6. Abberations of Light

This post marks the end of another week, and it's thus time to reflect. Based on the Simple Mental Health Pain Scale shared in the previous post (hereafter abbreviated SMHPS), I would say that this week has been much better than the preceding one. Earlier in that preceding week, I was still reeling from the release of my 'testament' Facebook post, and by Thursday I was having another mental health collapse (a.k.a. 'death spiral'), which finally prompted me to book the appointment with the therapist. 

Having met with the therapist on Monday this week, I felt much better for the most part, despite us having only briefly gone over my history and touching on some key issues. I think just the knowledge that there will be more therapy sessions makes me calmer because I know there will at least be someone to talk and vent to. The danger, however, is that troubling issues might arise, and then given that my therapy session is still days away, be forgotten in the course of daily activities. Then the troubles remain buried in my subconscious, but I may forget to raise it in the session. I have to be sure to make notes from now on about how I'm feeling and about anything troubling me. That way, I'll be sure to remember by the time of my next session. Otherwise, any lessons or insights might be overlooked. It might be useful to spend the first few minutes of any therapy session just reviewing the past week. At any rate, it's difficult to judge accurately where this past week falls on the SMHPS, but 6 sounds pretty accurate since I still try and avoid all stressful tasks. In other news, I had the worst headache of my life on Wednesday, and it wouldn't get better despite taking ordinary painkillers and lying down. I eventually had no choice but to visit the Emergency Room, where I was placed on a drip with anti-inflammatory medication and strong painkillers. That worked, and I was prescribed the same medication in pill form. The next day it was still a little painful, so I took the pills, but subsequently didn't do the work I wanted to on a research paper, and again put off a meeting that was supposed to be on Friday. I wonder if it might have been stress related, precisely in response to that work and meeting. I also wonder if the anti-depressants I stopped taking about two weeks prior had anything to do with it.

In the meantime, I've been thinking more about the 'assignment' I have for Monday. I've put off doing it - as I do with most things (one of the issues I need to address through therapy) - but I thought the best framework might be the most straightforward, namely using the kernel contained in the previous post (more of my strengths and fewer of my weaknesses) as the foundation. There are many dimensions to happiness or being the person you always wanted to be, but I think being realistic is essential. There will never be a time when everything is 'perfect' since such perfection does not exist. Therefore, focusing on gradually reducing some of my main weaknesses and building on my strengths is a sensible plan. Of course, this means I must identify these first, which is easier said than done, especially for my strengths. I've outlined the major areas I want to work on in therapy, and these are all linked in some way to weaknesses. Perhaps strengths in this sense are the opposite of the weaknesses? 

In terms of weaknesses (or perhaps one should more kindly call them challenges?), I outline the main ones below, although I'm sure there are others.

• laziness
• lack of enough self-care, including exercise
• bottling up negative emotions and experiences (perhaps in therapy I will deal with this, after all, speaking about such issues is the point of therapy)
• inability to cope with stress in a healthy manner
• escapism (not in itself a bad thing but I do it to get away from stress, mainly through video games)
• addictive aspects (especially about the abovementioned escapism)
• poor work-study-life balance
• terrible procrastination (linked to escapism)
• lack of social skills/social phobia
• loneliness (linked to social phobia), lack of friends
• not fitting in anywhere (this is not per se a weakness since conformity is its own weakness, but I want to at least feel belonging and a sense of community somewhere)
• lack of self-worth/self-confidence/self-acceptance
• internalised oppression and homophobia
• not being able to assert myself enough and avoiding conflict or confrontation completely
• not feeling good about my appearance/feeling ugly
• not believing compliments
• not being able to keep a sleep schedule or schedule of any kind (though the sleep issue is likely linked to non-24-sleep-wake syndrome)
• struggling to look people in the eyes for any length of time (liked to self-assertion and conflict avoidance and lack of self-worth, and possibly mild autism? - needs further investigation, but I can get overwhelmed by noises and sights and activity like going to a mall after a long period of staying at home - may be linked to agoraphobia and isolation too?)
• falling into negative spirals and not being able to break free without internalising the negativity
• not having any romantic experiences (also possibly linked to childhood emotional neglect)
• feeling the need to please others and to 'kowtow' to authority figures 
• grief and many conflicting feelings around my mother's relatively recent death
• lack of boundaries 
• avoiding social situations, even picking up the phone when possible (introversion contributes here, but is not bad in itself)
• self-sabotage
• negative beliefs
• feels there is a great barrier all around, limiting me, containing me, that I cannot escape 

In short, in unkind moods, I might say I'm a mess, but more gently, there's much to work on. However, all of this is underpinned by my desire to live a full and happy life. How can I do so without being honest about my issues and confronting them? Many people never do this, so I must give credit to myself.

