose life spanned 95 years, heard me say that I wanted only cookies and eggs to eat, she would have told me such a diet isn’t healthful. Interestingly, both she and my father, who lived to be 97, never really watched their diets. Their list of daily foods would make health gurus shudder: Salami, cheese, pasta, processed foods, white flour. The list goes on, and all, or most of it, falls into the wellness taboo lists of “those in the know.” Sounds as though Emma Morano, born some 16 and 17 years before my parents, would agree with their choice of foods.
 
And here we are, many of us driven to eat “right” or driven to feel guilty over eating “wrong.” Says something about what we are, doesn’t it? Imagine our ancient ancestors having this discussion as they wandered first in search of anything that seemed edible and then in search of arable land for single plant crops. And now, paleo diets, carb diets, powdered drink diets, and pills! Then at the end of 2016 the apparent oldest living person, Emma, eats two eggs and some cookies daily. She will, of course, pass on that title of oldest person to someone else, but we should wish her dozens and dozens and dozens more eggs and cookies.
 
There’s something to be said for careful living and for thoughtful living. Most of us will probably not live as long as Emma. We might argue that she has something genetically right that the rest of us probably have wrong. So, giving some thought to our lifestyle seems a reasonable alternative way to prolong our existence even with some built-in flaws.
 
Now there will be those who say that Emma’s 117-year-old lifestyle isn’t worth waiting for. She spends a great deal of time in bed, has a caretaker, has no teeth of her own, and lost her hearing. Nevertheless, she’s alive and cognizant. Age has beaten her down but not beaten her. If she were so inclined, she could be blogging. As it is, she gets visitors, both curious and scientifically inquisitive, with whom she can communicate. Of course, she’s outlived all her contemporaries, but she hasn’t outlived a new generation that seeks some bit of information or even wisdom about her “secret path” to longevity.
 
Eggs and cookies work for Emma, but probably not for anyone else, but she probably doesn’t say that eating eggs and cookies is the secret to her long life. She left an abusive husband early on, and she lost a child; then she went to work for a long time. Doesn’t sound as though she had any specific regimen for prolonging life. Avoiding abuse, overcoming a tragedy, and committing to financially supporting herself seem to have been important. Oh! And, having lived through World War I and living in Italy during World War II, she avoided being killed by bomb or bullet.
 
You might be one of those completely mindful people doing all the “right” things while simultaneously filling your brain with endorphins. That’s great—for you. So, given that you lead a life perfectly tuned to the processes of longevity, what can you teach others that will enhance their lifespans? Are you as old as you are because you survived abuse and tragedy, because you watched your diet and avoided being shot or blown up, because you were so completely mindful that little came your way for which you were not prepared, because you lived in the present and not the past, or because you believed that however one day turns out the next day always holds the promise of something better? Maybe the last one, even if it means eating two more eggs and some cookies.

For the Wiffle Ball games my kids and their friends played in my front yard, first base was a Ginkgo biloba sapling next to the sidewalk. An eventual change to the sidewalk meant moving the Ginkgo to the backyard, where it now stands in the Wiffle Ball outfield behind a small barn. It’s decades older now and much taller, maybe sixty feet or so. Those children, now adults, can hit the ball well over the tall tree that was only a little over their height in its first years. During this autumn, the tree’s fan-shaped leaves turned to yellow, making a display of color against the leafless deciduous trees that shed their foliage earlier. Holding onto its leaves a bit longer into autumn, the Ginkgo drops them decisively in a day or two. It’s as though the tree knows what to do to shed leaves whereas the other trees indecisively drop some and keep some for weeks.
 
Choosing a tree so different from other deciduous trees for first base might have been my unconscious tribute to the Ginkgo’s position in the history of trees. Ginkgos are old. Some think of them as fossil trees because their lineage goes back at least to the Jurassic and possibly even farther in time. They have survived as a species because of numerous defense mechanisms and a complex genome that researchers from the Beijing Genomics Institute have unraveled. The group reports, “The 10.61 GB genome sequence containing 41,840 annotated genes was assembled in the present study. Repetitive sequences account for 76.58% of the assembled sequence….”*
.
Ginkgos are tough. The species endured not only environmental changes over more than 150 million years, but they also survived the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima. The one in my back yard survived numerous touches as first base and even, when it was just a sapling, frequent bending as players tried to slow themselves down by grabbing onto “first base.” Not environmental changes, not diseases, not insect or nuclear attacks, not a bolide collision that wiped out the dinosaurs, and not the hands of children bending its young form seem to affect the Gingko. The species seems to have a built in wisdom for survival.
 
