Wednesday was a trying day for me. First off, I was working on my new book, having recently put it into an Indesign“Book”—a very powerful app on Adobe’s Indesign program that paginates all chapters consecutively and makes them ready for delivery to the printer. I had just finished the chapter I was proofing (for the nth time), the second-to-last one in my novel, and closed it with some satisfaction: I was very nearly done. Then I went to close the “Book,” and suddenly—it disappeared. A little panicky, I went to my documents, found the “Book” file, and clicked to open it. Nothing. It would not open. Now I got really panicky. Where the hell was it? I kept trying to open it in different ways (on the task bar, on the Indesign home page), and each time came up empty. Then I went to my backup hard drive, and it wasn’t there either, nor was it available on Mac’s Time Machine—supposedly backing up everything automatically. Now I was beside myself. All my work on the damn novel gone? Then I decided to create another “Book” file, and re-enter all the chapters that I had earlier formatted with Indesign. It was laborious, but I thought I had to do it, though I knew I’d have to go over each one again to make sure it was formatted with the new corrections.
And then, something happened. I tried opening the “Book” one more time (like a dog going back again and again to an empty dish), and it opened. I had no idea why, or whether it was the new one, or the one that disappeared, but I didn’t care. It was back, and after trying it several more times, I was satisfied that the “Book” had somehow returned—with all the crucial changes I had made. Whew.
Then I ate and got ready to go to my doctor’s appointment at the local clinic, scheduled for 2:45 pm. After some errands (rushed), my helper got me to the clinic a bit early, left, and I told the desk attendant who I was and sat down to wait. Then came the second blow: the attendant said he couldn’t find an appointment for me with my doctor for today. He said the only one he saw was the one on September 21, next Tuesday, at the Point Reyes clinic. ‘Yes, I said, I know about that one, it’s in Point Reyes because they have the frozen nitrogen there to take care of the blemish I want removed. But the advice nurse had previously made an appointment for today for the follow-up my doctor wanted.’ No dice. There had been a glitch somewhere, I was not on the computer’s calendar, and I could not see my doctor today. Perhaps on Tuesday, he said, you can make an appointment for the follow up.
I won’t go into further details, but want to emphasize what this really brought home with a vengeance: How the world, our world, can suddenly collapse when our expectations about how things will work are suddenly dashed. In the one case, it was expectations about how computers and reliable design programs can suddenly fail or abort; in the other, how what we are sure some human has scheduled turns out not to have been. In short, we are totally dependent on millions, trillions of little automaticities, both human-created and natural, continuing to work as we expect, in order for our lives to continue to function. And when one or more do not, then we suddenly lose our certainty, our bearings, our faith that the world, the universe will, on its own, continue to support us, but instead seems determined to crush us. I did indeed lose faith yesterday, worried that it was the beginning of another of those periods in my life when nothing goes my way (especially worrisome at this time, when my crowd-funding campaign to publish my novel was hitting its stride), and braced myself for the coming shit-storm.
As it turned out, my loss of faith was exaggerated and somewhat premature. But again, that isn’t the important thing. The issue I’m pointing to here is, again, the myriad of silent operations that we depend on, utterly, and must have faith in, to keep going. Take our blood circulation, wherein it, the heart, has to keep doing its taken-for-granted task of steadily pumping blood through our arteries and veins to keep us oxygenated and alive. If it fails, or slows too much because of age-hardened arteries, we can have a stroke that impairs our brain, or a heart attack that can kill us. Or the uptake of glucose into our bloodstream, the one that manufactures energy in each of our 724 trillion cells. Interruption in that complex process can spell loss of energy, and even death. Or the billions of bacteria in our gut that process and break down our food to provide that glucose, without whose indispensable work, again, we would be doomed. And that’s just a tiny glimpse of what goes on in the body, automatically, all beneath our consciousness, some well-understood by scientists, some not. We also depend on the planet rotating at the same speed for night and day to appear. And for the planet to keep traveling in its orbit around the sun (I have never understood what keeps these two circular motions going—some sort of inertia that’s left over from the original Big Bang 13 billion years ago? it seems preposterous), so the seasons keep succeeding each other, according to our calendars. And for gravity and angular momentum to keep us at just the right distance from the sun so we don’t either burn up or freeze. And for the climate to maintain its “goldilocks” balance so that we don’t, as now, suddenly find ourselves struggling with global warming because of too much fossil-fuel-burning by humans over the last centuries. Or for winter rains to fall so that the grasses and trees and plants don’t dry out for lack of water (as is now happening in the Western U.S.) and our whole way of life, our very lives, are threatened. And on and on. We rarely, except in a crisis, think about these things. But these and a gazillion more events (traffic lights working, drivers observing the rules of the road or pilots the airways) and regularities and conditions are absolutely necessary for our continuing functioning as human beings.
In short, we humans like to think we’re independent, sovereign creatures who keep ourselves going, and the world under control with hard work and self-discipline and intelligence. Mostly on our own. And those qualities are important, yes. But the larger truth is that we depend on countless other beings and actions, both organic and purely physical, to maintain the vital conditions that keep us moving and growing and nourished and healthy. And it is only when one of those actions falters or fails that we truly notice our utter dependency.
That is why there may actually be hope in the massive failure that is global warming. Yes, we are all in peril. Yes, the planet, or more specifically, life on the planet—especially human life—is going to change drastically and suffer enormously, and perhaps die off in horrifying numbers. But the one element that is going to be gained, is already being gained, is human awareness of our dependency, our interdependence with all other life, with all of creation. We will all find out, through bitter experience, that we humans cannot act with impunity, cannot disregard the well-being of other humans no matter where they live or what they look like, and more, cannot disregard the well-being of other animals, or the oceans—and the sea creatures that inhabit them, or the plants and soil we depend on for food, or the trees that provide most of the oxygen we need to breathe, or the countless other beings and non-beings throughout the universe, including even black holes, that must continue to circulate and procreate and self-destruct and energize the whole thing. For if we continue to do so, we do it at our peril, which means all of us.
And what makes this even more difficult is that the more we know, the more we don’t know (which is probably a good thing, our not knowing, because if we really knew about all of it, we’d be paralyzed with indecision)—about the amazing, incomprehensibly-complex inter-relations among all the single bits of existence with whom we are engaged in this thing we call “life.” But we are learning; and, as I found out recently, those happenings that seem like bitter failures are often blessings in disguise; for they teach us in the only way we seem willing to learn, that we are all floating on this precarious, nebulous, but miraculously-dependable-and-balanced web, that does support us, whether we deserve it or not. And all of us probably need to be more thankful and aware than we usually are that it is there, that it is always changing well beyond our puny attempts to control it, but that it still always operates because we need it, and thus need to respect it more than we will ever know.
Lawrence DiStasi
