May long weekend in Canada is an “interesting” holiday. Officially it is Victoria Day, a day for the contemplation of the birthday of a queen that passed away in a far off land more than a hundred years ago. Unofficially, it’s the beginning of Spring/Summer and generally people cram into cars and head out of the city to pitch tents and camp in the various local, provincial and national parks. Unfortunately, this is Canada in mid-May, more than likely those camping will wake up to frost and some to find their tent poles creaking with the weight of snow. I remember one year in Newfoundland where friends had to get rescued after a snowfall during this particular weekend.

I decided to escape Edmonton and Canada altogether and run off to find Yogi bear in Yellowstone National Park (I tried explaining this to the park attendant when I arrived and she looked a little confused). If anyone is wondering, it’s a 14-hour drive from Edmonton to Yellowstone which I filled with lobotomizing eighties music.

If this were anyone else, I suspect that they would have had a normal drive down. But those readers who read my travel blogs know that some force out there really likes to toy with me. For example, as I happily packed into my car and head out of town I reached the cruising speed of about 110 km/h and suddenly my steering wheel decided to try and escape it’s mounting bar. I turned back and returned to the mechanic who had performed a comprehensive service on the car the day before. Nevertheless, I did manage to reach the park and spent the next couple of days walking around and taking photos. I also managed to hike up Mt. Sepulcher (9,659ft) where the trail disappeared into snow (”Oh don’t worry you won’t need a map, the trail should be clear by now”) and the markers had been blown down over this past winter.

Yellowstone National Park is actually mostly the caldera of a gigantic Supervolcano, and as such thermal activity is everywhere, not just famous Old Faithful. You know, walking on top of a plugged volcano isn’t what I call the most confidence-inspiring thing to do. Regardless, enjoy the photos of my insane long weekend.

Victoria, I’m smarter than the average bear!

In my last post I examined the idea of destiny and horoscopes. At the end I mentioned my theory of “affinity”. I do not believe in a deified destiny. I do not believe that there is a supreme being pulling the threads of my life into an intricate pattern. And yet, when I look back upon my own life I notice certain patterns, certain externally-influenced decisions, random chance and pure dumb luck which have led me down both wondrous roads and cart-paths of despair. If I cannot accept destiny and I cannot accept the thought that my feet have been placed upon a path pre-ordained then I have to accept the following: everything that happens is complete and utter randomness.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera examines the moment that the main characters Tereza and Tomas meet. In Tereza’s mind the fact that Beethoven, her favourite musician, was playing as Tomas first looked on her was a sign of destiny. Kundera, the cynic, instead explains that it is the human need to find destiny that seeks to tie even the smallest possibility of non-randomness into a given situation. This is the same sentiment that leads athletes to wear underwear backwards in an effort to win sporting events. I used to listen carefully to the songs that came on the radio in the morning to see if the DJ’s choice would enlighten me to what would happen in my day – as if the entire world was a stage constructed for me to play in like The Truman Show.

However, I can’t believe only in total randomness either. This particular universe has a set of rules. It is a large set of rules which we have yet to discover, but there are patterns which keep getting repeated, over and over again. In another universe, it is quite likely that its birth heralded completely alien properties. Ultimately, when you break us down, we are essentially collections of atoms, molecules, electrons, protons and perhaps even smaller particles that we have yet to discover. Richard Dawkins breaks down his theory of life into the smallest of life’s elements: the genetic replicators. I choose to break it down further, right down to the atomic and sub-atomic level.

In this universe, different types of atoms combine to produce an infinite array of chemicals and materials. Hydrogen and Oxygen form water, essential for our existence, Sodium and Chlorine form salt and complex lengths of chemicals form our own DNA. These combinations do not happen by chance; they happen because there are affinities for certain elements to bond together.

Until the last infinitesimally small section of human history, our overly-developed and under-educated brains could not comprehend the thought of such small particles. Why then is it so immensely difficult for us to imagine the possible effects of our chemical structure upon each other and our surroundings? If you can accept that genes control our bodies, then you will have to accept that genes control our bodies by using any number of different chemicals. Introduction of certain hormones in organisms induce growth, reproduction and more.

Forgetting the chemical structure of our bodies and our environment, there is also the physical/electrical. The largest bodies of the universe have such a huge mass that they cause gravitational pull. It is the force that keeps our own little haven in the universe spinning around a glowing sphere. The solar winds produce such electrical disturbance that our mass communications companies live in fear that a single giant accidental burst could shove us back into television-less mediocrity. In our own small spheres atop our necks, electrical impulses jumping between synapses allow me to place these words here so that you may reinterpret them and scoff.

