I realized that it’s been since my freshman year of high school since I’ve been home for a spring break. The dear old Northland is an odd place in the spring– full of harsh beauty and the last gasping breaths of winter. I’ve found the old familiar feel of rubber soles pounding the asphalt once again, watching the lingering veins of snowfall recede before the newly warm sunshine. Barren, yes, but not without a certain charm brought on by the ever present shadow of memory that shades each coming bend in the road.

It’s an odd kind of loneliness that accompanies my sojourns. I can hear the echoes of those spring track practice runs of the past, the first time my bare white legs had seen the sun for months. Carelessly exploring the streets of the East end in packs like young wolves, always on the lookout for mischief and ways to shirk the duty of the training routine. Icy spring swims, covert frisbee matches, and the classic thrill of watching dueling pop bottles bump their way down the rushing cold clear streams come to mind.

Those days of memory are long gone now. The spirit of the town dampened by the fog of recession, pot-holed roads and stalled construction a stark reminder that no one has any money these days. My friends of springtimes past have moved on as well. Those that left hoped to find better fortunes abroad, college degrees proving to be barely kindling for the fuel that ignites the flame of employment. Those that stayed behind found the odd job here or there, amid the dwindling breadth of opportunity.

But the season turns cautiously, unperturbed by the economic stagnation. Though the ‘boomers are aging in their fleeces and ski caps and Subarus, the weather plods on steadily as it ever has in the paradox of Minnesota spring. The steely blue skim ice breaks upon the shore; naked trees bathed in a suddenly bright pale sun. The first ship of spring marches slowly into port, an open channel cleaved wide in the ice to permit its passage. I’m startled by its trumpet-like declaration and the majestic response of the lift bridge as it raises to open. The silence of winter shatters into an icy spring.

Amid the latent signs of winter, it is always the pale sun that strikes hope into the hardy Northerner. For despite the naked trees and crusts of snow, bathing my face in its light brings just a hint of warmth to my cheeks. As if to say, nothing lasts forever, my friend. Not even winter. Out of months of dark and cold, ever so slowly the spring comes.

As I run, I see a flash of white legs off in the distance. There’s a pack of young runners approaching me, definitely making the most of their afternoon of training. I smile a small, wry smile. Nothing does last forever.

Given academia’s temporary respite, I thought it would be appropriate to try and re-engage in the timeless pastime of contemplative thought and the written word, in this case, from the godly bird’s eye view of United 529 en route to Chicago.

My recent efforts here have been of a different creative variety. You may notice some changes in the interface of the site, both on the splash page and in the photo portfolio section. These comprise my humble efforts during the last few weeks, attempting to satisfy both the constraints of my schedule as well as the friendly demands of a certain visionary. In any case, I’ll make an effort now to contribute something more conventional.

Tonight I’m looking out at the world from 32,000 feet. I know, some of the overt romanticism of Will’s train-travel writings is lost upon my situation– the slow progression of the countryside, the long, dark nights of transcontinental progress. But I have to point out– nothing really equals the humbling yet invigorating prospect of seeing the insect-like workings of man laid out in miniature at one’s feet. 

The real quandary is the shift in scale that results from the inevitable descent. Whole cities erupt into existence from the solitary glittery patches on skin of the earth, bringing to life fantastic and beautiful sinusoidal ribbons of light, filled with the glacial momentum of thousands of glowing particles in gold and ruby. Suburbs sprout off of these conduits, lights strung together in curves that almost suggest handwritten phrases, uniting the lives of hundreds of occupants.

More than anything, I’m struck by the incomprehensible vastness of it all. This is the perspective one doesn’t get from the train– the unbelievable expanse and reach of human development, dwarfed by the enormous landscape that swallows up our roads, bridges, cities, and other marks of civilization.

I think it’s humbling, but also terrifying. It reminds me viscerally in a very gripping way of one of the fundamental pillars of my personal philosophy. How important it becomes, to consider the repercussions of action, not just multiplied across the scope of the apparent, but also beyond the scale of the imagined. 

Take street lights, for example. When the first electric lamps decorated homes, businesses, and streets, the numbers were in the hundreds: an aberration, or even an attraction. But looking out my window, I estimate that in this view alone, I can see on the order of a million lights: incandescent, sodium vapor, fluorescent, headlights, tail lights, navigational lights, stop lights, warning lights, lighted signs, search lights, spot lights, flashing lights, early Christmas lights… You get the idea. 

