Walking into the Unknown

Walking into the Unknown

Living means walking decisively towards the unknown with Paradise on our right and Hell on our left while the Angel of Death comes at us from behind. [1]

What if life was not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be experienced? What if control and power and knowing just gets in the way. What if being busy or being right about collapse is totally beside the point and just gets in the way…. as I ask: “Gets in the way of what exactly?” That’s what we are going to explore today through Poetry and Sci-Fi and the life of an eccentric man and even a bit of provocative Science.

Let’s start with our good friend Evel Knievel. I enjoyed visiting his museum in Kansas this past June and was surprised by some of the insights he had into life. An fascinating tidbit about him is that he did not become famous from this successes: he became famous from his failures…. by NOT stopping after breaking many bones. Here is what he said about this curious fact:

If you fall during your life, it doesn’t matter.

You’re never a failure as long as you try to get up.

So what do we do with this insight? Obviously, as Evel was an obvious kind of guy: make mistakes, fall and then learn from so you can get back up.

Let’s read a poem now. I receive recommendations on good books/poems to read each month and this month I was very happy to come across this poem from the UK. It needs no comment.

Went Out to See All The Downed Trees

Nothing was where it was supposed to be
or even where it was twenty minutes ago,
one of the only times I’ve understood
what nature was trying to say
to me. But the people I always see
at the farmers market being very specific
about their mushroom selection weren’t
listening, already dragging branches
onto the curb, fixing their lawns,
resetting their Black Lives Matter signs.
These were the people blasting
‘Celebrate good times, come on!’
from their front porch window
on the day Joe Biden was elected.
One of them was high-fiving
a police officer. The branches were still green,
on the ground. The sun hadn’t browned
the dead leaves yet. There was part
of me that trusted them, my neighbors.
I hadn’t locked my door when I left.
One neighbor said, I hired an arborist
just a few weeks ago, and he said
this tree was fine. The neighbor
motioned toward a tree currently
pulling black power lines down
on top of their red Subaru.
Who could afford an arborist?
I would never own a house,
or a tree, or my own car,
but these were my neighbors, and we had to clean this up together.

So, what do you do with this poem? Well, given than its a poem your guess as good as mine, but what I get out of it is that rich people are more easily in denial of disaster because their money usually protects them from the harsh realities of life – so much so that they lose the ability to learn from reality but instead deny it.

The quote below the title is from Dune, a famous sci-fi novel recently made into a movie. In it the main character, a messiah like but violent character, has visions of the future. He can, in some ways, see the future – but he learns that this can easily turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, his power to see the future traps him and takes away his freedom to choose because in the future there are multiple futures when only unfold because of the choices he makes in this moment. So really, knowing what could be is a trap – all we have is the choices we freely make – in spite of the inertia that seems to want to sweep us in a certain direction.

The safe path leads ever down into stagnation. [1]

What can you do with this thought? Clearly safety is an illusion. Perhaps overly focusing on what looks like certain collapse is a self fulfilling prophecy because its safe to be certain. That is not to say that ignorance is strength, but perhaps a focus on what we can do instead of what we cannot do would, if enough of us did it, bend the future in another direction… perhaps….

I know that many of you might consider this Artsy stuff so much fluff… but wait: here’s a good old fashioned Science experiment that will, I hope, shock you into realizing that we homo sapiens may not be as sapiens as we think we are. In a puzzle competition a group of ants were given the same complex cooperative task as a group of humans….. AND THE ANTS WON! [3]

The researchers created two sets of mazes that differed only in size, to match the dimensions of ants and humans, as well as groups of different sizes. Recruiting study participants was easier in the case of humans, who volunteered simply because they were asked to participate, and probably because they liked the idea of a competition. Ants, on the other hand, are far from competitive. They joined because they were misled into thinking that the heavy load was a juicy edible morsel that they were transporting into their nest.

Unsurprisingly, the cognitive abilities of humans gave them an edge in the individual challenge, in which they resorted to calculated, strategic planning, easily outperforming the ants.

In the group challenge, however, the picture was completely different, especially for the larger groups. Not only did groups of ants perform better than individual ants, but in some cases they did better than humans. Groups of ants acted together in a calculated and strategic manner, exhibiting collective memory that helped them persist in a particular direction of motion and avoid repeated mistakes. Humans, on the contrary, failed to significantly improve their performance when acting in groups. When communication between group members was restricted to resemble that of ants, their performance even dropped compared to that of individuals. They tended to opt for “greedy” solutions—which seemed attractive in the short term but were not beneficial in the long term, and—according to the researchers—opted for the lowest common denominator.

So, what are you to do with this uncomfortable result? I don’t know, I’m only human, not a smart ant!

In conclusion, dear friend, perhaps all of us need to be a bit like Evel Knievel and choose danger over safety because believe it or, he died in at the relatively good age of 69 from diabetes. Let’s choose to change and give up our safe and comfortable way of thinking and living. I give you the challenge of the most act for a social ant like animal like we humans; be seen as really weird and strange by your neighbours, family and friends – obviously a positive , constructive weird that is hell bent on living in a way that affirms life instead of killing life on this planet as most of us are doing now. Thrive in uncertainty. Don’t predict the future, make it, no matter how small the change is because we don’t know, except in retrospect, what really mattered and what did not.

References

1. F. Herbert, Dune [edited]

2. Went Out to See All The Downed Trees by Sasha Debevec-McKenney https://poems.poetrysociety.org.uk/poems/i-went-out-to-see-all-the-downed-trees/

3. https://phys.org/news/2024-12-ants-superior-humans-group-problem.html