What do you believe that you can’t prove?

OK, so this is a couple of weeks late - this time I did have it written and sitting in Microsoft Word, just didn't get around to posting it - so I'm improving on just composing posts in my head.

The Edge Foundation is an informal group of “some of the most interesting minds in the world.” Its mandate is to “promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society.” Their annual question for 2005 to which they have 119 responses up on their website is: “what do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?”. The responses come from (amongst others) physicists, mathematicians, biologists, psychologists and writers – people like Benoit Mandelbrot, Richard Dawkins, Paul Davies and Lee Smolin just to pick a few names I recognized – and cover a wide range of topics including consciousness, cosmology, computing and evolution.

I have only just skimmed through them at this stage, but this one from Kai Krause is an interesting challenge to the widely held belief that we should always strive to “live in the present”. Here’s his summary of his belief that we should live in the future and the past rather than the present:

“Bluntly put: spend your life in the eternal bliss of always having something to hope for, something to wait for, plans not realized, dreams not come true.... Make sure you have new points on the horizon, that you purposely create. And at the same time, relive your memories, uphold and cherish them, keep them alive and share them, talk about them.”

And, as he rightly points out, life then is not a mainly humdrum existence punctuated by the occasional “high” moment, but it is about “the anticipation of the moment and the memory of the moment.” An interesting concept.

New Year’s resolution?

OK, so it is already most of the way through January and probably too late to be thinking about making New Year’s resolutions, but I’ve been pondering the relentless “busy-ness” of my life lately, and maybe with the season of Lent just around the corner it is not such a bad time to look at what I am doing with the limited time and energy that I have. I strongly believe that the way I spend my time reflects my real priorities in life – for example, if I say that my parents are an important part of my life and then don’t spend any time with them, to me that says they aren’t really important to me – my actions speak much louder (and more truthfully) than my words – didn’t someone once say “don’t tell me you love me, show me” or something like that.

Sadly the way I’m spending my time at the moment says that aimless Internet surfing and watching sport and dramas on TV are the most important things in my life. Now some of that is merely a way of making sure I get the rest I need so my body doesn’t give up on me – any exertion, physical or mental, has an impact on the chronic fatigue / fibromyalgia – but some of it is probably not a good use of my time.

I read on someone’s blog the other day – and no, I don’t remember which one at the moment – that if you can read 50 books a year and have, say, 30 years left to live, that’s 1500 books that you can read. I’ve never thought of it like that before – I’ve often said “so many books, so little time”, but never really come to the stark realisation that there is a finite amount of time left in life and therefore a finite number of books that can be read – not to mention a finite number of TV programs that can be watched, Internet sites that can be surfed, etc, etc. So, I should spend a significant portion of that finite time doing those things that are important to me.

So my “resolution” is to gradually change the way I am using my time to more accurately reflect what is important to me – to spend my time a little more thoughtfully each day, to question what I am doing and to reassess what is important. I see this as a gradual process not as a task that I will ever really complete – there will be times when I fall back into habits developed over many years, but as long as there are also times when I make a little progress, that is OK. And maybe having this blog post to remind me will help me make that progress.

Was God in this disaster?

I just read this article after having seen it on a group I’m in – it rings true for me – the disaster just is – we see God in the response of people to it.

Poor neglected blog

I think it must be something about starting a blog – now this one looks like a lot of others, with an initial burst of enthusiastic posting followed by a long quiet period of neglect. Not that I haven’t had anything to write about – I have – but the posts that I compose in my mind when I’m under the shower in the morning just haven’t been finding their way onto the Internet – I remember having the same problem years ago with letters to my grandparents. In the absence of a waterproof laptop, I need to find a way to translate all those wonderful ideas into words on “paper” – which, of course, is part of the reason I started a blog – to get my thoughts out of my head and recorded in some coherent way. I suspect the answer lies in the concept of self-discipline – and trying to form new habits – all of which takes time.

The maths has also suffered a period of neglect leading up to Christmas as I was saving my energy for driving to and from the hospital / apartments where my parents spent almost five weeks as Dad underwent a stem cell transplant (similar to a bone marrow transplant only using the patient’s own stem cells which have previously been harvested). It’s not a pleasant process but they were able to go back home just before Christmas, and he seems to be slowly recovering his appetite and energy levels. Prior to that, I also expended more energy than I could afford trying to mulch various garden beds – with considerable help from the local Apex club. The worst beds have been done, but there’s still a pile of mulch awaiting my further attention – for the time being, weed-killer is keeping things under control.

I’ve returned to the maths recently – I have to finish within 40 weeks of the day I started it (ie the end of April) and the schedule is starting to get a bit tight. The year 11 stuff is all finished – just the exam to go, which will be in February. I’ve started on the year 12 textbook and have got as far as drafting the first of 4 tutorials – on the first 2 chapters (out of a total of 12). Now I’m working on the 3rd chapter in between watching the Test cricket on TV.

My thoughts over the past week or so have been very much with those people affected by the Asian tsunami – I’d already gotten the strong impression after the Christmas Eve service at church that I needed to keep the events of my life in perspective –that I actually have a lot to be grateful for. Now, I realise more than ever just how lucky I am – in fact, how lucky most of us in Australia are. The challenge for me is to retain a sense of perspective – after all, I have a roof over my head, plenty of food, running hot water, car, electricity, phone, internet, all sorts of “toys” (tv, computer, books, music) – the fact that I have a chronic illness and that my fridge decided it wasn’t going to join me in 2005 is really not such a big deal ….