Ho hum. Another year. More wars. More murder. More abuse. More cruelty. More waste. What did we learn?

Not much. At least not much as a group of organisms. Maybe, however, much as individuals. One can only guess for others. But every Self can know. 

Wish I could follow you through your day. There’s a rhythm in what you do. There’s some music. Okay, maybe sometimes just a noise, but often you make music in your actions, or, at least, the stuff of a coffee house suite. Wish I had a guitar. Wish I had taken lessons. I would love to put to music the day you live, sometimes a quiet time and at other times a little louder. Your music would tell the tale of humanity.

You do experience much even when you don’t think you do. So, you think you live a boring life? Maybe an ordinary one? Maybe a desperate one? I’m starting to put down some chords here. I have notes on the staff. The beat varies. The various strings play the notes of your multifaceted life. You know, even when you are bored you seem like an interesting subject to me. I mean, there you are, trillions of cells, processes that fill a biology book, neurons that make meaning in a chaotic world. Yes, there’s definitely music in you, maybe an entire opera, at the very least an album of diverse songs.

Now that I think about it, a guitar wouldn’t do you justice. I need all the instruments, and I mean all, even a didgeridoo, a pan flute, an upside down pot, a contrabass balalaika, all. If I follow you around closely enough I might even hear music you never knew you made. Different pitches in voice. The strike of your heel on a pavement. The sound of your hand helping another. Maybe, but I hope not, the sound of your hand hurting another or yourself.

Go ahead. Live your day. Don’t pay attention to me. I’ll be in the coffee house trying to convey all that you are to both disinterested and interested patrons. The disinterested might be oblivious to their music. The interested will be those seeking in your song some echo of their own, some genre of commonality. When they open themselves up to your music, they open themselves up to their own.

Religious beliefs, save those few like eighteenth-century Deism, typically tie a Creator to the creation and to the created, from finite beings to demi-gods. In short, the Hand of God touches what It has shaped. And on Earth, even the non-religious reach out to touch back. Yes. Even the non-religious.

Watch the Pope walk or drive past a crowd. See the outstretched arms? See the parent carrying the child for a touch, just a quick touch, a blessing in the hand, the representative Hand. Watch a rock star make his way to the stage. See the frenetic reaching? See the outstretched hands trying to touch? See him reach down from the stage to touch a hand extending over stage right or another over stage left?

The Big Bang. Or, if you want, some bouncing branes of alternate dimensions crashing our universe into existence. Or, a Creator. Even the division of the Water Goddess as in ancient Babylonia. Whatever your belief, you can’t do without a beginning of some sort, and before that beginning…What? However and whatever you believe, you are part of the All-There-Is and as part of the creation, once somehow or now somehow, you are still in touch with either the Divine or the Not-So-Divine. And like all in the All-There-Is, you reach out.

All those you encounter are also part of All-There-Is. All have been touched. All are representatives of the Hand of God. When you reach out to touch, who is it that you really want to touch? What is it that you are really trying to reach? Regardless of your belief or nonbelief, the next time you extend a hand to touch, consider the Hand that reaches back and the blessing in the touch.  

Cyclodextrin polymers are examples of how small substances can cover a big area. According to a recent news story on the AAAS website about cyclodextrin development, two grams (0.07 oz) of these polymers have a surface area sufficient to cover a basketball court. Just two bitty grams can spread over 436.6 square m (4700 square ft.).

Little things can have surprising large effects, and just like cyclodextrin polymers, your words and actions cover a surprisingly wider area of influence than you might think. Thanks to social media, we find the basketball court of life covered by the smallest of particles spread wide. And that court gets covered rapidly, as though the hardwood were inundated by floodwaters.

The smallest of your actions can have far-reaching consequences because all of your behaviors are complexes just like polymers.  

In 1884 a Dutch chemist named Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff (d. 1911) proposed a principle about equilibrium that might help us to understand our angry world. Van’t Hoff’s chemical principle describes a shift in equilibrium produced by changes in temperature. When temperature increases, equilibrium shifts toward the more endothermic substance and away from the more exothermic substance. Just the opposite happens when temperature decreases. In either case, changes in temperature alter the equilibrium.

Endothermic substances absorb heat, whereas exothermic ones evolve it. Human bodies are essentially bags of chemicals, so let’s draw an analogy. In an ethical interplay between two humans, equilibrium is a coveted endgame. “We balance each other. I’m glad we got together. We have so much in common.” Equilibrium.

