Seawater is salty. The salt, mostly the same stuff you shake on food, can be measured in parts per thousand. The more than one billion cubic kilometers (over 300 billion cubic miles) of water in the oceans contain the salts delivered to the sea by rivers, underground springs, and oceanic thermal (volcanic) vents (geysers), all of which carry dissolved solids. Over the course of four billion years, the salts have added to about 35 parts per thousand, a little more in some arid areas and a little less in some humid ones (from dilution caused by rain, river discharge, and ice melt). Some of the dissolved substances are “biolimited”; that is, organisms use them to make hard parts like shells and reefs. Salt deposits, mined from strata of varying thickness, attest to Nature’s littering: When water evaporates, it leaves behind salts like a discarded McDonald’s sandwich bag. Layers of salt on dry land simply indicate that there was once a sea or large lake that evaporated long ago.

To the unscientific eye, there’s no ostensible source of the salt. Stand by a river or lake, look at the water. See any dissolved substances? Of course not. They are invisible. Yet, as you look at the water, there’s probably some dissolving of local rocks adding minute amounts of salts, including, if they are present in the area, heavy elements like gold. Yes, you guessed it. There’s dissolved gold in seawater that you swallowed when you were tossed around by a wave at the beach. 

The oceans weren’t originally salty. The process took time and the recycling of Earth’s water from sea to land and back again in the hydrologic cycle you studied in elementary science class. The process took place out of the sight of human—actually, out of the sight of any—eyes. The inostensible acquisition of salts in the ocean is much like the inostensible acquisition of personality traits that lead to inexplicable or unexpected behavior.

As each of us grows, we are like the oceans. We get a constant influx from all those ostensible and inostensible sources of influence. When we read about someone’s committing an act of atrocity, we say, “Why didn’t we notice? Why didn’t someone know what was going on? Nothing like this was apparent.”

Each of us is an ocean of dissolved influences. The widespread and constant influx over a lifetime makes determining the source of even our own “salt content” difficult or even impossible to determine. Some of the salts of idea and behavior go back into our early history. Some are recycled. Some left behind. Some are still with us in varying proportions, more where the influence was strong and less where it was diluted by fresh waters of new emotions and ideas.

When you look out over the sea, realize that on average only 96.5% of what is ostensible is actually water. The rest is dissolved solids. Invisible, but there. When you look at another person, realize that much is hidden, and much derives from an unknowable source.

Dear You,

The people are restless. A change in the climate seems to be stirring anger throughout the land. Now diseases previously unknown on a scale not previously experienced by international populations seem to be running amok among people weakened by famine. Everyone seems to be coughing from one disease or another. It’s all doom and gloom. We have to find a cause, and barring that, we have to name a scapegoat. We’re on the verge of a widespread disaster with spring weather unfavorable to the growth of crops. Millions will apparently die from starvation, and crimes and cruelty seem to be proliferating at an alarming rate. There are even stories of cannibalism among those who have little or no food.

After a period of climatic warming we’ve come to call the Warm Period, the weather of this year has turned a bit foul. Gone are the wonderful decades of growth and prosperity we’ve known during the past two centuries. Spring rains continue into the summer, and temperatures are definitely cooler on average than those merry times of growth and prosperity. How did this happen? Why did it happen? Are we being punished? I even heard that King Edward II of England could not find food when he stopped at St. Albans in August. It seems as though all of northern Europe is affected, and the conditions are especially hard on the peasantry.

Is there no relief from these worsening environmental conditions of 1315? Will they last for years? When will warmth and favorable precipitation rates return? We can’t grow wheat this year; the crops rot in the fields. We’ve turned to eating the seeds, and that means we don’t have the seeds to plant for next year.

It’s all doom and gloom. Humans might not last to the end of the fourteenth century. What else could happen to us? A plague?

Hoping that you and yours can survive these conditions,

Me    

You have done everything correctly. All the circumstances are perfect for success. Then just at the moment when success seems imminent, the left fielder makes a catch on the warning track not more than inches from a homerun. Oh! Had you just hit the ball with more of the sweet spot on the bat barrel, had you just connected with the ball just a millimeter lower on the sphere, had you just started your swing a microsecond earlier…

Homeruns are rare events. That’s why we make a big deal when someone hits one. There are far more warning track fly balls than homeruns, far more grounders, far more strikeouts than homers. Warning track fly balls are, perhaps, the most frustrating to baseball players because the slightest change in hitting parameters makes the difference between an out and a homerun.

