Look Up, Not Down

Sometimes we should look up.

Most of the time, most of us look down.

We are buried in our iPads, our iphones, our laptops, our notebooks; what we are seeking isn't there. It's just an artificial interface between our reality and what we think is reality, condensed, mashed and filtered for our primate brains.

What we seek is never found. But if we seek a reflection of our egos, by all means keep looking into that gadget in front of you.

We should look up. When we do, we see an accumulation of clouds, sky and color. We name the clouds cirrus or cumulus. We think that to name something is to understand it. We named God God but we still don't understand It.

Poets and madmen and mean cynical bloggers see otherwise. They might see curls of white hair or drops of snow or a confusion of cotton drifting aimlessly in the atmosphere.

Poets see curls of white hair. Madmen might see the hand of a universal being slapping them silly with the reality of the herd.

And mean cynical bloggers might see the clouds and name them cirrus and then, with a tweak of perception, say they look like curls and then write an essay about looking up instead of down.

We pretend that we can find the universe on the Internet. We console ourselves that all the answers to life are buried in a hyperlink or revealed or exposed or flaunted on Facebook or some other social media machine.

If they are, why does misery still exist on this planet?

Because it does.

If so, why does poverty and murder and mayhem prevail?

Because we are human.

The answers lie within ourselves and not in a gadget. The answers lie within ourselves and not the stars but we can look at the stars and wonder at the incomprehensibility of the incomprehensible.

We don't look at the universe and wonder.

We look at the screen and regurgitate.

We don't ask who we are.

We tell others who they are and then post a selfie. What we see isn't what others see. But we want others to see what we see.

The problem confronts you in the mirror.

If we don't know, we say, Google it.

(To check the spelling of “cirrus,” I opened my Thesaurus. Some of you might scoff at this and say you can check the spelling online, and I might reply, but I don't have to see ads for Viagra, Match.com and teaser headlines, such as the 10 celebrities with the worst teeth or the ugliest partners.)

We know everything and yet we know nothing.

Knowing nothing is something. To say we know something is really a defensive mechanism to 

protect our ignorance.

But I do know something.

If you don't look up sometimes, you may get hit by a car or truck or some beefy guy on a bicycle delivering sandwiches.

That's all I know. And I still wonder at our existence in a universe of possibilities.