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.