If hitting the ball over the fence were a common event, then our attitude toward the homerun would be different. Ho-hum. Another homer. Big deal. Where’s the hot dog guy?

The rare and fairly unreachable accomplishment makes life both interesting and inspiring. Failure is common. Ho-hum. Warning track fly balls are just a tease, a moment of hope, a fruitless effort. But if enough balls are hit to the fence occasionally one will go over, even if only with the help of the wind.

We can never be in complete control, even when we think we have done everything correctly. But sometimes, even when we think we are about to fail by an inch, a favorable wind turns seeming failure into success. We never know unless we swing for the fence.

After the advent of broadcast radio with KDKA, the medium proliferated, turning rapidly into a major form of entertainment. Radio networks, like television networks, aired dramas, comedies, sports, news reports, and variety shows. In an era before TV, people were captivated, spending evenings sitting by radios to listen to favorite stars and favorite shows.

Listening requires a different kind of concentration from seeing. No flow of images, save those created in the mind of the listener, accompanies the sounds emanating from a radio. If we could jump into the brains of two listeners while both heard the same radio broadcast, we would likely encounter different images in each. One says, “I like to think of her as being tall and forceful.” The other says, “No, I like to think of her as being rather diminutive and feisty.” That’s as it should be, of course, because every listener takes to the moment of hearing a unique personal history that includes experience, learning, and emotional needs. Visual media reduce the effect of personal history by connecting for all viewers the same image to sound.

Here’s your assignment. In an age of image bombardment, try recreating those days of radio-only. Try listening in the context of your personal history, not in the context projected by someone else. You have a storehouse of imagery from personal experience that is yours and no one else’s. That imagery is your “take on the world,” and it’s the product of your own radio broadcast. Try freeing yourself from the images imposed by others. Try listening to yourself.    

Maybe you didn’t like fractions when you first encountered them in school. What’s this stuff about turning one of them upside down and then multiplying them? What do you mean I can’t add ½ and 1/3 without changing the denominator? Math was easy until you stumbled temporarily over comprehending these problems composed of parts.

But parts are what we often deal with in life, aren’t they? Once again, because we are finite beings riding the arrow of time, we have to listen to music one note or chord at a time to work our way to the end of a song. Playing every note in the song at once for a single beat would make little sense to us. We actually favor fractions in much of what we do: Entertainment, sports, love. In other words: The score is not the game.

Fractions in life provide us with the joy of getting to the climax or end of something. Fractions provide us with anticipation. We might even think of fractions as anticipation itself, and that makes anticipation a large fraction of every emotion.

Now, here’s where our emotional math goes awry: Although we derive both pleasure and pain from the solution to a problem or event, we also, at least a large proportion of us, try to solve the problem through worry. Worry is not the same as anticipation. Worry already has a solution. Worry doesn’t work in fractions. Worry works with whole numbers. Worry is the score, and not the game.

Be patient. Work with the fractions you're given. Find the common denominator that ties the fractions into a meaningful problem, and you'll see and derive the "whole" without the stress caused by worry.    

Scene: Registration Desk, Moderately Priced Motel

Characters:

            Registration clerk, a late middle-aged woman

            Self-employed professional woman in late twenties

Clerk: “Name and address here. Sign here, please, and please put down your place of employment, also.”

Professional woman: “My home address is my place of work.”

Clerk: “No, I mean, where do you go to work. That’s the address for that line.”

Professional woman: “Home and work addresses are the same.”

Clerk: “Where do you drive to everyday? Where is your boss?”

Professional woman: “I don’t have a boss. I’m self-employed.”

Clerk: “Well, I’ll just make up an address for that.”

Professional woman: “Why?”

Clerk: “If I don’t have a business address, I can’t give you the tax-free rate.”

Professional woman: “I think I can pay the $7.00 tax.”

Clerk: “If that’s what you want.”

This is a version of a true story. The clerk, living and working in the twenty-first century, could not understand the concept of “working at home.” For the clerk, there is a workplace and a homeplace, and they are distinctly different places because that is how the clerk sees place.

