Cosmic Beer Goggles

Today's my Birthday, you know what that means. Well, OK. It's not totally clear. I got some great cards and Birthday wishes which I appreciate a lot. We're going to have my favorite meal, pork chops, potatoes and gravy and corn. I will reflect on 64 years of existence and what it has come to signify to me.

These are all good things. I have to say I reflect on my existence pretty much every day anyway. I have for a long time. It's my default condition. It just suits me better now that I'm old. It doesn't, however, make any more sense to me, it just seems more familiar. As a matter of fact, I have more questions now than ever before but I think my questions are getting better with every year.

Maybe that's how it goes. Every passing day, we refine the questions. Making them a little clearer, a little more defined. We drop a few old ones that are stupid or redundant. That's part of the editing process. When we finish, we should have a couple perfect questions or maybe just one.

One perfect question to ask as we go back where we came from. And there are as many perfect questions as there are lives being lived.

I used to think that life was about answers. To have the most answers, to have the correct answers, But now, I lean toward the Alex Trebek philosophy. Our answer must be in the form of a question.

Answers are a mirage we see in the distance when we're young, an illusion created by the power of stories.

The stories we're told tell us that life is ultimately fair and balanced. That the world is beautiful and that the nature of nature is balance and fairness. We build a small model in our heads of the balanced beautiful world we believe in and then we stretch and distort our senses and reason to make the world outside fit the model. Like Cosmic Beer Goggles.

We see the beauty of the world because our eyes and minds were made for this purpose. But the beauty must coexist with the ugliness. I can't imagine it otherwise.

The balance is there but it has nothing to do with us, with humanity. The real balance of nature looks cruel from our personal viewpoint. It is equally served by us skipping through an alpine glade at 72 degrees Fahrenheit with our pockets bulging with $100 bills or being ejected butt naked into the radiation filled vacuum of space at 3 degrees Kelvin.

Both are fair in the balance of nature. Any natural world that can create suyper-massive blackholes and cause the annihilation of stars is not looking out for your car or home.

We feel disappointed that our sun will die out spectacularly at some point. That makes me sad. It makes me sadder to think that our grandchildren's grandchildren will possibly have faced great extinctions and I won't be there to share their fate.

I want to change what I can to postpone that for them. To give humanity an edge for a little longer, to survive a little longer, for no reason other than, that's what people do.

If I am, for some reason, unable to fix the future with my thoughts and deeds (don't worry, it's a joke), then at least, I will make sure that my children can carry on with the absolute certainty that, in a universe in which they hardly matter, I love them from before the time they were born until the end of time, no matter what. I can do that.

For me. I'm indescribably happy turning 64 years old, upright, in such a world as this. With all its sad and awful parts. With all its happy and beautiful parts.  I'm so lucky to have had the chance to look and see the beauty around me in almost everything.

What a gift! What a life!