Making Choices

The moonrise is crisp and clear. Broken clouds at such varying heights the setting sun paints them with different colours depending on the elevation. Some clouds go from gray to white to pink to a deep salmon. The moon is a cleaner white and more detailed than I see at home.

 

Tonight six boats have sought anchorage in the pass between the two mangrove islands, seeking refuge against the strong north east current with winds running to 25 knots, raising the sea state to a four foot chop.

Four of the six have the mooring lights showing, warning other boats of their presence in the dark seas. Maritime law demands compliance. Last week a man died when he rammed his PWC (personal water craft) into the side of a moored boat at night. The law here in the tropics says operation of a PWC during hours of darkness is punishable. The story I read didn’t mention if a mooring light was on, or if alcohol was a factor. I assume that speed certainly was.

On my way home from the gym yesterday there was an iguana sunning itself dead centre in my lane. A GMC pickup off to starboard said no to a lane change, and speeds here are 45 mph in business areas. No choice but to run over the lizard. And I do, but the lizard lives on, being just the right height to avoid being rendered headless. I know because I felt nothing hit the car, and the little head popped up in the rear view still attached to its owner.

The iguana, unlike humans, don’t know there are rules to survival that you actually get a chance to ignore. For an iguana life is pretty simple. Eat, mate, and being an ectomorph spend a lot of time regulating body temperature. Humans make choices, often bad ones and for some of the same biological reasons as the iguana

Dumb luck, divine intervention, and karmic realization are pretty irrelevant. In this story the iguana’s alive and the human isn’t. And I’m left pondering who might be smarter or luckier, the ignorant left over dinosaur or the cave man in blue jeans making choices?

LIVING THE Pi LIFE

I’ve mentioned before how terrible I am at the math and the science. I spent a good deal of my childhood in an insular place of books and television. A place where story drove actions, and evil was usually vanquished with a combination of luck, knowledge, and intuition. That’s why I struggled with the math and the science. I could never find the plot, context, or storyline. It never had a moral or counterpoint to ponder. It was just flat out dull and without a purpose. And all you Mathletes out there can yell and scream all you want about how math and science changed your understanding of the universe. Go ahead, this isn’t about you. But it will be if you stay tuned.
One day as I sat pondering the mangrove islands that sit about a mile or so from my office in the tropics, I realized how Pi could actually translate into my world. Finally, I was getting a handle on a puzzle that has been quietly stewing way back in the “things to eventually do” spaces of my mind. This one was buried behind an ongoing thought about how to define mayoral corruption, and just to the right of an ongoing debate about the best burger I ever ate.

According to Wikipedia Pi is referred to as an “irrational number”, a number whose “decimal representation never ends and never settles into a permanent repeating pattern”. Which makes it the perfect human number.

 Starting with the basic 3.1415 at birth we move on to calculating the next digit to the right, since there can be no other number to the left. And we spend the next umpteen years of our lives calculating one digit at a time. Each digit calculates as a defining point on the circle of your lifeline. Apparently Pi’s most common usage is to figure out circle volume, which fit with my thought on those moments when we actually figure out a point in the human life constant. By a certain age we like to think we have life figured out, and that we no longer really need to spend time pondering our place on the circle. Except I find as I age that my journeys and travels allow that I ponder more, not less.

The past ten years have seen me travel in ways I never traveled before, both personally and for work. I returned to places I have always loved to be. Those places of childhood and youthful experience that helped mold our family’s joint dynamic. I journeyed to new places where I found new outlooks, ideas, truths, and in no small measure personal growth. I found that some old concepts, formed in either anger or ignorance, needed a new look. It was challenging to question a lot of choices and decisions that in retrospect were holding me back rather than pushing me forward. And some that were needlessly destructive.

I chose to go back and examine each of those moments, and they had to be examined in different ways. First through circumstance, knowledge, and even prejudice, and then run through a filter of a particular emotion that dominated those moments. And those moments were not re-visited in linear fashion, because a life fully lived is never linear. Sometimes we have answers years before we know there is even a question, and sometimes we close doors far too securely without knowing we might want, or need to re-open them. And those moments are the Pi moments. When the calculation of the next digit falls into place, but we find several of the preceding calculations have been wrong, throwing off a sequence that follows.

After the cross country road trip I admitted to someone that I had never got lost, but I did turn some corners I hadn’t anticipated thus seeing places and ideas I hadn’t planned. That in itself was a Pi moment. Previous to that I had been lost many times, literally and figuratively. But I have travelled so many roads over the years that suddenly, on this road, an unfamiliar turn had the promise of new ideas and adventures.

 For the better part of a week I spent time on my tropical office chair watching the pelicans, the herons, the ibis’s, the Osprey. I was softly guided through a color palette of the sea trying to determine a shade of green from a shade of blue or even black. The jumping fish, the occasional fin of a shark, and the marshmallow theatrics of bleached cotton clouds in constantly evolving shades of a blue sky. All the while I was tracing the notion of Pi as a philosophical equation against my personal Songlines all helped through the lenses of iced tea, and when appropriate Sandbar Sunday, and Boodles.

 Calculating the number Pi is a process defined by a logical and somewhat linear progression despite being an “irrational number”. In life we as humans progress along the line we choose and follow in a seemingly orderly progression until from somewhere the irrational happens, and we stumble and fall out of sequence.

Some people are quite happy with their lives being rounded out to only 6 or 7 decimal places. I know people who are happy with that simplicity of a life that doesn’t progress much beyond last night’s sports scores or those game shows masquerading as “human reality”.

For me, I live for those Pi days when I find a new number for my sequence. I know I’ll have worked for it, and I’ll know its real value to me is that it’s not my last one.