For the professional, home and work are the same place, and yet, not the same. Connected by phone and other electronic means of communication, the professional woman can be home and in multiple places.

We are already in the midst of a new concept of place, maybe not for the clerk, but for many who are “connected.” For the clerk, there’s the Newtonian macroworld where bilocation is impossible: Things are where they are. For the professional woman, there’s the quantum-like world where places are entangled, and bilocation and even polylocation are possible. The conception of place as a single, easily identifiable realm with exact dimensions and coordinates inhibits people like the clerk from this new understanding and reality of place. The clerk lives in a real world, a macroworld that is an aggregation of places. So does the professional woman. But the latter also lives in that quantum-like world where place, or location, is radically different from that of the macroworld.    

It’s always a battle between part and whole. Take brain studies, for example. Neuroscientists keep investigating what purpose a brain’s sundry parts serve.

Thus, we know about a sensory cortex and a motor cortex; we know about Wernicke’s Area and Broca’s Area; and we know about the Amygdala and Hippocampus. In their labs, the researchers keep refining segments and sub-segments. Parts within parts within parts. Psychologists, using what the neuroscientists tell them as a reference, then investigate the whole: How do all these parts work together to produce a psyche, a personality, a behavioral trend, or a functioning person. The rest of us look at phenomena. We, in our daily casual way, investigate how someone else acts in ways that affect us; and sometimes, in moments of self-awareness, we investigate ourselves and how our own actions change us and others.

It’s always a battle between part and whole as we try to make sense of ourselves and our world. That battle might be the reason that we use both deduction and induction to make decisions. Inductively, we see a bunch of parts, figure they are related in some causal way, and reach a conclusion that ostensibly gives us an understanding of a “whole.” As math people tell us, however, any conclusion based on induction is tenuous at best; we can’t know for sure whether or not a pattern will continue indefinitely or infinitely by referring to numerous examples. Yet, we think we do know the whole by the parts with respect to human behavior. “He’s a habitual drinker.” “She’s an addict.” “Both of them are incorrigible criminals.” “There’s no hope for her.”

In a contrasting way, we are certain we see a big picture, and then we go about disassembling its pixels. Usually, that leads us ironically into thinking about parts within parts, and we’re back to induction, having lost sight of the big picture.

  

A large population uniformly believes twenty-first century people are farther along the path of knowledge than any of their predecessors. There is much to cite in favor of this belief, including our knowing about segments and sub-segments of the brain. Probably, there’s a large population that also believes that they, as individuals and as members of a like-minded group, are farther along the path of understanding. That belief is, of course, the product of induction. Look around you for examples in your associates. The group uses induction to make judgments and decisions, and you, as a member of that group, also conclude through induction. “The parts all point to this,” you conclude. “He’s a biker. What can you expect?” “Of course, she fell into depression. Look at her past.” Induction. It leads to judgment and tenuous conclusions. In people it can lead to hope and despair.

We can’t stop shifting between our foci of part and whole. Many of the “wholes,” however, have come from previous additions of parts, now lost to memory but inculcated in belief. If there’s an imbalance, it favors induction, drawing conclusions and making judgments from parts. So, we go on our merry way thinking we can build parts into wholes. As we uncover more information, the rise in “knowledge” will increase, but understanding will always depend on some point of view, that is, interpreting the parts in respect to some real or imagined “whole.”

You are always in a battle between part and whole.   

Every place is a point of departure. In a multidimensional world, you can theoretically leave any place in any direction, but the place you leave determines the possible vector of the first step. As Chaos theorists know, initial conditions determine what happens next.

You’re probably thinking of taking a step away from some place at this moment, and you believe that step can be in any direction. You’re probably also thinking that it isn’t place that determines the direction of your life because you are so much more than a physical presence. You believe you can go in any direction you choose mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.  

No “next step,” regardless of its nature, occurs without reference to “this place,” the point of departure for your “next step.” Looking forward with a desire to change a life does entail a look around and also a look back. So, let’s say you want to make a life change of some kind, like moving to a different place. Or, let’s say you want to kick an addiction or change a job.

