Good Morning Justin

Letter to my Son
Sunday, 16 November

Good Morning Justin…

A college student I know says his education costs sixty thousand dollars a year.  It’s a private school in upstate New York so maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised at the small fortune required to get a degree.  State schools are more reasonable but students today are still required to take on enormous debt in order to get a higher education.  That means you are soon faced with stiff monthly payments once you receive your diploma and become a bright jobseeker, intent on landing a well-paying position in a highly competitive environment.  You can’t afford to founder and be branded a deadbeat at the start of your adult career.  Living at home well into your twenties implodes the hard-fought self-respect you earned attaining good grades while tackling challenging subjects.  A person is likely to second-guess their choices.  You find a Bachelor’s degree in biology certifies you to clean out animal cages and wash test tubes while you work on a more advanced degree.  You better know who you are, what you want and have a realistic career strategy by your sophomore year if you are to avoid writing blogs about life viewed from the sidelines.  What a picture; you still in your pajamas tapping away on your laptop just beneath your framed diploma.  It’s a good thing your phone’s disconnected – what with all the creditors menacing you.

This is not the first time eager graduates have been thrown a curve by the economy.  I remember a story many years ago of a man with a Ph.D. in physics having to settle for driving a cab in San Francisco.  At least he wasn’t faced with paying off crushing debt.  During those years the cost of textbooks for your courses cost more than your tuition at California state-sponsored universities.  What a dream that was.  It allowed you to experiment, find out who you were, what you liked.  You could change majors without fear if you liked.  It was even feasible for a student with little means to get a degree in topics like Art History or English Literature or Drama.  No, you weren’t likely to get a job in your field of study.  Chances are you wound up watering plants at a local nursery but you were free of creditors.  You could pull up stakes and move to a small mountain town in Arizona.  Here you would work as a DJ for minimum wage while you worked on your first novel – never to be published.  Friends would be getting married, buying new cars and setting career goals for where they wanted to be five years hence.  That’s OK.  You had the great outdoors and a good deal of free time to enjoy it.

I’m at the age of collecting Social Security.  I never figured out what I wanted to do for a living.  It was a life largely of improvisation.  It’s not a strategy that brings a tidy pension once you reach retirement.  Still, I doubt if I could have been successful working any other way.  I hated giving up the time it took to be practical.

The schools thought it a good idea to learn speed reading when I was a kid.  I think President Kennedy was said to read over twelve hundred words a minute.  The trick was to search for key words and phrases as you skimmed down the page.  Yeah, I think most people call this approach skimming.  I hated it.  It’s like stuffing your mouth and spend five minutes eating during your lunch hour.  There was no time for appreciating anything.  I would gladly skim through topics I didn’t care for in school.  Most books, though, I preferred to savor. 

Feel free to get your degree in a field that promises you a prosperous career if that’s your desire.  Raise a happy family and find a pot of gold at the end of your rainbow.  This is the path chosen by those fortunate enough to appreciate its demands.  I’m sorry it didn’t work for me.  I’m still willing to try.  Give me a ring if you know someone willing to pay me for photographing moths in a field somewhere.  I’ve also got some doodles I’d love to have marketed as posters.  I’m always game for starting over in something new.

Love,

          Dad

Good Morning Jack...

Letter to my Son

Sunday, 26 January

When our dreams lead

Good Morning Jack…

There was no fanfare for me over deciding on a resolution for this year.  I didn’t choose from a list of self-improvement items that I’d so far avoided.  I’ve never succeeded at sticking with beneficial behaviors unnatural to me and tasks I dread undertaking.  No, I just sort of fell into this idea because the time seemed right to make some long-delayed explorations that are on my own terms.  So much of what we’d like to do finds its way to dusty recesses of our mind because there are always more pressing personal concerns we need to confront.  It begins for us at a very early age, starting about the time we show up for our first day at school.  Maybe we just want to play with blocks all day but time must be set aside for our own personal growth into becoming responsible members of our society.  After a while the time for education extends beyond school hours and we find ourselves setting aside our interests to do homework.  Don’t forget we also have household chores.  The older we become the more challenging the homework.  Even when we are not attempting to solve assigned problems our minds may well be dwelling on the consequences of not measuring up to the expectations placed upon us.  We seem constantly confronted with new challenges that test the limits of our capabilities.  Those among us that are particularly conscientious and have lofty ambitions soon find themselves fearing to stumble at any point as it can only mean a contraction of their dreams for the future.  God forbid the world discovers us average at anything we undertake.

It’s been more than forty years since I got my first degree.  It was easier then because a college education was cheaper.  I didn’t have to take out huge loans to put myself through school.  I didn’t have to concern myself with getting a high-paying job to pay off my debt once I graduated.  I could take courses of interest to me without having to calculate how they would advance my career.  I could just learn and give myself the time to think about things I had never thought about before.  What a wonderful life!  Of course, I didn’t exactly handle my years in school that way.  I had a job.  I chased girls.  I was in a big hurry to get on with my life.  I would take five courses a semester, any one of which deserved my full attention.  I cut corners and studied to make it through the course without becoming a victim in chemistry or calculus or some other nasty test that would leave me left for dead, a scalped student on the academic battlefield.  So much of my education seemed a blur – like touring Europe in five days.  Instead of getting my passport stamped I received a grade and moved on to the next subject.  The most important piece of knowledge I retained was how to prepare for tests.  Don’t ask me anything about plant physiology two weeks after the course ended.

 Now I’ve reached the other end of my life.  I’ve begun thinking about things I’ve never before given much thought.  Some of these thoughts are actually questions that possibly have no solvable answer.  What is the length in time of now – the instantaneous present?  Does instant have a length?  Isn’t time made up of a series of instants?  Why would I want to know the answer to that?  Maybe my question really has to do with the nature of time.  What is time?  Is it linear as it seems to us or is that possibly an illusion?  Is time linked to space – if no space then no time?  I hear the nature of time is linked to gravity.  Why?  If true, what is the significance of that piece of evidence?

I’m also puzzled about consciousness.  Just for the sake of argument let’s say that our mind, our consciousness, is the result of the physical processes of our brain.  What property or properties of all this biochemical activity provides us with human intellectual thought?  What is the nature of thought?  How is it we find human reason so useful in deciphering much of the physical realm?  Is mathematics a human discovery or is it a tool of our invention?  Of what use it is to human beings that we have curiosity of this nature?  Asking such questions doesn’t put food on the table and they may never come with an answer of any certainty.

Over four decades ago we sent men to the moon.  It was an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking and it cost us a fortune to accomplish.  As a result our astronauts brought us back some rocks.  People may criticize the mission as a boondoggle – a giant publicity stunt that resulted from some ill-conceived competition between the U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cold War.  In fact, much of the technology we take for granted today – from smartphones to GPS navigation – has its inception in the Apollo Moon Program.  The challenge of manned space flight brought about a scientific revolution that we are still benefitting from today. 

I’m not going to find the answers to the questions I’ve posed for myself.  My effort in investigating these questions, though, will result in new mysteries to consider and intriguing new speculations that should stimulate my imagination.  My process of researching these ideas can only result in rewarding new thoughts for my consideration.  I have no idea as to what path my curiosity will lead me but I do know that it will take me far away from where it is I am today.  I’ve started a voyage that promises no material reward.  I’m doing it just because I can.  It’s human nature.  Really.

Love,

           Dad