Feeling Sheridan

At the town of Hardin Montana Interstate 90 changes direction from roughly east to mostly south. As you cross the Wyoming State line the Bighorn Mountains begin to show themselves off to the west, with scrubby grassland to the east. The land has gentle hills and the road pleasantly rolls along, neither challenging nor boring. It continues south through Sheridan until you get to the town of Buffalo. From there the road forks, I-25 continues south and I-90 resumes a more easterly run.

 

The turn at Buffalo was a ways into the future as I took Exit 23 at Sheridan for a fuel and pit stop. Turn right at the stop sign and you head downhill into the city of about 17,000 people. Turn left and there’s a Visitor Centre on a rise about a quarter mile up the hill. The Visitor Centre had first priority because the state run rest stop facilities are a safer and cleaner bet than a possible losing hand at a gas station.

There are some covered table areas with a clear view south and west, down across the low valley to where the Bighorn Mountains begin to challenge the distant sky. In Wyoming and Montana size and space take on vastly different meaning. At home on the coast distance is more relative, defined by rivers and the geography of coastal fjords. There aren’t a lot of “wide open spaces”. It’s heavily treed making it seem tight and close. The mountain terrain controls access so you’re pretty much always going uphill, downhill, or crossing a bridge.
 
In Wyoming and Montana you drive long distances to reach mountains that have dominated the horizon for hours. Descriptive phrases such as “endless prairie”, and “desolate empty spaces” are useless because they seem trite, childish, and embarrassingly cliché. Light is colored golden beige and light brown with a mottling green undertone, moderated and brightened by a blue sky that changes from edge to edge, from robin’s egg to iris, and back. The sky is so big you can’t see all of it. You have to turn your head from side to side as far as your neck will let you, and then nod up and down, and turn around. There is a feeling you exist in the centre of the sky. You know where everything is in your mind, yet you never actually see it because there’s so much of it.

This is the land of great modern western fiction. This is the land of Absaroka County where aging Sherriff Walt Longmire lives his troubled way through the understanding hand of author Craig Johnson. It’s the land of Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett, a good man brought to life by C.J. Box.

It’s a land where the dead can rest in peace for centuries without being disturbed, because it’s doubtful any human would come across the remains. This is the land of the Crow, Shoshone, Cheyenne, Ute, and Arapaho, and pretty much has been since time was invented. There is Spirit in this land, and I get just a tickle whiff of what awaits me when I come back through the Black Hills in a few weeks.

Thousands of years pass here, and nothing will change. Coming from a place that increasingly wants to run forward to fill the mountain sides and sky with glass and steel, obliterating the mountains themselves from view, and stressing the existing resources to a point where the community itself won’t be viable in a hundred years. I find this place and vista to be a place of personal reckoning.

Great expanses challenge the human soul, and makes some nervous. It seeks to find meaning and connection. It seeks to not be irrelevant and insubstantial. For most it seeks to not be alone, seeking comfort and safety in the company of other like beings. So the sage ones keep telling us.

For this moment I am pleased there is no one near. I find great expanses settling to my soul. As if I can finally reach out to open the mental and intellectual doors of the real me, and let a cleansing breeze carry in the freshness of a quiet world my mind loves to explore.

Various waterfront rooms at the Sheraton Waikiki overlooking the Pacific Ocean with practically nothing between me and the ocean were such a place. I spent days on the lanai just staring, sometimes reading, and writing prolifically. The beach at Tierra Del Mar and the summit of Mount Hebo in Oregon, both a surprise to find, and wonderful places to let the breeze blow through. My perch in the Tropics, where the sun moves across the sky, the shadows changing color and depth on the two small mangrove islands. The sky telling its own unique daily story from sunup to moonset. Even then the stars quietly whisper on, telling tales from so long ago that common points of reference are impossible, but the whispered melody of the sparkling universal language brings soothing comfort, and inspires curiosity.

Not everyone can find pleasure in contemplative solitude. It makes some people angry and nervous. Some enjoy it for a while, and then return to their day to day. For a few poor souls any kind of solitary endeavour can drive them truly mad. Being with such people can drive me mad.

It takes time for the depth of a momentary feeling to coalesce into significant thought, and even then only if you seek to let it. I find there seems to be less and less appetite for considered thought. The now seemingly constant state of individually processing raw information for a personally satisfying experience has left cogent ponderous thought, and the desire for salient context kicked to the kerb. Intellectual road kill on the information super-highway. The comment sections of the inter-web are filled with ignorance, vitriol, and self-righteous irrelevances. Perhaps like this blog.

None of these thoughts coalesced in the few minutes I stood there looking out across the valley at the Bighorns, the grasslands, and the long southbound ribbon of I-90. At the time I had never read Craig Johnson or C.J. Box. That enjoyment was over a year in the future. I had no idea of the names of the First Nations that flourished on this land long before the original 13 Colonies were formed. I was uninformed but open to the new and old, feelings and facts.

 

I had been on the road since 7 that morning when I left Missoula. I had passed Clinton (famous for a “testicle” festival, whatever that might be), Anaconda (ugly and industrial), Manhattan, and Billings. I had crossed the Continental Divide in a more emotional experience than I had expected. I pulled into and out of Sheridan around 3 in the afternoon. I was in town all of 15 minutes, conducted my business, and left. It would be 7 that night before I kept my date with a Motel 6 in Rapid City, after passing through Gillette, Deadwood, Sturgis and hundreds of miles of inspiring empty land.

It would be several years before Sheridan would become a real and considered thought and feeling. It’s a work in progress, and it’s that progress keeping my life interesting.