Individual Ginkgos can live a thousand years, but all of them belong to only a single species. Their relatives are gone. Maybe the Ginkgo will someday go extinct, but it is already among the longest lasting organisms, competing with horseshoe crabs for species longevity. And what of us? How fragile we are by comparison! We, like that “fossil tree,” are the sole species representing our genus. In just a few millions of years Earth has lost our ancestors and closest relatives: Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Homo Neandertal, and possibly a few others of our kind. However similar other primates are to humans, they aren’t Homo sapiens sapiens; our genomes differ.  
 
I’m pretty sure I won’t be around to see whether or not my Ginkgo lives to be 1,000; I do know that it has weathered storms and blunt force attacks by little humans at play. I can only hope that our own species with its short-term individual lives can survive not only whatever Nature throws at it, but also the severe bending of human folly.
 
Wouldn’t it be interesting to see whether or not my Ginkgo will serve as first base for a generation of children playing Wiffle Ball 1,000 years from now? Yes, they would be different individuals from those who initially used it as a base, but a future generation’s playing around that tree would be good news for our species. No, that stretch of time doesn’t come close to the more than 150 million years of Ginkgo biloba, but, hey, let’s take survival one millennium at a time in imitation of the species I call “First base.” I hope we have, like the tree, some built in wisdom to endure.  
 
54-http://gigascience.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13742-016-0154-1
†Contributed equally

First, the good news: You, the individual, can defy prediction. Second, the bad news: You, the group, can’t.
 
According to Henri Weimerskirch of the Centre d’Etudes Biologiques de Chizé, pelicans trained to fly in a “V” formation individually save as much as 14% of the energy the lead pelican uses.* Of course, we associate flying in a “V” with geese, so let’s make the leap the Smithsonian makes about their flight: Geese save energy by flying in a “V.”** I know, you’re not a bird, but your species is prone to exhibit a characterizing cliché, “Birds of a feather flock together.” And, like geese, the human “birds” move in formation, predictable formation.
 
Enter a team of numerical analysts from the Technical University of Munich. In short, a team led by Professor Massimo Fornasier claims it is possible to devise automatic and precise models “for specific, relatively simple group interactions.”*** Although he acknowledges the unpredictability of individuals (like you, of course), Fornasier says, “People in masses behave akin to particles in a fluid or gas…Analogous to the force of attraction between molecules in a gas, we can describe generalized behavioral patterns as resulting from interacting social forces between individual agents and represent them in mathematical equations.”
 
The numerical analysts seek to develop ever more precise algorithms for interpreting and predicting human group behavior. In doing so they will serve the needs of those who want to manipulate the “collective” in any place at any time. As Fornasier says, “In the next step we can then also make predictions about future behavior… And once we can calculate the behavior of a group of interacting agents in advance, we are only one small step away from controlling them.”
 
Do you relish unpredictability? Or do you prefer to save some intellectual energy, fly in formation, and follow the lead goose? Yes, life is seemingly easier in the “V,” but it’s not YOUR life.    
 
*http://mentalfloss.com/article/13062/why-do-flocks-geese-fly-%E2%80%9Cv%E2%80%9D-shape
 
** http://www.tweentribune.com/article/tween56/why-do-geese-fly-v-formation/
 
*** https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/11/161114143006.htm
Massimo Fornasier, Francesco Solombrino. Mean-Field Optimal Control. ESAIM: Control, Optimisation and Calculus of Variations, 2014; 20 (4): 1123 DOI: 10.1051/cocv/2014009

If you are not a janitor, you know what one is. He (or she, janitress) goes about the work of straightening and cleaning, usually when no one else is around. The office or the building is busy with people during the day, but after hours, a lone occupant or an occupying crew moves efficiently through the place, typically in some preordained order that includes wastebaskets, floors, and restroom facilities. When the new day arrives, no one has to look back on the mess of the previous day. From the daytime occupants’ perspectives, all is new and fresh; a cycle has been completed.
 
In many instances, janitors have large key chains with numerous keys, one for every door. How unlike the CEO’s key chain. The master key opens all. As the saying goes, “Fewer keys, more authority.” The master (or mistress) has control.
 