Strengths I can identify at this point include:

• intelligence
• kindness
• a desire to - as Carl Sagan put it - accept and work on uncomfortable truths instead of holding on to my dearest illusions (maybe in some sense an illusion could be that of 'learned helplessness', that I'm destined to be a victim of all these challenges and that I am doomed to die lonely and miserable - as I tell myself in my most depressive moments when I become suicidal)
• hope
• empathy
• imagination
• creativity
• good writer

Maybe this is not much, but it's enough to start with.

One thing I must remember to do before Monday is to complete the 'wheel of life' I shared in the previous post. I know this will present a low score in all areas. Perhaps I can do it now (and my first step against procrastination can be to follow some advice I saw recently, namely if something takes less than two minutes do it immediately). Well, I took a moment and here is my wheel:

Maybe I was too generous in some respects, but it's challenging to quantify complex matters with a simple 1-10 scale.

Nevertheless, I scored myself highest in health and business/career (both 6). Healthwise, despite my depression and headaches (and underactive thyroid), I have no complaints. I am not ill or limited in some way physically, which is a considerable blessing. Still, I don't exercise, and I eat poorly; I sit all day in front of a screen, and I sleep at irregular hours (but enough). I don't go outside enough, and I don't drink enough water. Overall, a 6 seems justified.

In business/career, I gave myself a six because I like the work I'm doing, and I'm getting several publications out a year, but I suffer from incredible stress (which caused the overall 'breakdown' this year), which leads to avoidance and procrastination. I also suffer terribly from imposter syndrome, and I worry if I'm 'good enough'. I've missed deadlines and don't get paid if I don't deliver (since I'm on contract), but this is also partly a blessing since I can avoid having the stress of being paid for something and then struggling to deliver, and it's easy to resign (I've tried to a while back but my boss convinced me to try staying on - she has been very kind and accommodating but I know her boss dislikes my delays, and then she has to cover - a terrible burden on me and a vicious cycle, but it must be said their work schedules and expectations are rediculous, despite me having raised concerns and objections - maybe I did at least try to stand up for myself in some way). All in all, confusing, stressful, hopefull, exciting, frightening, and many other things at once.

On romance, I scored myself a 1, maybe a 0 is more accurate since I have never been near romance or a relationship.

On finances, I scored a 4. I have enough to live for now, but my limited funds are dwindling rapidly. Perhaps the score should have been lower. There is a possibility of inheriting something from my mother via my father, but I don't want to have any expectation because my mother left everything to my father.

Family and friends - I'm lonely and rarely speak to my broader family. In fact, I'm very removed from them, physically and in world-view. We aren't close. My dad has his positives and negatives. I have one friend and a few acquaintances, but where does one draw the distinction? Again, no-one, I see at all regularly, literally maybe once a year. The score should have been lower.

I make my own fun and recreation via gaming, but it's unbalanced and limited. My physical environment is okay, but I certainly leave things disorganised, and I avoid cleaning. Maybe things are worse than I thought. Personal growth shows prospects of improving given therapy and this act of blogging and reflecting and working on myself (I also thought, since therapy won't last forever due to finances, blogging is one way to keep giving myself some kind of outlet and voice to my feelings and thoughts). I also study but have been terribly neglecting this for a very long time. I have a great PhD supervisor, but we rarely speak because I never produce anything.

Out of a total of 80 (with revised scores - romance 0, family and friends 3, health 5, finances 3, business 5, physical environment 4, fun 5, personal growth 5), I score myself 30.


37.5%

To paraphrase Carl, I should be able to do much better.

To return to my assignment - my ideal, happy self is someone who is braver, more adventurous, knows himself and his strengths, is healthier, more organised, is less afraid, more resilient, more confident, with more positive beliefs, makes himself heard, avoids self-sabotage (and reduces procrastination), escaped the great barrier of limiting beliefs, copes with stress and psychological shocks and stress in a healthier way, and is comfortable in his own skin. The wheel of life is actually quite useful since it outlines well where I am now, and therefore provides a useful yardstick for where I want to be. When I score higher in all the areas above I will be closer to my goal.

