Flyin' Shoes

You know that chemistry has an impact on your daily life, but the extent of that impact can be mind-boggling. Consider just the beginning of a typical day from a chemical point of view. Molecules align in the liquid crystal display of your clock, electrons flow through its circuitry to create a rousing sound, and you throw off a thermal insulator of manufactured polymer. You jump in the shower, to emulsify fatty substances on your skin and hair with chemically treated water and formulated detergents. You adorn yourself in an array of processed chemicals – pleasant-smelling pigmented materials suspended in cosmetic gels, dyed polymeric fibers, synthetic footware, and metal-alloyed jewelry. Today, breakfast is a bowl of nutrient-enriched, spoilage-retarded cereal and milk, a piece of fertilizer-grown, pesticide-treated fruit, and a cup of a hot, aqueous solution of neurally stimulating alkaloid. Ready to leave, you collect some books – processed cellulose and plastic, electrically printed with light-and-oxygen-resistant inks – hop in your hydrocarbon-fuelled metal-vinyl-ceramic vehicle, electrically ignite a synchronized series of controlled, gaseous explosions, and you’re off to class!

–Martin S. Silberberg

Life is about life and not the result of life.

–Johann von Goethe

Rain. Again. Nothing sedates the fight for cheerfulness and action than a virulent sky and it’s viscose tears. As a victim of my own desires I’ve run amok these past weeks, through sun-washed landscapes like a fleeing prisoner, drunk with an ecstasy of golden freedom; I do not want to return to solitary or my emotional chains. Those moments now reduced to electrical impulses remain stored in my brain under ‘L’ for life… living… loving.

Restrained within a cube again, I’m resigned to making do for a while. How succinct the words have become; a lingering dialog from my previous life in England, a more disarming way of saying that the fires within are being suppressed. There are bills to be paid and savings to be acquired for the next round of travel, yet, making do should never be an option. Often we suffocate ourselves under the pressure of our own desires to engage something else, peer over the fence to the greener grass or just be a walking contradiction that will always argue the toss, no matter which side the coin lays. Life, as it currently appears, is a single shot of undetermined speed which ultimately will draw to a close when the metaphorical bullet reaches its target. Choosing an easier option of idling the mind and counting hours until the next event, robs us of taking part in the moment and filling our lives with meaning and growth.

There are many ways to conceive of life. One of many levels we need to elevate to, an education on Eden before the next metamorphosis, a rite of passage to enter some realm of afterlife, or as so eloquently put in the movie K-Pax, one existence that is continually repeated so that the actions we take now, will always be made again and again. It doesn’t matter how we conceive of life but how we use the tools that genetics, evolution and timing have handed us. It’s never enough to make do; be extraordinary, because we all are.