Janitor derives from the Roman god Janus, the two-faced god who looks both forward and backward and is associated with New Year celebrations and the month, obviously, January. And the word includes in its meaning “gate,” “doorway,” and even “travel.” Janitor is more than cleaner; janitor is doorkeeper, so maybe all those keys have more than a utilitarian purpose. Maybe they are also symbolic.
 
In the hierarchy of organizations janitors dwell at the bottom, but no new day begins in promise without their overnight work. Office chaos or inefficiency is the destiny without their control of place. They transition previous workday to current workday, and for the office workers, that transition seems like some daily renewal.
 
But what about that expression concerning the number of keys? Is the janitor important when his key chain is cumbersome, whereas that of the CEO is not? It’s a matter of your perspective. If you believe the world works “top-down,” then the CEO is all important. If you believe it works “bottom-up,” janitors play a significant role.
 
The contributions of all those unseen doorkeepers, seemingly insignificant, become significant in their absence. Bottom-up, many keys opening many doors, might be the way places operate efficiently despite beliefs to the contrary. Maybe the holder of a single key is an authority only because all those other key holders work cooperatively when no one is looking. They are in a unique position. Like some ancient god, they see the mess of the previous day and are first to see a renewed place fresh for the mess of the next day. They keep cleaning, and the office workers and CEO keep messing.
 
Is there some political lesson in this?

One cup equals one-half pint. One inch equals 2.54 centimeters. Zero degrees Celsius equals 32 degrees Fahrenheit. We can even convert Newtons to dynes, joules to ergs, and watts to foot-pounds per second. Conversions are usually a matter of straight-forward math. Given this unit, then that unit. Not so with conversions of thought.
 
Some realization is the converting impetus and mechanism for conversions of thought, but ultimately, there’s no equivalence. We’re all a bit too different to be “the same.” Yet, we do, at times, seek conversion formulas or even believe we have discovered them. Want to convince So-n-so of an ideology? Do this. Or that. Say this or that. If this approach fails, try that one. Throughout our lives we often sit with those of differing opinion around conversion tables of thought. Each participant, both in turn and often raucously and simultaneously, offers some expression. Frequently, neither side offers an equation, but rather an expression, something like 5x + y -3. Thrown onto the table of discussion by one side, the expression, without identity of the variables, is meaningless on the other side. Kept in the dark about the precise meaning of each x or y, the opposing side of an argument sees no way to solve the problem. When there is no equal sign, there is nothing to equal.
 
Even without the prospect of equivalence, we continue to seek perfect conversions in the personal meanings of our expressions. What is it that drives us to convert the thoughts of others to our own without finding equivalence? Is it a refusal to recognize their uniqueness while standing firmly by our own? Do we think the equivalence we seek is better than the equivalence others seek? Who has the best conversion tables?
 
Here’s some advice on how to find some equivalence from Ben Franklin as reported by General John Dayton:
 
     "It is, however, to be feared that the members of this [Constitutional] Convention are not in a temper, at this moment, to approach the subject in which we differ, in this spirit. I would, therefore, propose, Mr. President, that, without proceeding further in this business at this time, the Convention shall adjourn for three days, in order to let the present ferment pass off, and to afford time for a more full, free, and dispassionate investigation of the subject; and I would earnestly recommend to the members of this Convention, that they spend the time of this recess, not in associating with their own party, and devising new arguments to fortify themselves in their old opinions, but that they mix with members of opposite sentiments, lend a patient ear to their reasonings, and candidly allow them all the weight to which they may be entitled; and when we assemble again, I hope it will be with a determination to form a constitution, if not such an one as we can individually, and in all respects, approve, yet the best, which, under existing circumstances, can be obtained."
 
As members of the Constitutional Convention sat around their own conversion table, they seem to have heeded Franklin’s advice and did, in fact, reach an agreement. As the Bill of Rights indicates, that initial conversion formula was not necessarily a perfect equivalence. The formula of the Convention had to be tweaked. It was, nevertheless, the best one that “under existing circumstances” could be obtained.
 
Of course, you might argue that our inability to discover a universal formula for conversions of thought is a good thing and that equivalence leads to a lessening of individualism, of a demise of uniqueness. Consider, however, how much the world might benefit from everyone’s sitting at a table of conversions and offering not mere expressions with undefined variables, but rather equations, even though those equations, unlike the equations in math, establish only partial equivalences. Like the Founding Fathers, we might later have to tweak the equation, but, at least, we will have defined terms we all understand, and we will be near, if not at, equivalence and mutual conversion.  