What then holds me back? In one sense I suppose it's all the baggage from the past. All the painful bones and ruins that were buried in the sediment of time in my mind. A large part of therapy - and becoming my ideal self - is thus undertaking an expertly-supervised archeological excavation, to uncover, identify, process, and preserve or discard all these bones and ruins. As I wrote in my testament, one cannot confront one aspect of mental illness without confronting all aspects, since they are all deeply interwoven as my list of weaknesses above shows. This is not easy to do, even with that expert supervision of a trained and compassionate therapist. And, as my case shows, even just getting to the point of seeking help can be a long and arduous journey, made all the more difficult by the stigma of mental illness, which is so easily internalised. Un-internalising all my false beliefs will be part of my journey towards healing (perhaps this is also a form of cognitive dissonance - holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously - something I must overcome). The same is true for validating and giving voice to my deepest feelings - to plumb the depths as it were. Having the skill to do this - or rather lacking it, is what holds me back. I also think negative beliefs and this feeling of having a great barrier I cannot escape must fall.

I recently saw a video on Youtube of interviews held with elderly people in 1929. One of the oldest people interviewed (aged 103), had a wonderfully simple and powerful outlook on life, that I would love to adopt on my journey towards healing. He said, simply, when asked about the future:

I don't worry about the future. I'm going to live as long as I can, and I'm happy in living.

5. Encyclopaedia Galactica

In this post I will gather different pieces of the puzzle posed in the previous post. I will edit it over time to add new elements so I can keep them all together. Maybe some of these ideas/models/images will provide inspiration to others as well.

Source: The Graceful Patient

Source: Simple Psychology

Source: The Start of Happiness

Source: Objective: Happiness

Source: Habits for Wellbeing

Source: Qaspire

World Happiness Report 2019

Global Wellbeing Report 2018

Source: Pinterest

Source: mylemarks

Source: The Gottman Institute

4. You Are Here

Based on my state, as reflected in my previous post, I decided I could no longer avoid seeking help. Despite being very apprehensive and even afraid, I made an appointment with a counselling psychologist, and yesterday I had my first appointment. An hour flies by so fast when you have the chance to speak about yourself and all the things you never could before. For many reasons, a psychologist or a counsellor is easier to talk to than friends or family. Your friends and family have a pre-existing image in their minds of who you are and expect certain things from you. There are longstanding social conventions and discussing very personal thoughts can leave you feeling vulnerable, and if people do not react in positive ways, it can cause more harm. Thus, I am hopeful this psychologist can help me on my voyage. The first session consisted mostly of me speaking about my background and 'introducing' myself. Some outlines of challenging issues also started to emerge. At one point the doctor (is that the right title? I still want to ask the lady how to address her) commented that maybe there is an issue with setting boundaries (or rather not setting them). She also mentioned that bottling things up - which I very much do - is a bad thing. The time flew by, and she wanted to ask many more questions, so my next session will probably be a continuation of the 'setting of the scene' as it were. I came prepared with a printout of my Facebook post I shared in the previous post. She said she would read it before the next session. Perhaps it will give her insights that can help me. 

In parting, she gave me 'homework' for next week. She posed two questions:

1. If I go to sleep tonight as the person I am now, and wake up tomorrow as the 'ideal happy' person I want to be, what would have had to have changed in the night?
2. What prevents me now from being this person?

These are not easy questions, but I want to approach them from an academic standpoint. In my work, I do research, and I am also working on a PhD, so this comes naturally to me. First, I must set out the terms of the 'assignment'. What do people understand by being happy or fulfilled? What does the literature say? Something like Maslow's pyramid comes to mind already. This is also tied to my goals for therapy. What would I like to take away from the sessions? Perhaps I will ask in what ways am I happy or strong/healthy already? What are my strengths? Then perhaps what are my challenges or weaknesses, as clues to why I am not the person I would like to be. But first, I need to build a full picture for myself of what that person looks like. Unsurprisingly, a quote by Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot) just came to mind now:

By the time we're ready to settle even the nearest other planetary systems, we will have changed. The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us. The different circumstances we will be living under will have changed us. Prostheses and genetic engineering will have changed us. Necessity will have changed us. We're an adaptable species.

