Here we are on Thursday, time for me to plug one of my books again. I can’t give you a book link for this one from last September, because it’s in my upcoming tome What I Came to Say: Making the most of the time that’s left. Watch this space for information about availability.
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It’s 4:18 a.m., and the morning newspaper was just delivered to my mailbox. What an interesting process — people collect information (news, advertising, photos, artwork, etc.), manufacture a large booklet, and send copies out via courier to boxes all over creation, including a box on a post 40 feet from my garage door.
Similar processes generated the thousands of items stored or lying about this house, one of millions of homes across the country, billions around the globe, each with thousands, or hundreds, or at least dozens of belongings, each item requiring the cooperation of countless people to reach the place it occupies now.
Thousands of my belongings are discs and tapes of music. I’m not entirely sure what I own and what music I never owned or don’t own anymore. I enjoy exploring the shelves and I don’t, because I know there are gems hidden in the unexplored and undocumented spaces.
Each recording took lifetimes to produce — years of learning by the various contributors, hours of practice to create just that sound from each of the instruments, the right settings for that particular blend of sounds to emerge, and the manufacture of the discs reproducing those sounds, which represent a message from a moment many years ago, perhaps the sound of a winter concert at Carnegie Hall in 1938. The weather that day, the energy from the hundreds of humans in that room, echo through the electronics and are pumped through the speakers in an imitation of what that great hall sounded like that night, here and now in this little house in a field 1,000 miles and 87 years away from where the musicians performed.
Or perhaps the sounds were recorded in a little room on the other side of the world.
And those are just a couple of examples. There is this ceramic mug in my left hand that was fired on the other side of the globe, filled with hot liquid brewed from coffee beans grown in Jamaica and transported to a small factory north of here, where the beans were roasted, ground and packaged, then brought to a grocery store filled with people who stock shelves in a particular way so that I know exactly where to find and purchase my Door County Coffee Jamaican Me Crazy blend.
Each and every one of the items scattered about this house has a similar story. Each was produced, shipped, and delivered through a process of cooperation and collaboration.
You ask if it’s possible we can overcome our differences and get along? The answer is obvious in everything from this coffee mug to the house itself, or the complex machine sitting in my driveway that can take me over mostly smooth roads to the stores where I replenish my supplies.
Everything we see is evidence that humans can get along and live with one another in peace. Don’t tell me that we can’t, when it’s clear that we can and do, every day, all day and all night.
