[SCIENCE SOLITAIRE] Considerata X

STOP! Like you never have before.
Stop.
Taste what becomes of life
remaindered from its old meat and skin.
Stop.
See what remains
Now that our presences happen only
with screenlight that never sets.
Stop.
Feel what remains
Now that everyday space has been stripped
of its relentless bravura.

We marauded into the wild, claiming fortunes and thrill.
Now, we too are fair space to little lifeless but lethal crowns that live there
Freefalling, crowding our insides
Muffling our lifeline’s inner air.

Now, we need a new compass with a truer North
That gives us not a mere orientation
But also a consequential picture of time’s arrow
when it lands,
charged with words and actions we merely borrow.

Hunkering in safe harbors
Longer than our own set thresholds
Shocking ourselves to see impossible mathematics
Derived from counter-intuitive ethics –
we could multiply our loaves
refill our cups
expand our souls
accelerate our own healing
Only if we care what happens to sails other than our own.

Screenlight became our only portals to proofs of life
We grew another set of lenses to see
that the photons bathing in our screenlight
Correspond to the very lights that animate our lives –
Sentiment-seasoned parents,
Spritzy joyful children,
trusty, comfy, craze-flavored siblings and friends,
and temper-spiced bosses.

But social media runs on algorithmic blood
that serves and reinforces our worst impulses: anger, hate, envy, love for attention.
It forms a swarm around those.
They say it also forms a mob around kindness, love and compassion
But the human mind is built
to bias a few stains of darkness against a tapestry of light.
We amplify the dark in our heads and in our AIs.

We all have low orbits of “first instincts” –
with the planets “me”, “me-again” and “only-me”.
But what a stupendous waste of spacetime
if we wrapped a journey of care around ONLY ourselves and our tribes.
“Houston” says the only mission worth its while
Is to sail an orbit beyond your own self-long mile.

We are aging slower than before
Generating catchy time retreats like “50’s is the new 30’s”
But a number need not borrow from another
50 can be an old or new 50.
No matter how long we live, we will always think life went swiftly.

What if, instead, we marked our years and decades
with sweeps of a clock that move only
when we break loose from time-clawed nasty habits;
when we mend time-scarred fights with an old friend;
when we break from our calendared routines to create;
when we depart from our own time-stamped but dangerous mindsets.
How many seasons will you have lived in your long or short life?
How old or young would you really be?

Each of us will have our mic drop for the final time.
What will the music of life be after you exit the stage?
Beyond that final rush of confetti.
Your life mattered to you
But did you capture life’s running chorus that it is not just about you?

Before anything else, stop and ask “why”
All tools can be carved out and
need to be charged with batteries called “why”.

Why join life’s offerings out of fear? Fear of Missing Out.
Or simply because it may not come your way again – You Only Live Once.
You cannot be and do everything
That was what the Big Bang was for.
You are not in charge of creating the universe but to forge your character.
Choose to click life out of joy and to be present in your own life
Not so you can show-and-tell and be “cli-ked” by another.

 

But at every chance you get, unleash gratitude
To those who help the minutes of your day and night slide easier
Mostly, to the souls whose names and circumstance escape you.
You flow because they clear the blocks
that may have not even been known to you.

Be wary of people who cannot appreciate diversity.
To them, the world is safe only when it is flat and coded for them alone.
Why brandish “world” if it is only for a tribe or two?

But we all have to agree on facts.
If the moon were a triangle,
Eclipses will be shadows of pizza slices.
If we lived forever,
Murder would not be offensive
And poverty would simply wait for its luck to turn.

Recognize lies, especially when it is your own.
They erase you from within.
And it erases others.
All that is left when the lights are turned off are memories.
Lies erase you and others even before we all turn to dusty solitaries.

As much as you can, insist on joy
Not as a panacea or quick antiseptic to the wounds of a tragic year
But to ride the current so deep but present in our shared humanity –
the soft glimmer of longing in the eyes of a masked loved one,
the chuckle you share with a stranger as you witness spontaneous comedy,
the flying kisses that virtually land but burrow deep
to last us
for as long as it takes.

Never ever discount the soft sweet thick sunshine of mango slices
The quiet elegance burst open by the citrusy slits of a lemon olive oil cake
The vegan menagerie of M’s laing’s flavorful chemistry
or the impeccable sea-flavored rice farm in S’ black paella.

Tune in to birds abuzz in pandemic stillness,
As greens find a window in time to stretch uninterrupted,
Saturn and Jupiter waltz in orbit to get closer,
Humans bend in reverent bows and
“Handmade” meant “soul-weighed” for both the maker and receiver,
With squared Zoom estates weaving our shared quarantined lives in song.
They all find their once-upon-a-time, in the story of our one Sun.
Always, majesty in complexity.

Be yourself.
It is the only signature required of your own life.
Love, learn and thank
With the constancy and supreme pizazz of our Sun.

If you’re going to stop time
Remember that it can stop you.
It has random agents all named “anytime”.
But what time cannot do
Is fill your life for you.

Fill it with love for people and life forms
beyond the tribe you were born into
Genes are the stories of birth
But being human, fed with chances and shaped by choices,
is your full life story.

But sear in your conscience
That our humanity is only one of life’s billion Niagara-powered fountain of stories.
Those other stories should also be lived out.
Just as it allowed you to live out yours.
Feel that
when you take out animals from the wild
Or destroy the only natural places where they can be themselves.

Time machines are real in us
We are all sauntering on overlapping lifetimes.
WE-sdom is mining the junctions of the generations.

Despite the overwhelming sense of isolation in 2020
you still live in a real, genuine universe with other beings.
Coming from 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang
None of us had to perform birth-defying feats to be born.
Live, knowing all that light
Came to birth you.
You are here.
NOW.

Whether or not you care for strange poetry like this
This online portal, the friend you lost, your puzzling family,
Your complicated boss,
this is the only universe that holds them all.
It birthed all your atoms
and what you have made of your own atoms.
In your end time, it will see your atoms, your dusty atoms.
And your atoms will recycle.

Atoms to atoms.

But not your story.
You had your stretch of spacetime.
Dented by the weight of your own life.
Even inside a pandemic, each life still could throw its weight around
Uncontainable, uncountable life.

And as we are suffused with the immense blue-flavored spread of day
Or are embraced by the mysterious shadow of night
Clasp your hands and look and stretch upwards for that is
irrevocable proof of a universe alive through you.

And when you gaze at light at day or night,
you capture that light
That same light
Buttering the face of your beloved
As crackling, popping energy inside the bodies of children at play
On young questers seized with lightning charge for their fresh adventures
As staggering beauty unravelling
in coasts, deserts, and forest canopies
Infused with life-moving critters
rooted in and rooting for
land, sky and sea.

Desiderata, Considerata, Coviderata
The same universe holds them all.

Dawn is here.
Old world. Old Virus.
Awaken with new eyes.
Learn, live and love the difference.

Happy New Year.
– Rappler.com