Of course, any equilibrium is fleeting in a universe of process. Something is going to disrupt every balance. Things happen that way in a constantly moving, finite cosmos, and nowhere is this more evident than in the tenuous balance between two individuals, particularly when one is relatively more endothermic and the other is relatively more exothermic. Some people are just a bit more imbued with heat-generating potential. Some are a bit more imbued with absorption potential. If everyone were endothermic, relationships would probably be a little colder; if everyone were exothermic, relationships would be hotter. Typically, someone gives off more heat; the other absorbs it.

I wish Jacobus Henricus could apply his principle to the current human substances. Seems that there are too many exothermic ones out there, throwing off heat. At times, the heat is too great for even an endothermic body to absorb. There goes the equilibrium.

Let’s try the principle on individuals in relationships before we apply it to the world as a new anger therapy. “Okay, you two seem to have a problem. Which one of you is giving off? Which one of you is absorbing? Wouldn’t a balance be better for the both of you?” Maybe the van’t Hoff principle does apply to people. 

How did humans get hooked on dark prophecies? Go back just a decade and a half to the concerns people had about Y2K as an example. Or go to the prophecies of doom, such as the one made by Harold Camping for May 21, 2011 or the follow up prediction by The eBible Fellowship of Philadelphia, a group that proclaimed the “End” would come on Wednesday, October 7, 2015.  (Hey! Did I miss something?)

Why are so many of us always looking for signs of End Times? Asteroids and comets should form a union. They star in major movies and numerous TV shows in a thankless job of arriving unexpectedly on the scene to wipe out humanity. Wait for 99942 Apophis: The Uncreator might fall down the drain of gravity in April 2068 after several near-Earth passes. No doubt the big collision will be preceded by TV documentaries and movie spectaculars that feature a few human survivors and every species of bacterium and cockroach left to repopulate Planet Earth. Bolide collisions get top billing in the Media.

Signs. More specifically, omens. Some people can’t take their eyes off them: For such people “Collision, Next Exit” hangs like an Interstate sign suspended over the highway of life.  Looking for guidance, the passenger asks some trusted prophetic driver, “Should we get off here?”

Remember Comet Hale-Bopp? Picture an almost monastic-like group of people imbued with stories of UFOs, Apocalypses, Recycling of Earth, and world-ending comets. Living an ascetic life, some of this group, including the leader, underwent voluntary castration to facilitate their life of denial. Of course, the denial occurred in affluent America, and the group’s 9,000 square foot house had amenities and, strangely, many monitoring devices to keep track of everyone at all times. When Hale-Bopp, the dirty ball of ice, traveled through the Solar System and passed by Earth in March, 1997, the Franciscan-like followers of Marshall Applewhite, belonging to a cult named Heaven’s Gate, saw suicide as a way to continue a journey. Supposedly, a spacecraft was following the foreboding comet, and they could hitch a ride by dying as a way to expedite leaving the planet. In their leader’s words, "It is also possible that part of our test of faith is our hating this world, even our flesh body, to the extent to be willing to leave it without any proof of the Next Level's existence." Now there’s a thought: Let’s go some place. We don’t know the location. In fact, we don’t even know whether the location exists. Be frank here. That’s exiting the highway because of a fleeting, temporary roadwork sign.

The word omen has a dubious and debated etymology, and that might indicate how shadowy our connection is to dark prophecies. Some Jungian archetype or Freudian id lurks as a moveable sign in the recesses of brain and underlies everything mind becomes. Yet, if you will allow me to paraphrase Freud’s famous statement about his cigar, “Sometimes a sign is just a sign. Nothing more.”

Is the weather bad? Sometimes. Does bad weather portend worldwide disaster? No. Weather is a local or regional phenomenon. Does the ground shake in an earthquake? Sometimes, usually in very specific places with very specific causes. Does an earthquake, landslide, tsunami, or volcanic eruption portend the end? Will the world end this past October 7, 2015? No. We already know it has survived as it has survived every dark prophecy since people started to foretell universal ends. Will something really bad happen to you because you have seen some sign of cataclysm? Probably not. Maybe the significance of any omen is that it is more a sign of what lies deep within rather than of what lies without.   

