Thank you, Dear Jane

It was only yesterday
that I was sitting
in a fetal position,
hands folded across the chest,
and the forehead,
trying to reach my knees.

In that position,
I was rocked by invisible hands,
tying to get some traction
on slippery sands
and bring myself
      to stand.

It was only yesterday
that I had wondered,
is this what it feels like
before
      the end?

It was only yesterday
that you were calling
county’s hotline
desperate to find some crutches,
and not let me fall
into the abyss.

You did not want us
      to end,
not yet, not tomorrow,
      not ever,

because,

you had loved me,
loved us being together
loved the simplicity
of sum of our moments
      adding to  more than
what they were,
and because,
you were
a born fighter.

It was all only yesterday,
but it feels so far away
      as we cuddle up
for a movie,
and are thankful for
      normal days.

I wonder,
if this what it feels like
to be born again?

And for all that,
Thank you, Dear Jane.

Let go the thought of the next

Old man
(and that would be me)
enjoy this cup
of amber-brown tea
      that is
nestled in your hand
      on a winter morning
and let go the thought of
      the next cup
that is already brewing
in your mind,
      with the anticipation of enjoying
after this one ends.

That cup of tea
is going to be
      no different
than what already nestles
      in your hands.

Enjoy this kiss
that is already on your lips
and let go the thought of
    the next one
…

      … 

The ailment of existential crisis

 

We all have to die one day, we might as well die with some obscure meaning attached to it — Ryan Gelpke

Arun Kumar

Arun Kumar + AI

The existential crisis is a condition born from the union of life and death sleeping together in the same bed called the living.

Compelled to coexist, they strive for amicability. Yet, their efforts often culminate in struggle, especially when death seeks to strip life of all significance and meaning, leaving it exposed and trembling in the cold of night.

Nonetheless, they persist in their efforts to remain together and honor each other’s individuality. Even when their elbows occasionally collide, they hold onto the hope that the majority of their remaining time on this Earth can be of mutual respect and peaceful coexistence.

Together they strive to have shared time where empathy and mutual understanding prevail, and compassion is the bridge across their divide.

In their quest for harmonious coexistence, they’ve consulted therapists, delved into self-help books, and explored philosophical texts, seeking to unravel the significance of their ongoing struggles and discover effective solutions.

After a long enough struggle with living succumbing to the moods and vagaries of the tension that exists between them, a solution they have come is to recognize the reality that their personalities are different and the tension between them may not go away.

After enduring a protracted struggle, with living succumbing to the unpredictable shifts and nuances of the tension that binds life and death, they have arrived at a realization: their distinct personalities are there to stay, and the tension between them will remain.

To keep moving forward, they’ve reached a compromise solution that has been effective.

What they have settled down is to let life have a meaning, purpose, goal, and something to look forward to in the mornings. Yet, being perfectly aware that periods of tranquility could be taken over by occasions of death doubting the authenticity of everything life does. They have come to an acceptance that when that happens it would be moments of facing the ailment of existential crisis once again.

Indeed, they acknowledge that equilibrium between always be tenuous and is capable of shifting without a formal announcement.

For now, the arrangement has been working out well.

Ciao.

Taming mortality

 

Why fear death when we can never perceive it — Epictetus

Arun Kumar

Arun Kumar + AI

Often, I envision a future where I reside in a community for those 55 and older, engaging in activities like playing pickleball. During the game, I am fully immersed, and everything is going well. However, once the game concludes, a gradual sense of futility regarding the activity begins to set in. The mechanics behind this transition is as follows:

After the game is over, a remembrance of my mortality sneaks. This thought brings a cognizance that life ends with death, the point at which the self is annihilated. While I will cease to exist, the party goes on. Remembering this, I feel as though I am enveloped in a cloud of meaninglessness that mortality can bestow upon daily engagements, including playing pickleball.

(Note: In the context of this discussion, ‘playing pickleball’ serves merely as an example and could be replaced with any other activity such as cooking, reading, or watching a movie.)

This vision of the future elicits an unease about the meaninglessness of activities that are occurring in the present. At its core, the reason is the dissonance between the necessity to live and the inevitability of death. This dissonance renders life’s activities seemingly futile and complicates the search for an inherent (and life-sustaining) meaning within them.

This vision of the future further intensifies the sense of existential unease about living, which also gets intertwined with the angst about the remaining days of my fleeting existence on the Earth.

The transition from engaging moments of pickleball to feelings of its futility leads me to wonder if life will follow in the same sequence of events day after day.

