A Rain of Frogs

I’ve been told that once you’ve created your 1000th origami paper crane, you are granted one wish. I doubt the wish part, but it seems that creating 1000 origami paper cranes might be an interesting task.

There probably won’t be one every day, but I’ll start tomorrow.

Imagine a single piece of thread, about an inch long, a silver thread floating on a field of infinite black nothingness.

Imagine that piece of thread as a single human life, perhaps yours. At one end, birth, the other death, and all the triumphs and failings, joy and sorrow, all of the hours, minutes, seconds and moments of that life represented by the length of the thread between the ends.

Think of all the human lives that ever were, and ever will be, in their millions and billions. Doctors and astronauts and factory workers and farmers and starving children in third world countries. Popes, despots, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters. Everyone that has ever been, and ever will be. Every human life, represented by an inch of silver thread. It doesn’t matter if that life was three years or eighty-six years or three minutes long, imagine it as a piece of thread an inch long.

You might see those threads organized chronologically, running in parallel like the lives they represent. There are fewer of them at the start, since there were less people, and many many more at the other end. Billions today, perhaps hundreds of billions someday. It might look like a fan of silver embroidered on the blackness of infinity.

Scatter those threads. Churn and mix them until there is no more semblance of order, only a pile of fragments of silver thread each an inch long. Chronology no longer matters, relationships no longer matter. Every one of those lives now detached from context.

Now organize that pile of contextless threads in a new way. Start laying them end to end, a line of silver fragments infinitely long. But not randomly placed. Decide where in line those pieces of thread go based on how insightful and self-aware those lives led were. A great thinker like Einstein, or a great philosopher like Jesus or Buddha might be closer to the end of the line, while a child who died minutes after birth might be closer to the beginning. This order will be a subjective, but subjective is okay.

And when those billions and billions of threads are laid out end to end, with the least advanced ones at the beginning and the most advanced ones at the end, more can be done. Add the lives of animals, and birds and insects and plants, of microbes and viruses and single celled organisms. Of rocks and water. Add the lifetimes of planets and suns and galaxies to the line, until at last, everything in the universe has been added, and there is a single silver thread, infinite in length.

One single silver thread, the sum total existence of everything that ever was and ever will be, from nothingness to infinite knowledge and awareness.

It’s the butcher in the shop, and the soldier in the trench. The mother nursing her baby. The baby nursed by it’s mother. The person you were disgusted by last week, and it’s the playboy billionaire you envy.

Some lessons can be learned in one life. Perhaps it takes dozens of lives for an advancement to be noticeable, for other lessons to be learned. Or thousands. Maybe the real lessons, the true lessons need to be repeated over and over hundreds of times over hundreds of lives before they make an indelible change, before they are noticeable in the silver thread.

Is this how God marks the fall of every sparrow, how Buddha finds Nirvana, and how Allah hears all prayers? Is it everything and everyone you’ve ever known, and everything and everyone you’ve never known, from the dawn of time till the end of eternity and beyond?

Is it you, learning everything there is to know?

The great machine winds down, the springs uncoil to the utmost end, spending themselves overcoming friction instead of driving forward the slow, once-inevitable gears of progress.

The last employee is cut for efficiency’s sake. The last transaction is completed. The last – and largest – profit is made. Then the flywheel stops.

All is quiet. No wind disturbs the dust and ashes.

What hand will wind again the great springs that turn the world?

Thirty-five years ago today, Voyager leapt from this small blue marble atop a fiery column to touch the heavens. And now, poised at the cusp of the solar system (poetically referred to as the heliosphere), and about to enter true interstellar space, she offers an opportunity to reflect on the last 35 years.

Not to reflect politically, or culturally, or even in any specific way. Voyager 1 and her sister Voyager 2 represent a time when humanity was still actively striving to understand the universe around it, still reaching out to grasp the stars.

We looked into the abyss, and when it looked back, we flinched.

And now she pushes ever onward, a last ambassador of that brave time, lost in the depths of space and valiantly forging on. It makes me a bit sad, really.

Long may you run, Voyager 1.

There used to be a story (or maybe there still is, I haven’t been past in ages), near my apartment in small-town Guelph called The Boxed Meat Revolution. Every now and then that phrase floats through my waking thoughts, and I have a quiet chuckle. It’s a funny phrase – slightly dirty seeming without ever actually flirting with dirtiness.
This morning, as I reported 41 separate Twitter accounts for spamming me, the phrase floated through my mind again. This time, it drifted past as “The Canned Meat Revolution”.

I got spammed because I dared to post that I was looking to hire web developers with Wordpress and/or Adobe CQ5 experience. Note that I said hire. Not contract out to a company in India, which will work for a whopping $12 per hour.

It is, of course, not limited to Twitter, this sort of abuse of communications systems. I get it on Facebook every now and then (Twitter automatically updates my FB status), and I get it on LinkedIn once in a while. I definitely get it through email. Somewhere offshore there is a team dedicated to finding posts I make about my profession (but not just that. Could be about sailboats, or my cat. Maybe it’s a picture of a rusty soda can I posted on my website) and contacting me to offer their services.

Not limited to the ‘online’ world either. I get telephone calls, like everyone else. Don’t even get me started on the 100 lbs of junk mail that gets rammed through the mail slot in my front door.

Granted this isn’t as offensive as actual scams being perpetrated via these channels. I routinely get txt messages telling me I’ve won something or other, and only have to txt a response (no double at $10 a shot). Hells bells, I am sick and tired of these parasites sucking the marrow from the bones of modern communication in hopes of racing each other to the bottom of the price bracket to offer me services I don’t want, and will never use.

See, I have a personal policy. I NEVER EVER EVER conclude a transaction that I have not personally initiated. Ever. Have I emphasized this enough? Call me to offer duct cleaning services on my house (which actually has no ducts)? Even if the requisite equipment existed, I’d not use your services. Even if if were cheaper than any other duct-cleaning service. How dare you invade my personal communications space – a space I take very seriously and consider an extension of my person – for as base a reason as to sell me something? How dare you?

So, I offer this advice to the word at large, and note that I am not emailing it everyone, nor am I following perfect strangers on Twitter and pointing them to it:

If you want to do business with me, don’t’ contact me. I’ll contact you. If you want to guarantee you never make a red (and soon no longer legal tender in Canada) cent off me, by all means, keep spamming.

I have a personal theory that if half – one out of every two – people out there did as I did and refused to do business with and sort of spammer, this sort of offensive, aggressive ‘marketing’ would vanish in days.