In the famous Christmas tale by Charles Dickens, Ebenezer Scrooge is a penny-pincher until he isn’t. Looking at his past and his potential future changes his perspective. We all do that sometimes, that is, going back and looking forward, but it only rarely changes us on the order of Scrooge’s metamorphosis. Take our use of oil as an example. Unlike Scrooge, we haven’t employed a Bob Cratchit to keep meticulous books. The result: We don’t know how much we’ve used since the year Charles Dickens died and John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil (1870).
 
We have some estimates of crude oil production since 1859, the year that Colonel Drake drilled the first well in western Pennsylvania. But, according to John Jones of the School of Engineering at Aberdeen U. in the UK, those estimates are crude. Jones says we’ve drilled 35% more than the old figures suggest. Scrooge would have fired Bob Cratchit if his books were that far amiss.
 
We’ve burned lots of oil according to Jones’s refined numbers.* Don’t fret. There will still be oil to drill for years to come, but we all might have to be reverse Scrooges. That is, after years of unchecked burning without a Bob Crachit to keep accurate books, we might have to become oil-pinchers and hire some Bobs.
 
Thinking about oil depletion isn’t something new. Throughout the previous and current centuries there have been alarmists and burnthrifts (spendthrift derivative). You might be somewhere between both. Obviously, Scrooge had some business reasoning behind his spendthrift nature: Not keeping track of one’s money is a hazardous financial tactic at best. So, economics plays its role. If you want a finite resource to last, you have to pace yourself. But is that the nature of humans?
 
Giddy with wealth, we burn through what we have. Look, for example, to the history of boomtowns built on gold, silver, and petroleum production. They turn to ghost towns relatively fast. We’ve seen rapid consumption throughout history, but the principle doesn’t just apply to humans. Think ocean blooms. Dinoflagellates responsible for toxic red tides bloom when they encounter a wealth of nutrients they need for growth. Just about all organisms do the same; think bears and berries.
 
The nature of life seems to have an underlying Principle of Excess. Life takes advantage of abundance until something stops it. Excess spending and use of nutrients point to a life principle. So, if from the tiniest organisms to “intelligent” macro-sized humans spending wildly during times of excess is normal (and historical), is it any wonder that we have burned more oil than we can reckon?
 
Against the background history of boom-and-bust excesses or miserly thriftiness, we find ourselves looking at who we are in the context of our resources. It is difficult for many to apply a Scrooginess to times of plenty. It’s been a Christmas of oil since 1870. Maybe that oil boom projected itself into other aspects of our lives, enhancing the fundamental Principle of Excess that underlies the lives of many, if not all, organisms. If so, each of us might profit from being a Bob Cratchit looking over what we’ve spent and what we have left to spend. Oil is irrelevant here.
 
The Principle of Excess might apply to emotions and behaviors as well as to physical entities. Is war one of those excesses? Is anger? Aren’t both of those boom-and-bust strategies of life? If we look back at production in the context of looking forward, do we see ourselves as Scrooge before his transformation or Scrooge after it? How do we know for sure? What if our Bob Crachits have been as erroneous as those who kept tabs on oil production? We could be off by 35% in our estimate of our behaviors. It’s difficult to know without an accurate bookkeeper, and, with regard to emotions and behaviors, we probably have only faulty estimates. Possibly, the bust with regard to oil is coming sooner than we might have predicted before Jones's study. That bust is still a long way off. But personally, what about the potential for other busts? Have our behavioral and emotional excesses built an unsustainable personal town?       
 
*Total amounts of oil produced over the history of the industry
by J.C. Jones
International Journal of Oil, Gas and Coal Technology (IJOGCT), Vol. 2, No. 2, 2009

I was fourteen when my mother told me during summer vacation that Joe Debich was very sick and that I should visit him. She gave me no more details, probably a practice of not talking about diseases like leukemia to “those too young to understand.” So, without any understanding of a disease that was taking the life of my friend, I went to the newsstand, bought some comic books for him with money I had earned selling newspapers, and went to see Joe. He was in bed, and we talked about when we could play basketball, and he simply said that at night the pain in his legs was a problem. I don’t remember his exact words, and I don’t remember his giving any indication that he understood the dire nature of his circumstance. He looked as he had looked during school to me.
 
The first days of school that fall were happy times of seeing friends who shared the frivolity of youth. So much going on in the new school year, I didn’t even notice Joe’s absence. And then, one of my classmates came to me and said, “Did you know that Joe Debich died yesterday?”
 