It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses, a species returned to circumstances more like those for which it was originally evolved, more confident, farseeing, capable, and prudent—the sorts of beings we would want to represent us in a Universe that, for all we know, is filled with species much older, much more powerful, and very different.

The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star.

...

Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the Solar System and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that, whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the Universe come from Earth.

They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will love it no less for its obscurity and fragility. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.

Just now, I am crossing one of these great rivers, but these strengths outlined by Carl appeal to me. They are only one part of the answer, but they provide food for thought.

As I like to do and have done in research publications and in outlining most of the challenging areas I would like to work on in therapy, I will make a model of these strengths/weaknesses, hopes, and ideas found in literature, to help me answer this question. Ultimately, I do not do so for the psychologist, but for myself.  I have a long and challenging journey ahead, but I am on the road. I am here.

3. Travels in Space and Time

I should start with a recollection of my history, a recollection of past encounters that brought me to this point in my trajectory. Ons of the best ways I can do this is to copy here a post I recently placed on Facebook. This post took a very long time to be written, despite how desperately I wanted to express my feelings. Then one Saturnday night at 2am, I sat up in bed, utterly distraught and in a suicidal haze, and typed it out on my phone from start to finish. That I had the courage to post it remains astounding to me, but despite my fears that the sky would fall, I have begun - slowly - to inch towards healing. In future posts I will elaborate further on many different issues.

One of the definitions given of the word testament in the Mirriam-Webster dictionary is 'a tangible proof or tribute'. This then is my testament, a proof of my struggle and a tribute to my hope, despite all convictions to the contrary, that I can escape the dark dungeon room I currently sit in. I have always loved metaphors for some reason, so here is one. Currently I am sitting on the cold stone floor of a room. It is dark all around me. A metaphor for my depression. My room however, is invisible. I can be in the world, talking, eating, shopping, for all intents appearing normal, and at the same time I sit in this room. I have heard from the experiences of others that this room has an exit somewhere but for some reason I've convinced myself from time to time that this does not, cannot, apply to my room. My room is different. For one, it's very old. Its contruction started some time around the time I was 12, but the foundations are even older. All I know is I was 12 when I first considered the option of ending it all.

In the years since, the walls of my room were built higher - a brick was laid every time I was bullied, or felt invisible, or cried to myself in silence at night. These days my room boasts a roof, and while I'm adept at ignoring it, it has been getting rather darker in here. Perhaps this room is also a tomb, and it's almost finished.

Truth is, I have much to be grateful for, I do research work I enjoy and find endlessly fascinating. I am furthering my studies as well, and have the best PhD supervisor. I have a birdy I deeply love, and whose mischief always brings me joy. But lately something new has been happening in my dark room, invisible to the world. It has slowly been filling with water. Previously, for periods lasting even years I could forget about this room while I was - even happily - going around in the world outside. Yet, it is the curse of all mental illness (which is still stigmatised) to be invisible to the world. In this way those of us who know this path live two lives - one within and one without. At the same time these mental illnesses which are so prevalent in our world today, and perhaps always have been, but were even more invisible before, often try and tell us that something is wrong. Perhaps some aspects of them at least call our attention to all those pains we have studiously been condensing into bricks that we accumulate as we live our lives - or, in my case, that I have used to build my room.

Illnesses such as depression also turn us, or me at least, into a vampire. We fear the light and seek the dark corners and alleyways in which to feel our pain. Perhaps I have accumulated a drop of water condensing in my cold stone room every time I have done this. Now, as I sit in my room, the water has gone past my neck and I am in serious danger of drowning. I have thought many, many times of how I could express what all this is like to the world. If you see this then one of my attempts at least has worked. Yet even now I fear the shame of talking about these things. This is one of the ways in which mental ill health becomes so powerful and so dangerous. It convinces us to keep quiet, to avoid the shame, that we will be even worse off if we speak its name because others will hate us more and isolate us more. Truth is, I've done the monster's work myself out of fear of others doing it to me first. I have hated myself, shamed myself, silenced myself, isolated myself, so that I wouldn't have to feel the pain of others doing this to me once they found out how weak and deplorable I really was.

As the waters in my room rose in recent months and weeks, I've even tried something worse. Something we don't speak about or mention. Something we get shamed for and pitied for and hated for even more. Luckily I couldn't go all the way, and the scars I still carry have almost faded. Like Wolverine I heal fast and well, but this power doesn't extend to the other mind-world I live in. There, wounds never heal, and only go ignored.

