It will be there in 3 days.
Agent of the USPS a couple weeks ago
But my little package took 6 days to get from San Diego, California, to Colorado Springs, Colorado.
At first, I was puzzled by the delay — not to mention disappointed. But then somebody said the new Postmaster General wanted to celebrate election year by reinstating the Pony Express. My immediate reaction was:
Continue reading “Genius Idea!”Cool! Who is this new Postmaster General?
Me, thinking about horses carrying the mail
I admit it’s possible to discover something accidentally. Take bacteriologist Dr. Alexander Fleming, for example. In 1928, he returned to his lab after a vacation in Scotland to discover a mold called Penicillium notatum had contaminated his petri dish colonies of Staphylococcus aureus, and was preventing its growth.
“When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I guess that was exactly what I did.” Dr. Alexander Fleming
Of course, Dr. Fleming had already studied bacteriology, so while it may be possible even you and I could accidentally discover some new scientific fact, if we don’t have the underlying knowledge, if we don’t know the rules, our discovery probably won’t make much of an impact on the world.
But for someone who has the knowledge and knows the rules of their field, like, say, art or agriculture or aerospace engineering, the rules can be a springboard into new understanding and advances.
“You have to know the rules before you can break them with purpose.” Me, reflecting on what little wisdom I’ve been fortunate to stumble into.
I lament the passing of my generation’s defiant motto: Question Authority. We didn’t believe the rules weren’t meant for us or that there shouldn’t be any at all. We wanted to know why they were rules and what would happen if they weren’t. Could we get along more peacefully if some of the rules were different? Like desegregation. Or Congressional term limits. Or decriminalizing pot. (Legalizing marijuana was only a pipe dream back then.)
Today, it seems too many people simply believe the rules don’t apply to them. We can see examples of the resulting chaos in any city that harbors those solar powered scooters as helmetless scofflaws ride them in the wrong direction on one-way streets, or cross multi-lane streets mid-block or against red lights. We can see that chaos in any government that denies reality, espouses ignorance, and ignores the Rule of Law.
Where will we go from here? To Mars? To a nation of healthier, better educated citizens? Or will we remain stuck in a man-made quagmire, clawing the mud to keep up with the rest of the world?
I know what I want. I’m watching for people who know stuff and understand the rules well enough to think beyond them. Those are the people who will launch us forward. Those are the people who can make a large-scale, positive impact on the world.
Gapawa published a post today titled A Bit of Honesty. He likened himself to Sisyphus, futilely pushing a big rock up a hill only to have it roll back down for him to push back up the hill. Day after day after day. Gapawa concludes the way out is beneath oceans of fear where your dream — whatever that means to you — is carefully concealed.
“It can be reached. But you must be courageous. You must be willing to accept help. You must be strong enough to surrender. Sweet dreams…” Gapawa
I left a comment.
“If you dive into the oceans of fear often enough, you can locate the shallows of experience where you can dream awake and put down your rock.
The first time was the scariest.” Me
He asked me if I’d care to share some of my experience, and my response grew into a post. With credit to Gapawa for prodding me to put it into words, I decided it would be more polite to publish it here than to fill his space with a post-length comment.
Here is my reply:
(This morning, I commented on grandfathersky’s post “The paradox of consciousness – part II“. My comment stands on its own here.)
I wonder if questioning is a cycle of humanity’s evolution. Surges of exploration, scientific discovery, extraordinary creativity in any of the arts all seem to coincide. Golden Ages like the Renaissance or the Age of Aquarius. Revolutions. Times when dissatisfaction saturates enough people’s lives that we reach a tipping point where the collective will is finally strong enough to question the rules, Authority, what we think we know, what we believe. And we search for new perspectives, trying this philosophy or that, new music, new art, new medicines, no medicines, new governments, anarchy, new views of the stars . . .
Till we reach a new plateau where we sit, complacent. Tired of questioning or simply believing there is no need to question. Willing to accept the lie in believe. A new Dark Age. We are comfortable.
Until we aren’t.
I suspect the world is showing us just how uncomfortable we have become, and dissatisfaction has reached the 98th monkey.
Space, Time, and Raspberries 
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