Maybe someone imagined things would get this big. Maybe someone even guessed that the collective glow of these lights would change the face of the earth, be visible from outer space, and forever obliterate the urban night sky, a night sky that our ancestors had gazed at for thousands and thousands of years (more than 4,000 by my count for you creationists). But no one thought to do anything about it until it happened. A simple design change could have preserved the sky for billions of people– generations who will now live their lives without ever having the opportunity to question their cosmic relevance and mull over the insignificance of their existence in the face of the wonder and extraordinary size of the distant universe.

Some would say that this manner of contemplation is particularly necessary in this modern age. It comes down to a simple idea: foresight. Imagining one’s actions multiplied across an impossibly large scale. Thinking in terms of exponential instead of linear. Thinking holistically instead of simplistically. Thinking about the distance of the future instead of the narrowness of the present. 

The difficulty is– we’re not built for this kind of work. Large numbers quickly become meaningless when we try to imagine them in material reality. We have a great deal of trouble visualizing a few hundred discreet entities, let alone six billion. Our evolutionary progress has favored those who learned to capitalize on their resources, not those who learned to conserve them. Of course, communities of the past over-farmed and over-hunted, but this was less of a problem when one’s nomadic tribe could pack up and move ten miles west to where the game was again plentiful.

If the current view out my window tells me anything, it is that this ability to pack up and move on is reaching its limits rather quickly. Populating our arable land, and expanding infrastructure beyond any previous measure is going to take its toll on the viability of relocation as a measure of salvation.

Foresight.

The next time you take a class or study an idea, think about why it’s important. Think about where it fits in to the construction of knowledge—what concepts are abstractions of smaller-scale concepts, and how this discipline fits in with a larger body of knowledge.

Let’s start by setting a few ground rules. You are a human being. You live on planet earth in a society of other human beings. Society is governed by a complex set of interactions and exchanges. Each ideal person in society contributes in some way, at some level to society at large, whether it is through the introduction of a particular skill, the contribution of new ideas or creative efforts, or through mental or physical effort. People work at their respective ‘layer’ and it’s generally not socially productive to dissect what lies below or above that layer unless it is specifically your place in society to do so.

Thus, abstraction layers. At some point you will become curious enough to try to take apart the concepts (physical and metaphysical) that you encounter in your life. Realize that the human trait that allows for technological and intellectual progress is the ability to simultaneously abstract the things you encounter at a particular level of investigation from their inner workings, but still be able to inquire into the nature of these things.

Take electricity. If you had never before seen a lamp, you would be naively forced to treat the workings of electricity as a black box. You give the box input—you plug in a lamp and turn it on—and the black box predictably gives you output: the lamp shines light. As a black box, you know that plugging in any number of lights will simply give you more light, and by modulating the frequency, color and intensity of these lights you can create a fantastic show of lights.

At some point, however, you begin to wonder just how a lamp works. You realize that a lamp has several different parts, one of which is a bulb. Then dawns the realization that the bulb itself is an abstraction—another ‘black box’, if you will. When it burns out, you know that replacing it with another bulb will predictably restore the function of the lamp. You begin to see the modularity of life—how each larger black box is created from many smaller black boxes, much as the knowledge of large ideas must come from the collective understanding of smaller ones. And so you can continue to venture on downward through form and function until you reach some fundamental building block of the universe that doesn’t yield itself to this kind of analysis because it cannot be broken down any further.

The major disciplines we study in life are an immediate reflection of the scope and scale at which we create abstraction. The area of study corresponds to the layer of abstraction at which phenomena are being observed.

Let’s start somewhere in the middle. Here you are, sitting at your desk, looking at physical objects sitting around you. No molecules and no supernovae are yet to be found—just the surfaces and materials you are familiar with. In your head, you are thinking thoughts, and those thoughts are the study psychology. In animals, this is behavioral biology.

Moving downward in scale. Your body has organs, blood, and bones. This is biology at the macro level—anatomy.

Your brain, an organ, is made up of units called neurons. Neurons have organelles and structures. This level is the study of neurobiology at the cellular level.

Inside of each of the cells, we find DNA and other structures constructed of molecules and proteins. This is biology at the molecular level.

Chemistry falls somewhere in here: changes in molecular connectivity.

Molecules happen to be made out of atoms, which are of different elemental types. We’re getting small here. This is atomic physics.

Atoms are made from protons, electrons, and neutrons. This is nuclear physics.

Quarks etc. String theory. Sub-atomic physics.