“What! I just saw him this summer. He just said he had some pain in his legs.” As with so many of us, the initial news of death is shock but shallow emotion, an abstraction of sorts, especially for one unaccustomed to death while at the same time being one too immature to reconcile what I saw in the summer with what I had just learned. I think I remember saying, “We were going to play basketball when he got better.”
 
I went to the funeral home with a friend that night, walked through a crowd of my classmates to the viewing room, and approached the open casket. There was Joe, but he wasn’t the Joe I knew. He was half his size, maybe sixty or sixty-five pounds that the disease had left untouched. My reaction was instantaneous. I cried uncontrollably, walked through the crowd of seemingly less bothered teenagers, and exited with my friend to walk the streets of our small town. I could not stop crying. Three hours. Death had come uninvited into Joe’s life—and into mine. The sense of frivolity was gone.
 
I had seen only one other dead person, an aunt. But I was little, maybe six years old. Yes, I understood death as all of us somehow do as children, maybe in a nightmare or fear of a lion under the bed, but not on the emotional level of that evening in front of Joe’s open casket. Of course, since that time I have, as you probably have, gone to funeral homes and to funerals, and I have been saddened by the experiences, even to the point of sobbing. Never, however, did a death affect me as much as Joe’s. In most instances after that year Death came uninvited: A car or other accident, a long or short disease, a stroke or heart attack.
 
But I became aware that some people invite Death: Teenagers who commit suicide, the very elderly whose contemporaries have left them worn down by time and lonely by their many losses, and those who act by war, crime, and anger to write Death’s invitation. In each instance, I always ask, “Did he or she not realize that even at boring parties, we make our own fun? Who invites that one character that will quash the happiness? Even if a particular party isn’t filled with frivolity, won’t there be other parties?” Having mourned Joe’s uninvited death, I have difficulty understanding reasons for extending an invitation.  
 
I think of Thomas Dylan’s last line in “A Refusal To Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.” He ends the poem, “After the first death, there is no other.” One death is all death. The first loss is all subsequent losses. We come to accept that uninvited Death will someday show up, and as always in the context of that day, It will come into midst of frivolity, and interrupt life’s party. Parties can be fun, and as children we don’t want them to end, and I don’t think we differ much in that as adults. That’s why I have written a number of these little essays on suicide. I can’t see, especially having experienced Joe’s death those many years ago, anyone inviting Death into life’s party. Uninvited Death comes soon enough.
 
I think of Death as a party crasher, an unwelcome intruder whose intention is to spoil the fun of life. I always argue against sending an invitation to the one guest who without question will shut out the lights and take down the decorations. I prefer—even in my knowledge of the contrary—to think that we’ll be able to party, to play basketball, that every “Joe” will rise from his bed of leg pain, join the frivolity of youth, and celebrate life. 

Thanks to Hubble, the guy not the telescope, we know that the universe is expanding. Thanks to Hubble, the telescope and not the guy, we know that its expansion rate is increasing. Seems that expansion is built into the nature of everything.
 
Two of the possible outcomes that astronomers used to argue: Either the universe will end in a Big Crunch because there is enough matter to exert a gravitational slowing of the expansion, a stopping, and a reversal into a smaller-and-smaller universe that ends by collapsing into a singularity reminiscent of its beginning state. Or: With insufficient matter to slow the expansion, the universe will continue to stretch itself until it rips into nothingness. Right now, the latter argument seems to be favored.  We’re in for the Big Rip. Not to worry, however; you won’t explode like an overinflated balloon unless you can live…well, you can’t live that long. But, apparently, every place and every thing in every place will eventually expand.
 
If the nature of the universe is expansion and you are part of the universe, why shouldn’t you make expansion part of your life? No, I’m not talking about waistlines. Minds, rather. There’s no reason to stop your personal expansion of understanding and wisdom, no reason to stop acquiring knowledge. Expansion isn’t just the universe’s destiny; it’s yours. Don’t deny it by working your way back to some Big Crunch, some return to a less encompassing perspective on life.
 
True, expanding mentally can be difficult. There’s always a gravity of some kind that works to retard any expansion: Ideologies, feelings, fatigue, hoplessness, lethargy. But expansion is actually built into the nature of the universe. And something else. Evidence suggests that the expansion of the universe has been accelerating. Haven’t you noticed that in yourself? As you have expanded your perspective, you seem to expand it faster toward ever more encompassing perspectives. More means more. Greater perspective breeds ever greater perspectives.
 