There is little doubt of chemical or electrical affinity in this universe. It should, therefore, not be hard to take the next logical leap of faith: That all living beings interact at the very base chemical and electrical level. If such is the case then there can be a case made for the relative non-randomness of randomness.

Imagine that you show up at a party of thirty strangers. It is probably quite predictable based on your own chemical and electrical make up which of those people will become your friends, who will be neutral to you and who will downright despise you. Someone like Richard Dawkins would argue that it is your genes which set all this up for you, and potentially that may be the case. Perhaps though it might simply be the chemicals that are effervescing from your body from the food that you had just eaten, or perhaps it is the positive or negative energy given from the electrical forces at work inside your brain.

Making friends isn’t unusual; pheromones are chemicals we give off which biologically affect other individuals. Imagine though that instead of a party, you run into a stranger who is so affected by some affinity that s/he mentions a job for which you end up applying. Now you have the randomness which we could associate with chance, luck and maybe destiny.

As Kundera would assert, a certain amount of coincidence is a fiction of our mortal minds concocting explanations for desire. Pure randomness and chance must also be present as there is a certain amount of chaos which influences the world. Finally there is my theory of affinity. We are influenced to do certain actions for other people (and potentially for and by other life forms) that affect their lives and in turn their view of coincidence based on chemical and genetic affinities over which we have little or no control.

Do you believe in fate? Do you believe in horoscopes? Do you believe in a foreordained future? A destiny perhaps? Human history is filled with an attempt to see where you will put your foot next, and if that weren’t enough where the children of your children will put their feet. What makes us such slaves to our unwritten future?

Every major religion is based on the idea of foretelling our future. Even in the Garden of Eve, Adam and Eve are given a destiny, and each character thereafter is given hope through God’s word of what they ought to do, their fate is marked in the will of God. Even Buddhism, which is as close to a philosophical religion as it gets, speaks of the Buddha who was, Sakyamuni, and the Buddha yet to be, the Maitreya.

Essentially our mortal mind cannot comprehend that we are here simply at the whim of biology. How can it be that life was breathed into us and we awoke to the sunrise by accident? We can think, we can philosophize, we are intelligent and we can master the very fabric of our existence. It would be impossibility, cries humanity, for our lives to exist with no greater noble purpose. If such purpose could not be found, the simple truth is too horrible to contemplate: we are slaves only to the biology that drives us, simple survival machines (as Richard Dawkins puts it in The Selfish Gene) created only to pass on our genes to the next generation. It would mean that everything we do in our everyday existence does not actually mean anything to the Universe and the hand that guides it. In fact, we would be a momentary blip, a spark that lasts for an instance in time so small against the life of the universe that quantifying it would itself be impossible.

This explanation is so scary to us that we immediately try to give meaning through religion. If you believe in the possibility of a higher power, then destiny must exist. If destiny exists then it must be possible to gamble on figuring out the path of the maker’s mind. The old cultures imagined a woman spinning thread and creating the fabric of the universe. Each thread was a life, and each thread fit into this immense cloth in a pattern. It would be a fabric of such beauty that at the end, the entire story of the universe would be told and as such every thread had a purpose.

Each culture in the world has figured out ways to try and tell the future. The Greeks stared at the constellations, mapped their movements, attached stories and Gods to them and we have the resultant horoscopes that grace our daily papers. I’m a Scorpio by the way, in case you cared. The Chinese looked at time, subdivided it and personified it in animals. Heck, my friends and I used Bibliomancy to drive us around Alberta.

People stared at the random but similar lines on each of our palms and decided that these were marks left by the Gods to show us our individual life pattern. In Sri Lanka, the custom of a fortune teller reading the palm and stars of a new born is still practiced. Amongst the upper classes this fortune is etched onto palm leaf paper and bound into a book. Supposedly my brothers and I have these. I have no idea what mine says and chances are, I never will.

So do I believe that fate exists? I think that belief of destiny and fate is a very personal thing. We spend a lot of time thinking about the future. Wouldn’t it be nice to think that we are not random, but that we are here for some greater purpose than to eat, sleep, poop and breed? However, I find that worrying about the future, trying to read it and so on, makes us slaves to our own futures. So much so that we sometimes forget to take note of the present and the beauty of life that is happening around us.

Despite all this I don’t believe completely in randomness either. If you put molecules of hydrogen and oxygen together in the correct environment, they will combine and form water. I believe that there is a certain affinity accorded to all things, animate and inanimate. We are beings of chemical and physical forces and as such we interact with each other similar to how giant objects in space have gravitational pull. If you put certain people together in certain environments, I do believe that it is possible to predict the outcome. The same can be true for thoughts and ideas and the electrical impulses that are jumping between synapses deep in the recesses of our grey matter.