Will calamities occur? Of course. Will some of them be as predictable as tornado outbreaks? Of course. Should you worry about distant asteroids? No. Should you take the exit that says “Collision, Next Exit”? No. Drive on. Sometimes signs are just signs. You will pass a number of people holding up or pointing to such signs, people who, for whatever reason or un-reason, want you to follow them to the off ramp along your career, dreams, or life. Drive on.  

Wouldn’t the ancients be amazed? Headphones on, music playing, being in the midst of humanity yet unattached, lost in an alternate aural reality but close to the din of modern life, free to think or not think, free to move but chained to a rhythm pumped through narrow wires and turned to a volume of choice: Ah! The ancients would be amazed, and, at first, probably a bit frightened. “What!” they would exclaim. “How can I be so removed from a place where I stand? Surely, this is wizardry. My eyes work, but my ears are now unconnected to my world. My thoughts are driven by music that just happens and that just overwhelms all other sounds.”

We make much of our connectedness to place. Home has a special meaning, sometimes good, sometimes not so good. The Forest, too, has meaning: In daytime we bathe in nature’s perfumes, sounds, colors, and textures, but at night we connect through fear of the unseen lurking creature. Or take urban life. The City is a chaotic movement tied to bits of order imposed by traffic lights, sidewalks, lanes for traffic, and “civilized behaviors like passing others without bumping, holding doors open, and waiting turns. We feel connected to each place until we put on the headphones.

There’s no complaint here. We are no longer early or pretech humans. We have invented sounds that we can turn to any decibel level we wish, even to dangerous levels. We have mastered natural sound and imposed artificial sound that disconnects us from place while we stand in its midst.

Why shouldn’t we be unconnected to place at times? We claim a nonphysical existence in mind and spirit. A mind, as the poets and psychologists have told us, is free to wander into places that could never exist in the world of senses. Or, as the great poet Milton has Satan say, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven….” Headphones serve as a vehicle for that temporary transformation and for wandering. Wrapped in headphones, we can be “placeless”—at least until the music stops.

Every place binds us loosely because of mind and spirit. Headphones provide an option. We are simultaneously bound and unbound. Headphones are our personal Ear of Dionysius, the cave that allows the quietest and most hidden sounds to be heard, a place where we can eavesdrop on others with whom we feel a connection, the distant Sirens that seemingly call only to us. Headphones, often called the bane of communication, serve the wearer a temporary way out of the meaningless din of seven billion others. Selfish? Yes. Self-centered? Not necessarily. Maybe we don them when we feel lost in a crowd of unknowns and pinned to a place. Maybe they provide a special communication between like minds separated by both time and space. Headphones can take us anywhere at any speed—until the music stops. 

As experience tells us, not everyone mourns the same way or for the same duration. Mourning is a private matter, and it can persist for years in the background of daily life. With help from loved ones and professionals we can lessen its effect, but it rises persistently as the sun.

Unlike Earth’s actual sun, however, the morning of mourning occurs in unexpected times and from unexpected directions. Its unpredictability can extend mourning throughout a lifetime. Even turning away from this rising darkness doesn’t free us from its effects; rather, it makes us see our own shadows along a chosen path. No, the better choice between facing the unexpected rise and turning away is to wear the protective glasses of reality.

We mourn because we were meant to mourn. Gerard Manly Hopkins probably caught the reality most succinctly in his poem “Spring and Fall” about the emotions of a girl named Margaret. Hopkins asks, “Margaret, are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?” Only the poem does full justice to the thought, but here’s the nutshell version: Any death, even that of leaves in the fall, can represent all death. Any loss can represent all loss, even our own deaths.

Mourning rises in all of us at sometime. There might be some comfort in that knowledge. If now you mourn, know that there are others who now witness the same rise. We are bound to one another by the commonness of the experience that breaks upon our days and unexpectedly eclipses our forgetful happiness.

You can’t do anything to stop the leaves from falling, but you can recognize a truth: After the bleak darkness of winter, new leaves will grow under a rising spring sun. 

“The moon,” we say, “waxes and wanes.” No, for anyone in the 21st century, waxing of popular culture is not applicable. The moon is already a hairless body. Think, instead, phases of the moon, that is, the way we see however much of the moon’s daytime—sometimes more, as in a full moon, sometimes less, as in a quarter moon, and, of course, sometimes none, as in a new moon.

