We had take-out from Chipotle’s tonight. It’s pretty good, although hard to take home without it’s becoming cold, but still tasty. I went out of my way a few miles to get it, even though I nearly pass one on my normal way home. When I arrived the place was packed, unusually so – extraordinarily unusually so – for a weeknight at this particular mall full of restaurants.
They were hosting a fundraiser for a five-time cancer victim who had been on the local swim team in high school, in between cancer battles, and who has made nothing but friends in her first twenty five years on Earth. The swim team was sponsoring the event during which, for several hours, Chipotle would donate not five or ten or fifteen percent of revenues from identified supporters, but an astronomical thirty-three percent thereof. By the time I left the wonderfully noisy establishment, the line had expanded from the long one I waited in, to one that extended through the double doors. I had tears in my eyes.
The ultimate beneficiary is a granddaughter. But that isn’t the topic… not really.
I work in a small city beset with every social ill, discomfort, and disruption there is, from drug abuse to gangs to illegal entrants on welfare. Yet it has its own vitality, too, with hundreds of small businesses, including several that expedite everything from cars and furniture to cash back to the “home” countries. Driving along the best route to the Chipotle restaurant I passed blocks that once were nearly pure Italian, now nearly pure “Hispanic,” although none of the residents come, actually, from Spain.
Looking at the myriad signs hanging from brackets or otherwise affixed to the storefronts, I was struck by all the forces, factors, influences and opportunities to create something, that had come together to form the human consciousness that had created this or that sign in particular. And for that matter, that had created the things on display in the windows, or the very windows or the cars parked in front. In the boundless (we think) Universe of planets and places of every shape and kind, how insignificant and majestic each of those creations are. Why are they what they are?
Across the street were new apartment blocks of certain size and shape, in certain colors chosen from millions of colors, made of materials natural and invented, but made – created, by people, whose purpose and motivation may have been garnering money, another human invention, but whose product, however important to the net occupants, is, in the grand scheme of things, so infinitesimally tiny as to be invisible, which is not to say, meaningless. One can rightfully assume, I believe, that every human-conceived and created thing or, I suppose, idea, is meaningful. Indeed every thing is or was meaningful in a large manner at some time, and the fact that no one we can find remembers its large meaning in no way detracts from its infinitesimal and utter importance.
How is it that we mere specks of tissue on this planetary mote have found within ourselves the need and the ability to create things? How is it that we have invested so much of our cosmically virtual instants of life to the work of creating things, but even more astonishing, to devise ways and means to care about one another… like the five-time cancer patient who has created of herself, in spite of constant physical attacks on her tiny body, a teacher to children?
That so large a fraction of our blinks of time is spent creating ways to comfort ourselves and our children, is logical and to be expected, one would think; but, how is another such large fraction of our time consumed by caring for others, unrelated, most likely and unmet, even more likely? Chemistry? Cosmic rays? Hmmnh. What is the point?
Many of us human specks think there is no point. To they who agree, apparently one should have as much fun as possible, as much sex as possible, own as many things as possible, be they items for sale behind that singular window in the building built as it was with the certain kind of sign saying what it says on the street where I passed, or the painted apartment blocks with unknown people in them… unknown at least to me. If the things one owns happen to bring the owner more fun and more sex, then he or she has hit “life’s lottery,” making him or her “lucky” despite the impossibility of luck as a force working on the dust-mote of a planet we call home, else there would be something larger than our atoms and selfishness.
The house a semi-handyman lives in is full of things that he has made or perhaps modified or built because of need or artistry. They are pleasing to him, for a hundred reasons, perhaps even to impress his wife or mate. Oftentimes they were argued about in the concept, but he still “did” them, sometimes to praise. But, why? Why could not things have simply stayed the same? Someone else crafted them as they were, or damaged them to leave them so. Barring concerns of safety or comfort, why not leave them alone, tan instead of green, yellowish instead of rose, blue instead of stained and polished wood? Whence came the compulsion, by anyone, to change them, all those things?
There may be, a billion stars away, a planet with what we call astronomers looking through what we call telescopes and barely detecting the changes in brilliance of our little star as we circle across its disk of light. If a little more “advanced” than we they may have detected radio signals or nuclear blasts on our little speck and feel compelled, somehow, to let us know they know. We will. What would it matter, the color of my house or socks or fingernails, to any of those distant, distant cousins? Or, to us, theirs? But they and we, matter above all of our respective, awakened histories, to one another. Interesting, that.
Where does freedom live? Is there some reason, aside from novels and movies, both strange aspects of humanity, to believe that only planet-wide, homogenous people could ever advance sufficiently to contact other life? Isn’t science most properly an affirmation of freedom? Freedom to wonder, investigate, experiment and explore? Freedom to challenge “truths” and to postulate new ones? A billion stars away, would the search for us be a scientific endeavor or a military one?
Or, as many appear to believe, increasingly over many decades, is freedom, the essence of individuality, an impediment to “progress?” If it is snuffed out on our Earth-speck, will the Universe care? Or is freedom a blip in the history of humanity, otherwise destined to be controlled by more powerful elites, inexorably planet-wide? How is it that humans evolved to invent democracy and the concept of republicanism? Cellular luck? Not possible if there are no philosophical forces, like “luck,” operating outside of simple existence. Did biochemistry produce democracy? Or a nation founded on self-government and limited central powers?
And if “freedom,” the inherent rights of individuals to both succeed or fail, were to be snuffed out on the tiny mote of matter we call Earth, would it matter to our brothers on that other speck a billion suns away? Would it matter here?