Just as I like my metaphors I also love mixing them. So while on the one side this mind-world is a dark room, on the other it is also an ashland. A great enveloping wasteland where it rains ash and all things are burned and scorched. This particular metaphor is useful because in this ashland there is a particularly big mountain. I have seen others climb this mountain so I know it can be done, I just never thought I could do it myself. You see, this is a big, gay old mountain. Yes - like Pandora, I also know how to keep secrets - my mind-world and struggles, and my being gay. I know there is nothing wrong with being gay, or even with hiding it so long. This is a journey we must make in our own time and way. But the problem is when it gets bound up in the spider web of mental illness, shame, self loathing, fear, isolation, and pain, and it becomes another brick to build my dark room with, and another bucket of water to throw inside where I sit.

This is the next curse of mental illness. It becomes impossible to confront one aspect of it without confronting all of it at once. This is a daunting task for anyone, let alone someone who actually carries the weight of these burdens. This brings us to the third metaphor - that of carrying a great weight. Like Atlas I have stood guarding the heavens, carrying the world on my shoulders. But like anyone knows, you can carry a heavy weight only so long and so far before it crushes you. Thus, through decades and over quicksand have I carried my dark room, my ashland, and my bricks. And as the waters in my room rose I desired once more to lay my burdens down.

The insidiousness of depression and mental illness in general lies in its abilities to turn your faculties against you. Thus I have resisted seeking help - how pathetic must I be that I need to pay someone to listen to my problems. This was one of the things I thought as I was doing the very bad thing we don't talk about. Now, it should be noted I have managed on a lower level to speak of a sliver of my struggle. Like the last sliver of a waning moon I revealed to my doctor some of my struggle, which is how I received my anti-depressant medication. Yet like all things this does not come without its own challenges. One in particular was how tired and useless it made me. I struggled to concentrate and still do, although for this reason I stopped taking it recently. The other problem is that such support is only meant to strengthen you for a while, while you seek assistance with deeper issues - the rest of the waning moon that was still hidden in darkness. This I have not yet done.

One of the many factors that have conspired in weaving this web I am intangled in is that my personality (INTP) is such that I generally balk at seeking the help of others, prefering to try solving puzzles on my own. Being an introvert is also part of this web. None of these things is problematic or bad on their own. But like chemicals they become dangerous when combined in certain ways.

Earlier I mentioned the foundations of my room. It is indeed true that these were set a long time ago. In fact I inherited them. Here too we find another great pit, family shame and reluctance to speak out about problems. We keep our radioactive poison within our family walls until it infects and kills us. We fear shame and derision. Yet even I in my dark room know that we are all human, and the secrets we keep only retain their power to frighten us when we keep them in the dark. Depression runs in my family and through each generation it has wrought its damage and spread its radioactive poison. My grandfather, as far as I know, drank himself to death due to depression, leaving his family in disarray. Depression then passed to the next generation, and while more successful in coping with it, his son and daughter still struggle with it to this day. Then it passed to the next generation. And here I am, like reactor number 4 at Chernobyl, with my enormous steel lid bouncing up and down from the steam pressure building inside as a runaway reaction builds exponentially in the core. Even speaking of these familial struggles will likely add even more heat to the core as everyone knows we shouldn't speak of it. Nobody utters this proscription aloud. It becomes tacit knowledge, adding to the structures which bind the agents who make the structures further. Being a social scientist did lend me some understanding after all it seems.

So, at long last and after many metaphors we arrive at the final station on a long train journey (yes another metaphor). Here I am, drowning in my own dark room, lost in my ashland, crippled by the weight I bear. Yet still standing despite it all. Despite generational foundations, despite a long history of bullying, despite being my own worst enemy, despite the silence, despite the sheer overwhelming burden of it all. A lone star in a faraway corner of the universe that refuses to go out. I know I must seek the professional help I so desperately need. I know I must, like an archeologist, uncover the buried bones and ruins in my mind. I must make peace with myself. But first I had to stop here for a moment and, for the first time, let the sun shine in and publicly say the things I have had to say. Perhaps social media is not the right place to do so, perhaps there will be those who preferred that my star go out in silence in a far flung corner of the cosmos. But despite everything I think I can admit that I'm strong, even very strong, and that I will continue to stand if I only will it. Most of all however, social media allows me to share my torment with others and it lets me say - you are not alone - both to myself and to others who are trapped in invisible whirlwinds. Perhaps I never needed to say this because perhaps others are stronger than I claim to be and they already know all these things. Perhaps I am the last to get the message because light can only travel so fast and I live so far away in the cosmos.

