The World Is Still Mysterious

It took a year, but they finally found Steve Fossett's plane wreck and a bone or two. It sounds rather grim to consider that you might still get lost in this world. Surely he could have been part of the grid. He might have worn an emergency beacon watch, but chose not to. I am heartened by this.

I don't mean to get all fuzzy, but there is something about crisis that brings out the best and worst in people. It's when we are forced to improvise that we are at our most human, and it is when we are at our most disciplined that we are most part of some machine. An ordinary life must balance discipline and spontaneity, but it is during those moments of chaos that reveal our true character.

I don't like thrillseekers, but I understand their motivation. People must get out of the planned life. I think such nerve would be better spent on gallantry than extreme sports. Fossett died flying into a mountain. As tragically as that can be interpreted, I think it's more than a little bit foolish. Gerard writes this today:

In the end, it is not our failure to learn from history that condemns us to repeat it, but our mind's turning away from even the briefest glimpse of what the dark passages of history were like that damns us. We may know, but we refuse to see. We blind our own mind's eye. It is our inability to imagine the most evil things that all men are capable of that corrupts us.

No, do not say "our inability" to imagine. Say rather, "our refusal" to imagine since the imagination itself -- if we were honest -- can indeed visualize carnage and depravity with ourselves as the actor and never the acted-upon. Our mind can and does see things that we cannot stand to admit. Our mind can bring to an image and hold in our mind's eye things of infinite vileness.

To risk one's life for the thrill. That's the ultimate celebrity, I suppose. Perhaps the TV show 'Fear Factor' can amp up its stunts to lethal levels, and we can be Roman spectators again.

Life is still mysterious and the world is still too big to find everyone and everything when you want to. For me that means I have reasons to look for more reasons to bond with my fellows. More reasons to make our human family what it is supposed to be, guarding against those dangerous elements, both human and natural. That is a challenge that requires both spontaneity and discipline.