Rolling Up My Shirt Sleeves

Is anything inevitable? Looking at my favourites, items that I recall with visual acuity, will I inevitably return to them out of habit or when I want reassurance about who I am? I say that I am not the objects around me and yet I know I am. I am not me without them.

Am I also the objects that do not factor into my list of favourites, the thousands of stimuli I encounter everyday no matter whether I don't want to encounter them? If my eyes pass over an object but I do not consciously recognize that object in the moment, what effect does that object have on me?

My wife and I sat in the restaurant, Dreamland BBQ, yesterday afternoon. The store has several television appliances tuned to sports-related channels as well as one or two general news-related channels. On the main television screen, two guys were wearing gloves and fighting each other, using punches and kicks in order to disable the other guy. My wife doesn't like the sight of blood and didn't want to see the guys bloodying each other up but she also couldn't resist glancing at the fight because of her habit of watching television. I told her she didn't have to watch the fight if it was upsetting her and she said she couldn't help it.

The fight ended a few minutes later, with one guy being awarded the victory on a split decision by the judges. To me, the fight was no worse than the schoolyard and neighborhood fights in which I participated, sometimes as winner and sometimes as loser. Bruises, cuts, scrapes and blood were par for the course, to mix metaphors.

While my wife and I enjoyed our meals, she was eating pork ribs and I was eating beef sausage, sharing bowls of baked beans and banana pudding between us, I wondered about the influence of that fight on my wife's thought process. Would the fight go from her short-term memory to long-term memory so that years from now I could ask her about that day we ate at Dreamland BBQ and were offered menus for the first time and she could respond, "And that cage fight, too!", reminding me of our server, Jami, who wore a religious symbol around her neck and had short brown hair, with what looked like a wedding band and engagement ring on her right hand?

Thoughts constantly swirl in our brains, reinforcing themselves while we make new thoughts and new memories at the same time. Protein synthesis strengthens the synaptic connections of some thoughts while other thoughts may fade with time because of our changing habits, changing venues, or changing health conditions.

Somewhere in my brain the memories of the cage fight will mix with my analysis of ourselves as overachieving primates and form a new set of memories that don't exactly reflect reality. They will be my memories, though, which live with me as long as I refresh those memories occasionally.

I am every thing that happens to be around me in this moment along with the memories of the things that were around me in previous moments.

Before we ate dinner, my wife and I stood in a little shop called Bella Beads and looked at natural stones and plastic beads. My wife was interested in finding metal framework to mount the gemstones we'd received in the mail yesterday morning. We talked with the shopkeeper whose husband had been rafting on the Ocoee River earlier in the day and was shopping at Unclaimed Baggage while we spoke. She suspended any work she had to perform to focus on us, gladly spending time looking at colored stones (I had never seen such a variety, including a string of fire opals that would light up a woman's neck and set her man ablaze (I told my wife that it was the first time I'd thought of rocks as aphrodisiacs)) and consulting with my wife about designing a necklace with pearls and gemstones. The woman has her own distinct personality but at the same time she reminded me of a cross between a colleague named Janet and my sister, which means my memory of the shopkeeper is overlaid with the memories of other people I know. The shopkeeper kept flyers on the counter about the 3/50 project, which my wife and I support without thinking about it - spending money at locally-owned, independently-operated stores before spending money at national chain stores.

Later on, while sitting in the car and watching people of all shapes and sizes (but limited cultural accoutrements) walk by the store, Ulta, where my wife was selecting some hair care products, I thought about the impact of what I know about the current state of human society on me and the objects around me. I return to those thoughts now... The trees outside my window carry the history of seasonal changes in their growth rings, including the times that humans swept through here and chopped down all large trees for their use in the last few hundred years which led to the current state of human society. The trees also reflect changes in local weather which may or may not be attributable to human influences. The trees are here in front of me only because the person who built this house decided not to cut them down; he, in turn, was here because his father owned a business that helped his son build houses for a living; and so on.

I have a limited view of the activities of humans and other objects on this planet that let me sit here and write these words. Through meditation and other relaxation techniques which cut out external influences on the moment, I can increase "global" access to my thoughts while later researching more human activities which will give me a larger view but I will never know everything going on all at once. The human population grows too quickly for me to keep up with seven billion individuals at the same time, assuming I had access to their thoughts and activities, which I don't.

The current state of the world of humans has changed many times since I started writing this blog entry. Millions of people have been born, injured, or killed. We can lump people into categories and make estimates about their activities from one state of the world to the next, can't we? After all, every person has a set of favourites: favourite food, favourite hobby, favourite people to hang out with, favourite place to sleep, favourite place to spend the day, etc.

If all of us are creatures of habit, who go about our lives with mainly a local point of view, seeking out our favourites while mixing in new activities for a bit of change every now and then, what will it take to get us to take a new stance, adopt a global viewpoint and see life as one active participant in a worldwide colony of human primates, individually acting toward the good of the whole in everything we do and everything we see?

Just before I fell asleep last night, I thought about the changes taking place in our local societies as more and more of us connect to the Internet. Many of us just like me will see humans in the light of a complete, global, set of us rather than compartmentalized sets, ignoring the calls of local leaders to maintain loyalties to the old ways of nation-states, shedding the ugliness of name-calling and nation-sized schoolyard fights, and join together to overcome the bullying tactics of megalomaniacs.

You wanna fight? Well, before you take on the easy target in front of you that you or someone else has trumped up as "the enemy", take a look in the mirror and see the enemy within you. That's who you're really fighting, isn't it, another human just like you? Don't let others convince you that someone out there is so much more different than you that you have to build up real or virtual walls to exclude "them."

In the not-so-distant future, we'll still have pockets of people dedicated to the preservation of their "pure" local cultures. But these will be anomalies, experiments we let continue happening as forms of control groups and pressure outlets for those unwilling to globalize - we may even create zones where people in those zones can only maintain local cultural practices. In the mainstream, people will coalesce, creating a global culture that includes a new religion not yet fully formed. We have hints about what the new culture will be like when we saw news this week of the death of a popular music icon and its effect on the Internet immediately following two smaller events, the violent reactions to election results in an Islamic nation and threat of Internet censorship by a large communist nation. But we're not there yet. It'll take more than the worldwide response to the "shock" of the death of a former bestselling musician to bring the world together. It'll either take a worldwide disaster that suddenly rips apart many cultures and mixes them together into one (the Great Recession came close, didn't it?), or it will take many more years of economic shifts for resistant cultures to merge (after all, we creatures of habit change slowly if we don't have to). Either way, the change is coming.

Your children and grandchildren have a higher chance of thinking of themselves as global citizens than you do. When you see it happen, don't think of it as something terrible or foreboding ill times ahead. Think of it as inevitable (it really happened the moment you bought them computers and cell phones - you just don't fully realize it yet). If you train your kids to embrace change while also understanding the consequences of their actions and the later influence of objects they encounter in the moment, you have nothing to fear about the future. They will decide what the future holds for their offspring and offspring's offspring. Instead of resisting their change to a global mindset, share your favourite local dives and habits with them so they can enjoy their global life on a local scale.