But despite it all, here it is, the testament of [voyager]. No doubt the dark web I am still trapped in will cause me to regret writing this, and even more so regret opening my Pandora's box to the world. But I who have faced death at my own hand know it is preferable - if my star is doomed at last - to go out in a supernova, and to shine, for a moment, brighter than a galaxy.

[I don't seek pity, or attention - as my dark web convinced me people would interpret my words - but simply desired to, at least, lay some of my burden down. Also, do not fear, I am not in danger at the moment, other than that of my shame and fear at writing this. It was, in the final instance, a testament to myself - I am here, and for a moment did something I never thought I'd be brave enough to do. Perhaps this is the start of a new journey towards healing.]

2. Scaling Heaven

I post here a segment of Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot on the Voyager spacecraft. It speaks to me deeply, and on some level reflects the journey of my life, and it is a reminder to me that I too am a voyager. It is a good analogy for life. This blog is thus my mission log of past encounters and future hopes.

Image: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory

THE VOYAGER SPACECRAFT are bound for the stars. They are on escape trajectories from the Solar System, barreling along at almost a million miles a day. The gravitational fields of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune have flung them at such high speeds that they have broken the bonds that once tied them to the Sun.

Have they left the Solar System yet? The answer depends very much on how you define the boundary of the Sun's realm. If it's the orbit of the outermost good-sized planet, then the Voyager spacecraft are already long gone; there are probably no undiscovered Neptunes. If you mean the outermost planet, it may be that there are other—perhaps Triton-like—planets far beyond Neptune and Pluto; if so, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are still within the Solar System. If you define the outer limits of the Solar System as the heliopause—where the interplanetary particles and magnetic fields are replaced by their interstellar counterparts—then neither Voyager has yet left the Solar System, although they may do so in the next few decades. But if your definition of the edge of the Solar System is the distance at which our star can no longer hold worlds in orbit about it, then the Voyagers will not leave the Solar System for hundreds of centuries.

Weakly grasped by the Sun's gravity, in every direction in the sky, is that immense horde of a trillion comets or more, the Oort Cloud. The two spacecraft will finish their passage through the Oort cloud in another 20,000 years or so. Then, at last, completing their long good-bye to the Solar System, broken free of the gravitational shackles that once bound them to the Sun, the Voyagers will make for the open sea of interstellar space. only then will Phase Two of their mission begin.

Their radio transmitters long dead, the spacecraft will wander for ages in the calm, cold interstellar blackness—where there is almost nothing to erode them. Once out of the Solar System, they will remain intact for a billion years or more, as they circumnavigate the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

We do not know whether there are other space-faring civilizations in the Milky Way. If theydo exist, we do not know how abundant they are, much less where they are. But there is at least a chance that sometime in the remote future one of the Voyagers will be intercepted and examined by an alien craft.

Accordingly, as each Voyager left Earth for the planets and the stars, it carried with it a golden phonograph record encased in a golden, mirrored jacket containing, among other things; greetings in 59 human languages and one whale language; a 12-minute sound essay including a kiss, a baby's cry, and an EEG record of the meditations of a young woman in love; 116 encoded pictures, on our science, our civilization, and ourselves; and 90 minutes of the Earth's greatest hits—Eastern and Western, classical and folk, including a Navajo night chant, a Japanese shakuhachi piece, a Pygmy girl's initiation song, a Peruvian wedding song, a 3,000-year-old composition for the ch'in called "Flowing Streams," Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky, Louis Armstrong, Blind Willie Johnson, and Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode."

Space is nearly empty. There is virtually no chance that one of the Voyagers will ever enter another solar system—and this is true even if every star in the sky is accompanied by planets. The instructions on the record jackets, written in what we believe to be readily comprehensible scientific hieroglyphics, can be read, and the contents of the records understood, only if alien beings, somewhere in the remote future, find Voyager in the depths of interstellar space. Since both Voyagers will circle the center of the Milky Way Galaxy essentially forever, there is plenty of time for the records to be found—if there's anyone out there to do the finding.