No, I do not believe that I am the Once and Future King but I do believe that given a certain environment, genes, people, objects and so on, we are groomed to be and do certain things… a lot of which can be predicted. There is no spinner for this thread, instead the fabric of life is a story told within ourselves and recounted at the end of our life. Better make it a good interesting present lest you bore the listeners of the future.

What’s my fortune cookie for May 11, 2007 from astrology.com?

“You’re desperately trying to remember a dream; perhaps you should go back to bed.”

Now that is an excellent idea.

One of the great passions of my life is reading. I think I’ve been concentrating on the meanings of ink scratches on paper since the moment that I realized weird squiggles meant more than how to find the closest bathroom. Like a lot of people I vacillate between literary creations which could be considered “pulp” and those where wandering through a world of words is like an adventure amongst the artists of the Louvre. While both entertain, the latter more often challenges us to examine our life as much as we fly through the dreams of the author.

Lately I’ve been thoroughly entertained by Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It’s one of “those” books. You know, the ones that everyone says you ought to read but you never quite get around to? Books like War and Peace, Catch 22 or even The English Patient (no worries, I haven’t read them either). Often we quickly pass over them; silently we make amendments to the New Year’s resolution that tipped our hands and consider watching the movie instead.

I am told that The Unbearable Lightness of Being has been made into a film. For some reason, I doubt that there would ever be a way for this novel to truly translate from the cinema of my mind to the silver screen of ninety minutes. Oddly I’ve been reading this book and another, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, on the recommendations of a friend (who has an amazing knack for suggesting good reading). Despite one being fiction and the other a scientific thesis on what the meaning of life could be, the two works are strangely interconnected, though that could also be the result of my strange mind. On that interrelation I’ll probably have to write another incredibly boring blog entry.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being has too many layers to even begin dissecting in a blog post, in fact I suspect there are graduate students’ theses examining every aspect of the story and the characters. However, the thing I find most interesting about a good book is when it makes me think about myself. I doubt, for instance, that Kundera expressly wrote his novel for me and I doubt very much that he was considering what words would strike chords in the hearts of specific readers, maybe he never even meant for me to put down the book at a certain passage and go “wow!” In The Unbearable Lightness of Being we discover several relationships: The philandering Tomas and the constant Tereza, the dreaming Franz and the runaway Sabina, Tomas and his son, Tomas and his many women, Tereza and her mother. All of these interconnections delve deeply into what one considers to be love, happiness and the search for that essential, and yet unbearable lightness of being.

At the end of it all the most meaningful relationship in the book is not between humans. Tomas and Tereza have watched the passing of their “child”, the dog Karenin, and Tereza realizes this relationship between her and the dog was the most loving of all the relationships she had experienced. In one paragraph Kundera sums up something about relationships which hit too close to home. In this book, this was that “wow!” moment for me. Kundera wrote:

“It is a completely selfless love: Tereza did not want anything of Karenin; she did not ever ask him to love her back. Nor had she ever asked herself the questions that plague human couples: Does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking nothing but his company.”

In this one passage is summed up beautifully a lesson that I am slowly learning after wandering this scary planet for thirty odd years. In my (perhaps all of our) relationships with close friends I never ask or probe or test. I hope that my friends and you know who you are, realize that I would unquestioningly give the shirt of my back and more. There is no need to tell you how much I care; there is no competition between us or between us and others. These relationships are strong; they are without doubt the highlight of my life thus far. Contrast this with how we treat our more intimate relationships and suddenly I can understand the friction. I can see our own self-esteem issues, our needs and our attempts to try and pick relationships apart. Our penchant for reading between lines that don’t exist, asking questions that have no answers and coming up with answers to questions asked by the silent inner demons of no repute.

I was asked a week ago whether I thought that any relationship could truly survive in this day and age. I waffled, hedged my bets and even wavered on the fence while flip flopping in my opinion. I can honestly answer now having finished The Unbearable Lightness of Being and having let it swish and swirl against my literary palate. A relationship can last forever if the love between two people is selfless, unquestioning and unwavering without letting the foibles and smallness of our mortal minds interfere with the greatness of even the tiniest relationship. A tall order.

It’s 3am on the dot. I stood in line in the pouring rain to get in to see Spiderman 3. I now understand 1983. I know what it must have felt like for audiences to stare blankly at the movie screen and see the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. I know what that must have felt like. Finally.