Volumetric flow rate, or the Curious Incident of the Blog at the Right Time

Recently in Manhattan, a small Filipino woman was standing on the corner of 59th and Lexington, a little overbundled which can be forgiven for a small Filipino woman placed in that concrete jungle in early March. She was holding a bundle of flyers in one mitten-clad hand and waving them furiously with the other, getting just inside the comfort zone of each passing pedestrian in a small, sad effort to get him to take one. I say him because she was passing out flyers for Buy 1 Get 1 Free Mens Suits, which I think lent to the vague impression that she was targeting men more than women. Only by volume is she effective - 50 attempts at each cycle of the light, maybe one person takes it, out of those takers maybe 1 in 50 goes to the store (not such a far fetched idea in the shopping district near the original Bloomingdales). The store has turned a wad of tree pulp and ink, plus 8 hours of her nearly invisible immigrant life, into a few sold suits.

We live in a world where the sheer volume of things must be taken into account as an important aspect of any deep understanding and analysis. Everyone knows that the Earth can't support a growing Chinese and Indian middle-class with eyes for meat, martinis, and a Mercedes Benz. It's not the individuals, it's the group. Wait, hold on... I guess it IS the individuals who make up the group. Wait. Those two are different somehow, but I can't put my finger on it. Sheer volume....

The Dalai Lama speaks and speaks again, travels and smiles at crowd after crowd. Millions of people people have the shared experience in their lives of feeling his beaming presence, his quiet hope, his thoughtful approach to human suffering. The Tibetans and their plight are not forgotten. Buddhism ebbs forward. Sheer volume of time and exposure. Hundreds of thousands of university students in North America and Europe, photo spreads in yoga magazines, stickers on water bottles, small percentages of profits going to support the Free Tibet movement. Ripples of peace and love from a life of myriad contacts with people looking for a deeper connection.

A tremendous amount of life devoted to a single purpose can produce amazing results on the individual level too. Malcolm Gladwell poses the idea of a 10,000 hour rule - that's how long you need to do something to be great at it. Bill Gates working on computers for decades, the old Chinese man who I practiced tai chi with once who had been doing it for 8 hour days for 60 years, Miles Davis for 40 years on the trumpet, Lance Armstrong biking for 8-10 hours a day for a decade. The numbers are arguable, but the concept seems to emerge as clear. Sheer volume of life devoted to a single purpose can yield extraordinary results.

AIG. Decades of your life spent immersed in a culture of incredible material and monetary wealth. Living surrounded by wealthy individuals and those who serve you. How many hours can you hear that you deserve it and are right in pursuing it single-mindedly before you feel a sense of entitlement? How long can you live a life immersed in greed, without an outside reference point in the reality of others, before you feel untouchable? Sheer volume of feedback. One day a few billion dollars doesn't seem like so much anymore, either to take in bonuses or to gamble with even if it's not yours.

Sheer volume of ideas, urgent messages communicated in surreal soothing voices and homogeneous scenes, coming over us in waves of advertising. TV is ever more finely tuned to tap our subconscious desires and fears so as to manipulate us into consumer action. Billboards tell us we could be home by now when we're stuck in traffic. Our email programs scan our words and use our own fuzzy logic against us to suggest things we will want to buy that perhaps we hadn't thought of yet. At at time when we will do well to slow down and question our actions that have brought us to this historic intersection of ecology and economy, we are also pushing forward technology to more seamlessly integrate ourselves into convenient, subconscious consumption and subscription.

This is all stuff you think about in the crowds of Manhattan, when the headlines hint at the Depression even though the losers didn't see it coming, when the urban population beats the rural, when the information about climate change is increasing yet we can't agree as a planet what to do with our agreements from years ago, when we still mistake the environment for an issue to be concerned with among others instead of reclaiming the holistic view of ecology, when there is too much information to process as you think about making a tiny path for yourself winding through the three-dimensional world. Sometimes there is so much concrete, glass, and negligence that I can't feel the harmony, the joy of doing the things I love, and the peace of finding real grounding in myself. So I write to get it off my chest. And now, for some disc golf. Be well, take care of yourself, and keep at least some of yourself small and beautiful.

Speaking of small and beautiful, check out this picture of me and my niece Gwendolyn. Making cute look easy...

Difficult to believe story

In a slightly unusual vein, I'm including an excerpt from an article in The Economist that I just read moments ago. It's just a terrible thing, and I feel a need to make note of it for the public record, no matter how small. It's from the first week of March, 2009.

"Earlier this month, two judges in Pennsylvania's Luzerne County admitted sentencing thousands of children to jail in return for kickbacks from a prison-management company. Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan received a commission for every day they sent a child to private juvenile detention centers run by Pennsylvania Child Care and a sister company. The pay-offs came to $2.6 million over seven years."

Words can't describe this. These two guys took money from PRIVATE PRISONS to send kids to those juvenile detention centers, aka prisons. It's beyond insane. Keep your eyes and ears open.

My next post will be warmer and more self-reflective, I hope. I think it's important, however, to occasionally point out gross injustice and low points in humanity, such as these two judges and everyone else involved in paying them, as well those who support privatized prisons in general.

Be well, live loud and peaceful...