We cannot know how much of the records they would understand. Surely the greetings will be incomprehensible, but their intent may not be. (We thought it would be impolite not to say hello.) The hypothetical aliens are bound to be very different from us—independently evolved on another world. Are we really sure they could understand anything at all of our message? Every time I feel these concerns stirring, though, I reassure myself. Whatever the incomprehensibilities of the Voyager record, any alien ship that finds it will have another standard by which to judge us. Each Voyager is itself a message. In their exploratory intent, in the lofty ambition of their objectives, in their utter lack of intent to do harm, and in the brilliance of their design and performance, these robots speak eloquently for us.

But being much more advanced scientists and engineers than we—otherwise they would never be able to find and retrieve the small, silent spacecraft in interstellar space—perhaps the aliens would have no difficulty understanding what is encoded on these golden records. Perhaps they would recognize the tentativeness of our society, the mismatch between our technology and our wisdom. Have we destroyed ourselves since launching Voyager, they might wonder, or have we gone on to greater things?

Or perhaps the records will never be intercepted. Perhaps no one in five billion years will
ever come upon them. Five billion years is a long time. In five billion years, all humans will have become extinct or evolved into other beings, none of our artifacts will have survived on Earth, the continents will have become unrecognizably altered or destroyed, and the evolution of the Sun will have burned the Earth to a crisp or reduced it to a whirl of atoms. Far from home, untouched by these remote events, the Voyagers, bearing the memories of a world that is no more, will fly on.

1. Travelers' Tales

"Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home."

- Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot)

The title of this blog, and the nom de plume of this blogger, were derived from the above quote by the great Carl Sagan. I think it is a fitting reflection and analogy of life with its many unexpected turns. Some of these turns were what prompted me to start this blog, as a reflection of my own personal voyage and my desire to overcome the many challenges confronting me.

Carl Sagan's writings on science make it clear to me that to grapple with the challenges I face in my life I too will have to adopt a scientific approach - good advice in any instance - and to see, as Carl put it, the hard truth rather than a reassuring fable. This I will do as I travel on my journey, and this blog will be a repository of my experiences, thoughts, ideas, feelings, fears, hopes, and dreams along the way. Writing this down will be a critical exercise because far too often, I have looked back at past scraps of thought and experience I wrote down only to wonder how many lessons have been swept away by forgetfulness. Carl's views here too are incredibly pertinent, as written in Cosmos:

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

Accordingly, this blog will primarily be a way for me to speak to myself and learn from myself across time. If my thoughts happen to - like the Voyager spacecraft - encounter life elsewhere, then I say to this life, here are the views and lessons of a flawed but hopeful human for a better future. Learn from them what you can. And, as Carl put it of the Voyager spacecraft, perhaps one day when I'm gone, these words and thoughts will fly on, bearing the memory of a person who is no more. But may this be a long time from now!

One of the many reasons I am drawn to Carl Sagan's work is his passionate and compassionate way of expressing and articulating complex ideas of science. These ideas are not only relevant in a laboratory or a classroom, but in everyday life. In the Harmony of the Worlds episode of Cosmos, Carl ended the episode by saying the following of Johannes Kepler:

"When he found that his long cherished beliefs did not agree with the most precise observations, he accepted the uncomfortable facts. He prefered the hard truth to his dearest illusions. That is the heart of science."

In these two sentences, Carl distils what makes science such an important but also challenging endeavour. Sometimes we hold on to comforting beliefs and views of ourselves, and at times these views even hurt us, but we prefer to cling on to them nonetheless. Many of my musings in this blog will be about mental health issues and psychology, and I think this view holds true here as well. For example, in Heaven and Hell (Cosmos), Carl said:

"The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge. And there's no place for it in the endeavour of science. We do not know beforehand where fundamental insights will arise from about our mysterious and lovely solar system, and the history of our study of the solar system shows clearly that accepted and conventional ideas are often wrong and that fundamental insights can arise from the most unexpected sources."

How true is this not also of psychology and our minds? We suppress uncomfortable truths while closing ourselves off from unexpected sources of fundamental insights into our lives. In my following posts, I will explore my own journey in life so far - a sort of narrow Cosmos series about myself - and in doing this I must be open to uncovering hard and inconvenient truths and ready to dispel false and limiting beliefs.

I repeat this quote from Carl as my conclusion to this first post, and my hopefulness in my own potential to live the happy and fulfilling life I always wanted:

"Both the insignificant and the extraordinary are architects of the natural world."

The same, I believe, is true of who we are as human beings.