Here lies an outlier

As we get to know more and more about each other, we will grow more comfortable accepting each other’s subcultural differences, appreciating how the definition of success can vary so widely that it almost seems impossible seven billion varieties point to the same thing: our species’ survival and growth.

Yes, it includes fear, crime, ecosystem disasters, economic failures and myriad ways in which the universe we live does not always point toward our survival and growth.

Dust particles — small fibers, short hair, unidentifiable tiny, twisted objects — seemingly oblivious to gravity, float through a beam of sunshine propped up between the writing desk and the dirty window.

A few days ago, I visited with some friends whose father recently died.  My friends and I had spent a few years together in primary and secondary school over 30 years ago.  One friend I hadn’t seen in at least 35 years.

Needless to say, we knew little about one another except what we have seen in the past couple of years while sharing space on a computer server farm spread across data centers around the world dedicated to an online social media website called facebook.

In other words, we had little to say to each other in person that we didn’t already know, or should have remembered seeing in our online personality profile.

The moment was there for comfort at the time of loss of the family patriarch.

Soothing words.

Fond memories of our youth spent under the guidance of a chemical research/sales engineer and literal/figurative father figure.

I cough, sending dust particles on a swirling dance out of and back into the sunlight, which then disappears with clouds passing overhead, reappearing a few minutes later at a new angle, attached to the bright, yellow glob amidst the blue-painted dome high above.

An airplane swoops and circles the patch of sky nearby, making the sounds of the television playing a movie called “The Longest Day” seem live and in real 3D viewing/listening closeness.

After visiting with the friends, my wife and I returned to her mother’s house, continued our sorting through physical reminders of my wife’s mother, father and brother, all deceased.

My wife’s nuclear family is no more, except in her memories.

Her brother’s widow and children still live.  She has cousins spread around the globe.  And her family by marriage — my blood relatives, including nuclear family (father, mother, sister), as well as extended family (nieces, nephew, cousins, aunt, uncle, etc.).

My friends’ father lived for 84 365-day, 24-hour cycles around our local star.

As the planet spun, my friends’ family influenced those they met, all of them tied to Earth by gravity, the curvature of spacetime, we surmise.

We can see the familial influence through the eyes of the intersection of sets of states of energy, adding meme upon meme, including the word “meme,” to build physical representations of ideas like “idea,” to arrive at the point where schoolmates meet 30+ years later to reminisce about a few years spent in growing up together toward adulthood.

Did any of the dust particles floating in the air at the church where, due to one death, we met to talk about good times in childhood attach themselves to me and then re-enter the airspace in the sunbeam not far from this computer?

What about the particles I can’t readily see, such as water molecules, bacteria, dead skin cells or other microscopically miniscule minutiae?

We are connected in ways we rarely take time to notice, if we can see the connections at all.

How do I explain a blog post composed only of pictures to a blind person who uses a Braille keyboard and automatic audible reader?

How do I explain wireless radio pathways between a notebook computer and wireless router to people who can’t feel or don’t communicate signals at a wavelength of 0.125 m or about 5 inches?

Although… you know, some people say they can feel 2.4 GHz radio waves and other phenomena they claim causes them radiowave/EMF sickness.

But let’s get back to the global story of our lives, where financial gurus want to prop up a system that is no longer a viable connection between the macro and microeconomic levels…