After each game of pickleball, when confronted with mortality, will I continue to question its meaning?

Do not misunderstand me. When I am in the midst of a pickleball game, I am completely absorbed. In those moments, there are no thoughts of mortality or the game’s futility. I strive to excel. I find myself getting frustrated with mistakes I make.

On the court, everything is as it should be. It is only afterward that the doubts begin to surface.

I also know that the malady I experience could be worse.

Currently, at least, when I play pickleball, awareness of mortality does not coincide and occupy the same mental space. Therefore, mortality does not prompt me to question the meaning of pickleball while I am engaged in it. A more troubling scenario is conceivable.

It’s possible that while playing pickleball, I become simultaneously aware of mortality, allowing both to coexist. In the midst of the game, this awareness could prompt me to question the purpose of my actions, draining all focus and pleasure from the activity.

Should that to occur, it might lead me into a depressive state, characterized by a lack of motivation to engage in any activity — a far graver situation.

The fact that, while playing pickleball, the awareness of mortality does not consume my thoughts (and remains in the background), and I experience no sense of unease, suggests a way to navigate the tension between living and dying.

The answer for appeasing the life sucking tendency of mortality (no pun intended) may lie in living in the present.

In a way, living in the present disassociates the mind away from the future, and it is in the shadows of the thought of the future where mortality lurks. Living in the present makes life forever.

To quote Ludwig Wittgenstein “Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.”

Living in the present, thus, may be the antidote of the existential crisis born from the tension between living and dying.

Ciao.

Natural Selection: Could there be any other alternative?

 

Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability — Ronald Fisher

Arun Kumar

Arun Kumar + AI

With my newly found identity as a more intelligent self, I continue with my quest for understanding and questioning the reasons for the wonders that surround me. In doing so, I quickly learn that it is so easy to keep going down rabbit holes. An answer to one question inevitably leads to another. Perhaps that is the reason that ultimately one gives up and says it is turtles all the way.

So, after little exploration I had figured out the reasons behind the fact that the physiology of my eyes is receptive to electromagnetic radiation between violet (380 nanometers) and red (750 nanometers). The reason had something to do with the spectral irradiance of the Sun and that living organisms are compelled to compete for the energy it provides.

Learning how well the physiology of my eyes fit the environment, I started to wonder about a more fundamental question whether my seeing a particular part of the electromagnetic spectrum an evolutionary inevitability.

Given the boundary conditions set by the Sun under which I evolved, inevitability of my traits fitting the environment is certainly a plausible hypothesis. Perhaps other options, for example, eyes being perceptive to the infrared part of the electromagnetic radiation, were tried and either were turned out to be dead ends or if some of them did work they got relegated to living in some lonely ecological niche like bats do.

Guided by the firm hands of the principles of natural selection that shape evolution and favor the survival of the fittest, the physiology of my eyes could indeed be an evolutionary inevitability.

The curiosity did not rest there. It wanted to go a little deeper into the rabbit holes and wonders if the principles of natural selection and the survival of the fittest, itself are an inevitability.

It may be so, my mind posits. The mind scurried down to explore following holes.

The Sun can only provide a fixed amount of radiative energy for the entirety of the Earth to consume (and the number depends on the Earth’s distance from the Sun and the disc area of the Earth to intercept the radiation). No argument there.

All biological forms need energy to hold themselves together, and ultimately, the only source of energy is from the Sun and that amount of energy is finite. No argument there either.

What defines a biological form is replication and reproduction. For otherwise, they might as well be rocks. Can I really argue with that?

With available energy being finite, competition for energy among various biological forms follows. By chance happenstance, some traits may be more efficient accessing the common pool of available energy.

Biological forms that evolve traits that are more efficient in garnering available energy have a better fitness quotient for survival and reproduction.

If a trait allows for better chances for reproduction, that particular trait proliferates in future generations and the biological form thereby evolves.

And that is the process of natural selection and the survival of the fittest.

It is hard to give a contrary argument against any of the steps that led to above inference. It is almost that natural selection has a natural grace for its logic and there could not have been any other way.

Going down these rabbit holes almost makes the existence of principles of natural selection an inevitability.

The simplicity, and the logical necessity of the argument begs for the question — could it have been any other way than natural selection works? It sure does not seem likely.

The curiosity wants to do down deeper and wonder whether biological forms in the different corners of the universe share the same traits as me, and perhaps, there might also be some inevitability for biological forms sharing the same traits as me even if separated by light years.