Think of yourself as an expanding universe, and don’t deny yourself your destined expansion. 

Ah! The famous portraits: Mona Lisa by Da Vinci, The Blue Boy by Gainsborough, George Washington by Stuart, and others, as they say, too numerous to mention. One assumes that people sat for these portraits, a bit of a time-consuming process. And then the photographic portraits, Afghan Girl, 1984 by McCurry, Nelson Mandela, 1990 by Leibovitz, and Marilyn Monroe by Stern. Again, too numerous to count.
 
You have a readily available camera in your phone, or you have a Nikon or Canon, and you use them as the mood strikes. It’s a second’s worth of work, and you can in a digital age swamped by memory cards take as many pictures as you like, from near or far, in light or dark, in forbidden or free places, and of anyone or thing you fancy to freeze in place and time. Think of the difference between your on-the-spot digital photography and the more time-consuming portraits made by professional photographers and the even more time-consuming portraits made by painters.
 
Before the camera, the brush and wall or canvas were the instruments. The process of capturing the essence of a person wasn’t as easy as it has been since the invention of cameras. And the digital age advanced the process of photography over the more cumbersome and more limited 35 mm film cameras.
 
Those famous one-time-only portraits in oil on canvas or paint on wall probably give us more of a sense of the artists’ essences than the pictures you take give us a sense of your essence. You can snap, snap, snap; images are as numerous as clicks, and a single setting gets an indefinite number of interpretations, from a bit of changed light behind a flickering candle to half a blink of the subject’s eyelid. Those famous portrait painters couldn’t get all those changes that you get in your multiple pictures.
 
Think now of sitting for a portrait artist. You want something of your essence to be in the painting. What nuance do you want others to see in you. You realize, of course, that you change moment to moment. Yet, in that oil-on-canvas, only a momentary you, one seen through the eyes of the painter, will travel through time. Is that the real George Washington we see captured by Stuart? We don’t have multiple images.
 
How would you pose for posterity if you had only a single sitting to represent your entire life?  

Liquid water isn’t just important to us; it is mostly what we are physically. Common stuff: Two hydrogen atoms linked to an oxygen atom in a bond that breaks up and reforms about a million times each second. That’s why the stuff is a “liquid.” And maybe, just because we’re mostly composed of it, that’s why change is a characteristic of our lives.
 
Temperature, you learned in science class, is a measure of atomic and molecular motion. Faster vibrating molecules yield higher temperatures; slower vibrations, lower temperatures. And you learned from experience that water has other phases. Liquid water slows down its breakup and reformation as it cools, becoming ice crystals, solids with more stability and maybe only once-a-second breakup and reformation. As water speeds up its vibrational movements by acquiring more energy, molecules separate in a more excited state to become water vapor, that unseen gas that plagues our comfort on hot, humid days.
 
We lie in that balance between solid and gas. Fickle humans don’t relish a solid life; for them breakup and reformation is the norm, and in the short-lived extreme, they live in the rapid vibrational excess of a gaseous state. More sedate people, in contrast, cherish a less hectic, less frenetic, and less vicissitudinous lifestyle. They aren’t quite solid, but they seem to prefer less liquidity, practicing in their lives a seemingly secure and solid state.
 
Now, isn’t it surprising that researchers have discovered that liquid water has two states itself?* Apparently, halfway between freezing and boiling (on average) water shifts its character slightly. No, you can stare at water of 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), but you won’t see this transition. Nothing you look at on the macro level reveals this change. Hidden from our eyes is a crossover point, where water begins to change its character.
 
That liquid water has an invisible crossover point where its nature changes shouldn’t surprise us. There are transitions in every life, even in lives we perceive to be steady or sedate. Moving a life toward either crystallized solidity or gaseous instability is always a matter of crossing over that transition point. And that applies not only to general lifestyle, but also to our thinking.
 
Are your thoughts still liquid, still fluid, and if they are, on what side of the transition point do they lie? Are they moving toward freezing or boiling? Is your intellectual stance frozen, crystallized into a set of unquestionable axioms? Or, have you moved toward such fluidity that nothing seems to be stable? Is all a vibrational frenzy?
 
* http://www.sci-news.com/physics/two-states-liquid-water-04359.html  L.M. Maestro et al. 2016. On the existence of two states in liquid water: impact on biological and nanoscopic systems. International Journal of Nanotechnology13: 8-9; doi: 10.1504/IJNT.2016.079670