I rent a house by the ocean. There are no houses between me and the Pacific. From the deck I can see maybe 135 degrees of blue and green and sunsets. And there's a beach, at the end of a wooded trail, without tourists. I'm addicted to it. This is the longest I've ever lived in one place.
The ocean looks a bit surreal today. I'd like to take a picture and share it on Facebook but there's no way to take a picture of this. The ocean is big. I have no context with which to really grasp how big it is. Hawaii is floating somewhere out there, Japan too. Incomprehensible space naturally evokes bigger spaces still. For me anyway.
We're 100 million miles from the sun. What does 100 million miles even mean? To circumnavigate the world at the equator you'd need to travel about 25 thousand miles. Travelling on foot, where possible, you could do it a couple times in a decade.
But now multiply that much space by 4 thousand. And that's just to the sun. There are 70 sextillion stars visible to our telescopes, which is more stars than grains of sand on all the beaches on earth, or so some astronomers estimate. Think about that the next time you have a handful of sand.
We aren't capable of understanding how small we are. But just existing in that much space makes us somehow more valuable. To make heat and light and build little worlds on our tiny rock amidst all that cold chaos.
So that's the ocean today... and it got me thinking, how much of the deeper experience of being alive can be shared? And if it can't easily be shared, doesn't that dilute it's relative importance? We're social creatures, 2 million years of survival by cooperation have wired us to want to connect with each other. If it can't be easily shared or understood, it's hard to justify giving it a top spot on our priority list.
And yet it's diverging from the mainstream that has been, arguably, responsible for our greatest achievements. Art, music, philosophy, adventures. Certainly it has been responsible for the defining moments in the evolution of our understanding of ourselves and the natural world.
We're good at surviving, but so are a lot of other animals. I like to think it's our ability to imagine, and then to create, that makes us human. Making our own pattern in the chaos, not merely by existing, but by intent. We have more leisure time now than at any other time in human history, shouldn't we use it to invent? Even if it's just new thoughts.
Anyway, getting back to social media, here's a hypothetical Facebook post:
May 32nd, 2013
about an hour ago
about an hour ago via mobile
about an hour ago
So I registered cantbeshared.com. I don't know exactly what I'm going to do with it. It would be fun to create a site where people can use different kinds of media to make beautiful but probably hopeless attempts to share things that can't be shared. And then again maybe that's not the sort of thing that would capture a lot of people's imagination. Most likely I'll just leave it at this.
