While waiting to board a Southwest flight from Oakland to Albuquerque, I struck up a conversation with the stranger standing next to me, a physicist who works at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. He was traveling to Los Alamos Labs, the birthplace of the atomic bomb. At that moment I remembered Albert Einstein who said, “The most important question you can ever ask is if the world is a friendly place?”
Ah, here’s a chance to this guy about his big question, I thought. So I referenced Einstein, and what he thought was the most exciting development in physics. With a conspiratorial whisper and a wink he answered,
“Time Travel! It’s absolutely possible.” Wow! Time Travel! I first started speculating about it while watching the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons of long ago, the ones that featured Mr. Peabody, Sherman and the Waybac Machine. Where I wondered I would set the dial on my Waybac machine if I had the opportunity to take a spin? Perhaps I’d tag along on the Lewis and Clark expedition or hide behind a giant fern and watch a Brontosaurus fight a T Rex.
Recently, I found myself having multiple flashbacks at an exhibit at the New Mexico History Museum; Voices of the Counter Culture in the Southwest. Among the assembled treasures, were blotter acid pages, a tipi, perfectly restored 1965 VW van, and the original manuscript of Ram Dass’ classic book of the era, Be Here Now. BE HERE NOW. At that moment, I experienced an epiphany to pair with the flashback.
If time travel is possible, the most difficult period of time to travel to… the most exotic and unfamiliar time and place, is the present! In the unlikely chance that we ever make it there, the signs are posted…No Loitering. No Lingering. But linger and loiter in the past we do. Here is a ridiculously trivial example that makes a larger point.
Last night while sipping on a glass of wine I remembered a long past incident with a neighbor. He has a backyard vineyard and he’s asked the neighbors to help pick the grapes on the day when they would be at their best. He promised each of us a bottle of wine at the end of the day. The work was hard, but the company was great, and the views of the Sandia Mountains rising up through crystal blue skies was sublime. The anticipation of bringing home a fine bottle of a previous year’s vintage and that I’d truly be a locavore drinker kept me at my task. That evening, I presented myself for my reward and received…a bottle of Trader Joe’s Two Buck Chuck! Have I let go of that deception, that betrayal, that bait and switch all those years ago? Apparently not! Last night, lost for a moment in memory, I drank sour grapes and missed the opportunity to enjoy the far better wine I was drinking in the moment.
Here is a story that gets to the bone and marrow of the matter. I’ve excerpted it from Mo Yan’s acceptance speech in 2012 for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
“My most painful memory involved going out in the collective’s field with Mother to glean ears of wheat. The gleaners scattered when they spotted the watchman. But Mother, who had bound feet, could not run; she was caught and slapped so hard by the watchman, a hulk of a man, that she fell to the ground.
The watchman confiscated the wheat we’d gleaned and walked off whistling. As she sat on the ground, her lip bleeding, Mother wore a look of hopelessness I’ll never forget. Years later, when I encountered the watchman, now a gray-haired old man, in the marketplace, Mother had to stop me from going up to avenge her.
“Son,” she said evenly, “the man who hit me and this man are not the same person.”
Consider this parable from Paul Reps classic collection, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.
The Muddy Road
“Tanzan and Eido were once traveling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was still falling. Coming around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the intersection.
“Come on, girl” said Tanzan at once. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud.
Ekido did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. Then he could no longer restrain himself. “ We monks don’t go near females,” he told Tanzan, “especially not young and lovely one. It is dangerous. Why did you do that?”
“ I left the girl there,” said Tanzan. “ Are you still carrying her?”
Barely a day goes by when I don’t find myself carrying traces of old muddy roads on my time traveling boots. Burdened by everything from worn thin ideas, to small grudges, to century-old animosities, it’s not easy to be in the present and see clearly what is going on. We’re like that monkey, hand stuck, clutching a banana in a narrow-necked bottle. We remain trapped by what we won’t let go of, even if it would save our individual and collective skins.
Here’s a thought experiment. Suppose that the banana that we are clutching is the certainty that the answer to Einstein’s question is that the world is fundamentally unfriendly. Now, let’s return to the rest of that Einstein quote.
“If we decide that the universe is an unfriendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries, and our natural resources to achieve safety and power by creating bigger walls to keep out the unfriendliness and bigger weapons to destroy all that which is unfriendly. and I believe that we are getting to a place where technology is powerful enough that we may either completely isolate or destroy ourselves as well in this process.
If we decide that the universe is neither friendly nor unfriendly and that God is essentially ‘playing dice with the universe’, then we are simply victims to the random toss of the dice and our lives have no real purpose or meaning.
But if we decide that the universe is a friendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries, and our natural resources to create tools and models for understanding that universe.
“Because power and safety will come through understanding its workings and its motives.”
Joan Halifax’s remarkable book, Being with Dying offers this perspective on carrying what does not serve.
“Some years ago, walking across the Himalayas, I realized I would never make it over those mountains unless I let go of everything extra. That meant I had to lighten up my mind as well as my overloaded day pack. It all came down to one simple sentence: Nothing extra! Just as these two legs carried me across mountains those same words carry me through complicated days. They always remind me to let go. The also remind me of the weightlessness and ease of a whole and dedicated heart.”
Perhaps the answer to Einstein’s question comes when we can say to ourselves… NOW, with a whole and dedicated heart, the world is what I will work to make it.
“Mr. Peabody, please set the dial the Waybac Machine to Be Here Now.”
A version of this post was previously published on StoryTellersCampfire.com and is republished here with permission from the author.
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