Somewhere in a Mental Hospital...

there may be someone...

Some notions are far too grand to be compressed onto a single page. This could be one of those, and the best I could ever hope to do is to open a window so the reader can see inside. I think it's worth a try, in this case, to attempt it.

It seems I can't look past the ordinary like many people can, but perhaps most everybody is just preoccupied. If some fantastically superior alien being was watching how we behave, he might think we're all pretty unintelligent, running around like ants with little cognition of the world around us. I know that's not entirely true. But we do wear a mental set of blinders, creating tunnel vision so that we can function in an existence we tend to create for ourselves.

I recently read an article about how easily and commonly we fool ourselves. Time and again we may make irrational choices based on preconceived ideas, certain that we're right. Upon reading the article, I had to plead guilty. We tend to view things in the context of our own experiences, or if we want to be a bit more honest, our own prejudices.

I may be writing now, but I hail from a manufacturing background. Recently I passed by a stockroom and saw, projecting from a rack, a section of rigid brass tubing. I know what it took to make that piece of tubing. Mining, transporting the ore, smelting, alloying the metals, tensile testing of the materials, design and machining of extrusion dies, extrusion, inspection and cutting for shipment. That's eliminating some steps. But that item was just the nearest thing to the door of the stockroom. My mind conjured images of open copper and zinc mining pits, fiery ingots being poured, and the extrusions squirting forth from a monstrous press like white-hot strings of spaghetti. I’ve seen all of it.

On the far wall of the stockroom, cutting tools were stored. I don't know if the varied means of making those tools or the processes those tools enable, are more complex. Then there were electronic testing devices kept beside the cutting tools. Imagine the volume of human effort behind developing those items, and what can be done with them – or what would not be possible without them.

And yet, all you have to do is to step outside and open your eyes for things to become even more amazing. A car whooshes by, and I lift my eyes to look beyond. Out there is an expressway with thousands of cars whizzing past during the course of the day, often bumper-to-bumper. They move along on massive infrastructure, controlled by more than their drivers. Even the system for providing fuel for these machines is tremendously involved. Compared to that piece of tubing, the engineering in these vehicles is astounding. You could go on and on in this vein.

But zooming back just a bit exposes the natural world, and the interwoven segments of the biosphere that support life on this planet. And even the smallest insects and the tiniest plants within it are unbelievably complex. It doesn't take one that much farther away to behold the universe of which it is all a part. And long before that point, if I am looking and have any idea at all what I am seeing, I realize there is no possibility I could ever begin to take it all in.

Somewhere in a mental hospital, there's a person who is massively more intelligent than am I, committed there simply because that person can't shut it off. He or she is staring at a wall, eyes wide and unblinking, trying to grasp what even I cannot see. The person isn't crazy.

Some people will say, "Stop and smell the roses," or "Wake up and smell the coffee." Maybe that's what you have to do - direct attention to some specific thing.

I won't do that for you. I simply can't.

Have a great day.

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