If you bother with such things, you know that the moon runs around our planet in a slightly inclined and elliptical orbit, and, for those on Earth, the moon rises about 50 minutes later each day until it cycles back to where it was in time and relative place about 28 days later. So, given that the moon rises, say, at 9:00 a.m. on one day, the next rising will be at 9:50 on the following day, and 10:40, and so on, progressing through both our days and our nights. When the rise is at night, it sometimes catches our attention, “Wow! Look at that moon!”

Turns out that my simple method of finding the location of the moon with respect to your horizon, is, in fact, just an approximation. For navigators and astronomers, the matter is a bit more serious and more mathematical. People take this stuff seriously. There’s a book. Really. There’s one entitled The Complete Mathematical and General Navigation Tables, Including Every Table Selected with the Nautical Almanac in Finding Latitude and Longitude: with an Explanation of Their Construction, Use, and Application to Navigation and Nautical Astronomy, Trigonometry, Dialling, Gunnery, Etc. Etc, written by Thomas Kerigan of the Royal Navy in 1836. And it’s a two-volume work. Kerigan shows his calculations for the moon’s rising that takes into account refraction by Earth’s atmosphere and the offset by parallax. Snooze. “You’re boring me here, professor.”

“Bear with me a moment longer. You’ve already committed to reading the above. Might as well finish this thing to see where I’m going. One of the astronomers who gave us a simpler way to calculate the moon’s rising was Truman Henry Safford, who was born the same year that Kerigan published his book. Now, you might think that since yours truly just gave you a rule of thumb on calculating the time of the moon’s rise, that it seems silly for someone to be defined as ‘one who gave us a simpler way to calculate the moon’s rising.’ Why not just use the simple method of adding 50 minutes per day that I gave above?”

Truman Henry Safford was famous in his time for having the ability as a child to do some big calculating in his head. Once presented as a ten-year-old with a squaring problem of daunting difficulty, he solved it IN HIS HEAD within a minute. The problem was “What is the square of 365,365,365,365,365,365?” (I’ll give you a minute to figure the answer…………………………What? Did you think I was going to spoon-feed it to you? The kid did it in his head)

How does one wax to such brilliance by age 10? He didn’t know. No one knows now. And no one knows why such ability can wane with age, as it did in Truman’s brain. Yes, over time he seems to have lost the ability that he couldn’t explain even when he had it. As a child, he just calculated.  

Now, you might not be a prodigy. But you certainly have had some ability as mysterious as Truman’s. You waxed into it unexpectedly. You waned from it gradually. There’s an intensity that fades from full moon to new moon in almost every aspect of our lives. The trick to shining like the risen full moon is curiosity. You might not be able to calculate when that new ability will suddenly rise; you might have some false rising caused by the parallax of your dreams over reality. But curiosity keeps the potential for the rise just 50 minutes later into the next day. What you were isn’t going to be there at the same time that it was the day before. Think not of past risings. Look toward the horizon. Repeated waning makes room for new waxing. Repeated setting makes way for new rising, maybe not in the same way or in the same place, but a rising nevertheless. There’s a potential prodigy in you. Look toward the horizon. 

Draw a circle. O That’s good enough. Now, within the circle but close to its circumference, draw a polygon of any number of sides (say n sides). That’s good. Draw another polygon with n sides on the outside of the circle, but again close to the circumference of the circle. Great! Stay with me now. Check the perimeters of both polygons. Obviously, the perimeter of the one outside the circle will be greater than the circumference, whereas the perimeter of the polygon inside the circle will be less than the circumference. Somewhere between the two, the circumference has a value that neither polygon equals. However, it is possible to make the two polygons come close to the circumference. Just add sides (i.e., a larger n). From the outside, the polygon will shrink toward the circumference. From the inside the polygon will grow.

Of course, as polygons, neither the inside nor the outside figure will exactly match the circumference of the circle, but both will get infinitely close as you add sides. That was Archimedes’ thinking when he tried to pin down the value of π, an irrational number (a number that can’t be put in an exact fraction).

Much of what we do daily is, like pi, irrational. We would all have difficulty putting relationships in exact ratios. What do we say? “Well, he’s 3 to my 5.” “She’s definitely a 7 to my 11.” “Gosh, now that I think about it, I would say I am definitely 5/9 of our relationship.”

No, we can’t pin down relationships just as we can’t ultimately pin down pi. But we can use Archimedes’ method and reasoning to get close. Both polygons have to move toward each other, never quite meeting at the circumference of the intervening circle, but approaching a good approximation. That’s about all we can hope for in understanding human relationships, a good approximation arrived at after adding an indefinite number of sides.