What comes next? Math is the abstraction of all abstractions. It gives us a means by which to model and explain phenomena at virtually any of the levels we’ll cover. Crudely put, everything is ‘made’ of math, at least from the human perspective. Math is how we test and explain things that we can’t even come close to interacting with in any remotely familiar human way.

Back to the desk where you are sitting. Now zoom out a little bit and let’s look around.

There are people interacting and cooperating. This is sociology.

If we zoom back in a little bit, we find political science, a quick look into how the society goes about organizing itself. We also find economics, which is how the society trades goods, services, and currency within itself.

If we back up again, we encounter history, which looks at societies over time. We find international relations, which is how large societies (countries) interact.

Somewhere here is philosophy, which is roughly the study of why we should bother to study in the first place.

Pulling out further, we find earth science and archaeology, which is essentially earth science over time. A little further and we’ve encountered planetary science and atmospheric science.

The solar system, astrophysics. Galaxies, relativistic time, parallel universes…

And, once again, mathematics. We find it both at the end of the continuum where things are too small to comprehend or measure and at the upper end where things are much too vast to hope to conceptualize.

All these disciplines have layers of abstraction in common. They are a necessity. Think of the madness that would ensue if sociologists tried to look at societal change using molecular methodology. It would be an impossibly large amount of data to analyze. It would also be impossible to find the relationship between any two variables. They rely fully upon the simplifying assumption that the individual member of society is a black box, with particular characteristics, inputs, and outputs in order to simply cause and effect and find a plausible way to meaningfully obtain conclusion from the relationships between things.

In other words: The reason that anatomy can function as a discipline is because it treats the cell and tissue as an abstraction. The reason psychology can function is that it treats the human as an abstraction. The reason that sociology can function is that is treats communities as an abstraction. The reason that international relations can function is that it treats nations as an abstraction.

And so on. Maybe not revolutionary, but hopefully not totally, blatantly obvious.

‘Get an education, so that you will be empowered to create change.’

This is the mantra of the teachers, the mentors, the parents, and the advisors that fill our lives, give our lectures, read our papers, and pack our lunches. And educate ourselves we do, through the heat of late summer through the frigidity of winter to the edginess of spring. We do our assignments (sometimes well, sometimes poorly), we study for our tests, and we are aggravated by the inequality of group projects. We play sports, we learn instruments; we find leadership roles in extracurricular activities. We try to find meaning in these activities—develop our ideology and perception of the world, learn how to exploit our strengths and overcome our weaknesses, and figure out how the world works and where we fit into the grand scheme of things. We seek to discover in what small, forlorn corner of society our much-needed skills might finally be put to work in a way that best employs our abilities to the advantage of society at large.

But somewhere in all of this, we get buried in the mountain of paperwork, the bureaucracy of academic institutions, and the endless progression of quizzes and tests and standardized assessments and exams and papers and problem sets and close readings and essays… you get the idea. We tend to lose sight of the eventual purpose, and worse, we even begin to resent the system just a little bit. The independent-minded among us resent the time it takes to succeed in education—time that could have devoted to more worthy pursuits. Those whose interests are not so academically inclined come to dislike the enforced delivery of information. And those among us who took the mantra to heart—who believe that the whole point of this process is to empower ourselves to enact change—begin to resent the fact that the system itself is preventing us from exercising the very purpose for which it seeks to prepare us.

It’s not that we can’t feel the impact of our actions in any way. We spend our summers volunteering in impoverished areas in foreign countries, tutoring disadvantaged youth, and working internships. But it all seems disingenuous somehow. Whatever our private motivations might be, the system has a purpose in store for all of these activities. When it comes times to apply for opportunities, these things become lines 10-18 on our resumes: premeditated proof of our character and integrity; an assurance that we are the applicants they want. It deprives anything we’ve done of its original intention or meaning—reduces it to merely a means to an end.

Maybe when I graduate—then I’ll be able to find work doing something meaningful, we think to ourselves. Maybe when I’m done with my Master’s degree. When I’m done with my residency. When the kids graduate from high school. When I retire. Then I’ll be able to take what I’ve become and use it in some genuinely fulfilling way.

It’s so easy to let this system dictate your every move—to fall victim to the inevitable necessity of the immediate future. It promises security, stability, that extra bonus, and that big house in the suburbs. But in doing so, we’ve forgotten the real reason why we educate ourselves. We don’t have to wait indefinitely to translate that education into meaningful work; it can begin tomorrow.