7 > 3

Reaching in to pluck a ripe blackberry you encounter a thorn. In recoil you engage several thorn pricks and thoughts of sweet berries are dismissed by feelings of pain. Pain receptors serve us well but the service is under valued. Why would you feel good about a thorn prick? Anyone who masters the 3rd grade understands the body’s early warning system. Then again, like my car’s cruise control, if I can make it work I know enough.

Mastering the 7th grade, you learn about nerve networks where impulses send information to the brain and the brain sends commands back to body parts. “Ouch, it hurts,” and “Get your finger out of harm’s way.” If you really feel a need to know, mastering can go on for decades. With a cruise control approach, you’ll never know what it is that you’ve missed. Unfortunately, if or when you change your mind it may be too late for a course correction. If at age 30 or 40 you feel the need to master understanding of the body’s immune system, all things being equal, your life is probably a plate-full. Making space and taking time to remaster the 12th or 15th grade is unlikely. So you ask someone who knows and the best they can do is dumb down the math from balancing equations to a fundamental appreciation that 7 is greater than 3. 

I don’t think you need a college education to understand a thorn prick but the learning curve is keen and if you leave it fallow it will take the low road. After 50 years of computer evolution the most important principle to emerge is, “Garbage in, garbage out.” However one equips the mind with tools for communication and the acquisition of information, that’s all you have to work with. I know folks who are, for all practical purposes, illiterate but they function in their culture, work hard, love and are loved, making a good life. Life is good. There is no career path to happiness like medical school for a doctor. Happiness is a universal expectation and everyone negotiates that boulder field with the tools they have mastered; throw in some random chance. Life delivers blistering fast balls, sinking curves, tantalizing change ups and random beanballs. We, the batters, stand in with a piece fo wood and the skill set we have accumulated.

I am an old man, career behind me but I have to work at something. The need for a sense of purpose is very real, at any age. If all I get is happy then I’m a dull boy. I think ‘Content’ is the ideal state of being. It feels good but like the half full, half empty glass; it keeps you real. Arrogance with its swagger and ego, they don’t care much for ‘Content’. The danger with ‘Happy’ is, it’s easy to believe you deserve all the glee that good fortune has rained down on your parade. True, in this life we have to live as if we are the masters of our own destiny but in fact we know that we are not. 

I’m a good listener but with age comes entropy and diminishing returns. That makes me more selective in what I consume than when every rock needed to be overturned. I love good conversation but they come few and far between. Even with like minded friends, dialogue can lose its way and all you take away is the rehashing of what was already agreed upon; reinforcing an established bias. The fact that someone will listen to your prattle is reconciled by listening to theirs, a ritual that has more to do with in group bonding than growing an idea or the spark of discovery. It’s hard enough, framing language to convey something long deemed unthinkable. You sense you are moving through the second or third step of a complex equation and your audience is stuck on the logic of, 7 is greater than 3. My offering, with no qualified destination, will sublimate like piss in the wind. Still, there are times, when lightning strikes and you feel like the young explorer who doesn’t care if the boat never docks, as long as there is wind in its sail.