After all, no matter where the Starship Enterprise goes, biological forms are somewhat similar to mine. Although it is just a TV show made for entertainment, but there might be some inevitability for it.

For now, the brain cells are fatigued and need some rest. Exploring other rabbit holes can wait for tomorrow.

Ciao.

The Internet

 

It is much too hard
climbing mountains,
      and so,
we just surf
      the web.

Everything after all,
      chooses the path
of least resistance. 

Fitting in a Puddle

 

Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in; fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact, it fits me staggeringly well! It must have been made to have me in it! — Douglas Adams

Arun Kumar

Arun Kumar + AI

That is quite a remarkable thought. However, I do not need to be a puddle to ponder such a profound question. I, as myself, can wake up one morning and marvel at the miracle of finding myself in surroundings that fit me so well. Furthermore, I wonder, how is that even possible? Do I happen to just fit into the surroundings, or is it the other way around, with the surroundings having managed to fit my traits?

I could imagine a thought experiment where I go to sleep and during the night, get hit on the head, waking up significantly more intelligent than I was before. [Note: I guess this could be considered a different kind of awakening — suddenly gaining enlightenment.]

When I wake up in the morning, endowed with the newly acquired gift of intelligence, I find my mind overflowing with all kinds of questions that I lacked the intellectual wherewithal to contemplate before. Intriguingly philosophical questions about how and why my personal traits align so harmoniously with the external world.

Back in my school days of elementary physics, I had learned about the electromagnetic spectrum, but my mind did not show any curiosity about why my eyes are attuned to seeing the part of the spectrum that ranges from violet to red — a range in which so many visual wonders of the external world exist. Now, my more intelligent self is eager to understand why.

Similarly, why is the audible range of my hearing from 20 to 20,000 Hertz (Hz), allowing me to hear things happening around me?

Filled with curiosity, I start to wonder where I should look for answers, or if there are any answers to begin with. If I keep my curiosity burning and continue searching for answers, I have a feeling that I will find them.

With perseverance, and by digging through the books in the local library and conducting searches (thanks to Dr. Google and Bing), I begin to unravel the reasons.

The reason that the physiology of my eyes and their interaction with neurons are tuned to register the electromagnetic spectrum between violet (380 nanometers) and red (750 nanometers) is that the Sun, the ultimate source of energy for all living organisms on Earth, emits radiation whose spectral density peaks around these wavelengths.

The physiology of the eye is similar for other living organisms in that we all have also evolved our visual traits to take advantage of this fact. In this way, we share a commonality in what we can perceive.

The curious fact is that we did not need to know anything about the electromagnetic spectrum or the spectral density of the Sun. We did not have to first analyze the spectral density of the Sun and decide, ‘Hey, let’s engineer the physiology of our eyes to take advantage of this.’ Instead, the process of natural selection, working under the given environmental conditions, did that for us.

The physiology of my eyes is a case where the hole was there, and I evolved to fit into it.

The story is the same for the physiology of my ear, which is capable of responding to longitudinal waves between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz.

This is because the typical conditions at the surface — namely, the pressure and density of the air — allow such longitudinal waves to travel most efficiently through the air. Once again, most biological organisms share this commonality, and the reason is the guiding hand of natural selection. Needless to say, once again the hole was there, and I evolved to fit into it.

The fact of the matter is that, living under the glory of the Sun — the giver of energy that we all rely on — and guided by the patient, yet firm hand of the principles of natural selection, various biological organisms are actors on a stage. They have evolved to share common traits and are engaged in a play where they can see, hear, feel, and smell each other, participate in the unfolding of each other’s lives over time.

So, what to tell the puddle about its amazement upon waking up and finding ‘an interesting hole that fits its form so well’? The answer is to say, ‘Not so fast, my friend. Perhaps the hole was already there, and it was the malleability of your form, working with the tendency of natural systems to settle into a state of least potential energy, that did the trick. And when you woke up, you discovered that you fit so well into it.

In the end, considering the innumerable characteristics, traits, and forms I could have embodied, there is likely a reason why a particular solution was selected among many possibilities. To understand why, I just have to wonder and ask the question.

Ciao.

May be or Maybe

 

There is tomorrow
but perched at its front,
       always sits a 'may be'
or a 'maybe'—
and if not leading,
      then it follows.

‘May be’ tomorrow
      or tomorrow, ‘may be.’

‘Maybe’ tomorrow
      or tomorrow, ‘maybe’.

Whichever way, perhaps
we will still be together
      come tomorrow
and that is so much easier
      to convey.