I have friends who’ve achieved and accomplished their whole lives.

Here, on the 11th of April, while I look out the window at the jungle of a yard that keeps my house cool in the summer, my friends’ stories stand out in my thoughts.

Meanwhile, my sister and I (with help from my wife and mother) assemble a set of notes and medical reports to give to medical experts to help understand where we can go to get a firm (or as close to firm) diagnosis for my father’s medical predicament(s).

The tree leaves and limbs do what they do best when breezes pass over the undergrowth, grabbing my attention as joggers and walkers avoid speeding cars on the road ahead.

Disco light dances across the window screen and onto the end table holding up a power strip, grow lamp, computer monitor, scented oil lamp, 3Com modem cable, incense bowl, light timer and a book a friend gave me titled “It’s a Young World After All.”

I am open to hearing and reading about alternative views concerning the history of our species.

I am willing to accept my friends’ opinions about their achievements and accomplishments.

I do not fret about belief systems in the majority or the minority and how they may or may not sway the thought sets of people both young and old like the wind shapes the forest around me.

There aren’t as many seedpods on the redbud outside the window as there were last year.

There are thousands of people who buy handguns and rifles every year and will never use them, storing them for a collection or trading them for something that looks more useful than the ones they first bought.

It is part of our global cultural interaction that drives some to buy weapons for self-protection on an active, daily basis.

There are those who travel great distances to provide basic medical care and deliver simple foodstuff in order to raise the standard of living in regions of the world not well-connected to local/regional caring social networks.

And then there are the few who seek membership in the Galactic Exploration Society.

In this moment, when the actions of others — friends, family, acquaintances, and instantly formed/lost friendships — find spaces in my thoughts, I look around the room of my study/meditation zone and wonder how/if happiness is contagious.

Some days I pursue the wrong activities.

My father is a man of action more than contemplation.

I have always been more of a man of contemplation rather than action.

From my father’s U.S. Army days in Germany during the Cold War to his most recent days of teaching students at ETSU as an adjunct professor, he found happiness in social engagement.

I find happiness in analysing interesting data more than in stressing pre-arthritic joints while swinging a scythe.

Both of us are products of the influences of ancestors, peers, descendants, and commercial interests.

My father grew up to put country first.

I grew up to put planetary exploration first.

The influences upon him influenced me.

The same goes for the achievements and accomplishments of my friends.

The Sun heats the planet and air pressure changes create wind which passes through the forest, influencing my thoughts and the thoughts of people passing in front of my yard.

Staring at an iPad, my head bent down while my finger slides news articles across the screen, like the scenes around me flashing past when I’d hold on to the rails of a merry-go-round during recess in elementary school, causes motion sickness.

While telling the tale of our species from a long perspective, how do I incorporate the images above into one where we’re looking at our achievements and accomplishments that’ve put people on the Moon and cybernetic explorers on millennial-long journeys?

It’s not the brain of Stephen Hawking that I want to preserve — it’s his thought patterns that are interwoven with the society around him I want to perpetuate, ensuring that they continue to evolve unabated by the physical presence of a brain or a body bound to a wheelchair.

My father, however, is a different story.  His physical AND mental presence are both key parts of what he means to me and my desire to push our species beyond primal tendencies to create dystopian nightmares where survivalist weapon hoarding is considered normal behaviour.

It’s also more than that but I’ve allowed myself to become a mortal human, subject to daily interruptions of bigger dreams, distracted from the plan set in motion by a group of people I’ve spun into a literary device called the Committee to capture the attention of those prone to primal thought patterns so that we can achieve a goal 13,904 days from now with all 7+ billion of us fully involved as sets of states of energy in the visible part of the universe with which we’re most familiar.

Are hopes and dreams intimately tied to happiness?

Perhaps.

How much does the passing of a single redbud leaf in front of the window have to do with dust devils on Mars?

Do you understand the immense distance between our planet and any celestial body with potential compatible communicable sets of states of energy that would interest us more than as laboratory experiments?

A lesson I learned one summer during sales training week for Southwestern Book Company decades ago still applies today:

The story concerns twin boys of five or six. Worried that the boys had developed extreme personalities — one was a total pessimist, the other a total optimist — their parents took them to a psychiatrist.

First the psychiatrist treated the pessimist. Trying to brighten his outlook, the psychiatrist took him to a room piled to the ceiling with brand-new toys. But instead of yelping with delight, the little boy burst into tears. “What’s the matter?” the psychiatrist asked, baffled. “Don’t you want to play with any of the toys?” “Yes,” the little boy bawled, “but if I did I’d only break them.”

Next the psychiatrist treated the optimist. Trying to dampen his outlook, the psychiatrist took him to a room piled to the ceiling with horse manure. But instead of wrinkling his nose in disgust, the optimist emitted just the yelp of delight the psychiatrist had been hoping to hear from his brother, the pessimist. Then he clambered to the top of the pile, dropped to his knees, and began gleefully digging out scoop after scoop with his bare hands. “What do you think you’re doing?” the psychiatrist asked, just as baffled by the optimist as he had been by the pessimist. “With all this manure,” the little boy replied, beaming, “there must be a pony in here somewhere!”

That, my friends, is why we get up in the morning, making miracles every day.  No matter how much we may be distracted by the mundane, or even happy being perfectly anonymous, there’s always a chance that pony will appear out of nowhere and change our perspective.

In fact, I guarantee it will.

Look at me.  I never thought a tablet PC could cause motion sickness until today, which has completely changed my desire to write the Next Great App.