Do you believe that you make decisions on the bases of “mental, emotional, and spiritual” considerations? Do you think place plays any role in your decision-making? Is it possible that you are largely reliant on everything that place has imparted to you, including sensations? Research now connects the limbic system to prediction. Somehow a group of neurons can suggest what to expect when you take that next step away from your current location. Reason alone, though it appears to be a powerful tool for survival, might not play the role you think it does when you take that step. The limbic system of your brain, relying on all those sensations you garnered from place, influences your expectations from conditions it already recorded along the path of your life. Place and prediction: Points of departure for your continued journey.   

Does the origin of ethics lie not in the works of great thinkers and religious leaders but rather in vanity? Let’s turn a mirror on this.

Vanity runs deeply into the past of our hominin branch. At Blombos Cave in South Africa, 75,000-year-old Stone Age perforated Nassarius shells probably once lined a necklace. And then there’s the matter of tattoos, the earliest appearing on the body of the Iceman, who lived about 5,200 years ago. Ornamentation? Vanity?

Yes, there’s another argument: The shells and tattoos represent symbolic expression like a Lascaux cave painting, but nothing definitely philosophical or theological. Nevertheless, as symbols or art they are exciting indicators of thinking and behavior similar to that of modern humans. In our own times we bedeck ourselves with embellishments that, even if only slightly, are expressions of vanity. Think not? Don’t dress appropriately for your next social occasion.

If you have an ornament, you have a place to keep it. In your home the ornament goes on something special, a mantel, a Christmas tree, or a curio shelf. You also wear ornaments, making your body a special place, and you associate ornaments with a place, such as the ears for earrings and wrists for bracelets and watches. By wearing ornamentation, you embellish what you are with gold, silver, and gems. You might even wear a necklace of shells. Vanity?

Apparently, Homo sapiens wasn’t the first group of hominins to make and wear ornaments. We now know this because of a discovery that Neandertals (Neanderthals) also had ornaments. The recent discovery of 130,000 year-old eagle talons that appear to have been strung together indicates an order of thinking not usually associated with this group of hominins. It might indicate that Neandertals could be vain.

“No,” you say, “not vain, rather artistic. We don’t know whether or not the talons were merely hung by the cave entrance the way people today hang wreaths on doors or put welcome mats on their porches.”

Okay, maybe you’re right. Necklaces and tattoos aren’t necessarily a sign of vanity, but, then, both are forms of ornamentation, both forms of adornment. Even a wreath on a door acts to call attention to the residence and, by association, to its residents. You don’t have to concede that ornamentation is a manifestation of vanity, but you might have to concede that necklaces and tattoos are a manifestation of self-consciousness in the form of enhanced or heightened self-expression. Anyway, you’re probably asking how all this ornamentation stuff ties to ethics.

First, don’t misunderstand me. I’m for self-expression. I’m for self-consciousness, even in a so-called “Me Generation” that captures its life in Selfies. In truth, I believe that even such ancient ornamentations as the talons and shells make an argument for the connection between vanity and ethics. If you grant there is such a thing as embellishment for self-expression, then you acknowledge the significance of Self, if only for the self-embellisher. Acknowledging the significance of one “Self” doesn’t necessitate an acknowledgement that any “self” can have significance, but it doesn’t eliminate potential significance. When there are many “selves” in a group of hominins, then more than one self has the potential for self-expression through embellishment. That any individual in a group acknowledges the embellishment on another or elicits from another an acknowledgement is an indication of, if not actual, then at least feigned respect. One more time: The process of acknowledgement of another’s vanity is an obeisance to societal rules and practices, in short, to the rudiments of an ethical system.

Ethics is at heart based on the value of self as respected by both the individual and other selves. Our ancestors might have been vain, but in talons and shells on a string they left evidence that some kind of respect for individuals arose from the practice of ornamentation.    

You can’t get around your need for assurances of control. “Hand me the remote, please.” “See what’s on channel 43.” “I’ll drive.” “You’re tailgating!” “Sam, if you want, I will cut the hedge every other month; it is, obviously, right on the property line.” Direct control or indirect control, there’s a difference, of course, but the key is the word control. You might not like the controller; you might even fear the controller. In such instances of dislike or fear, you probably want to replace external control with internal, self-control.  “I,” you think, “should be the ultimate controller of my own destiny.” “I,” you think, “should be master of this place.”

The alternative to some kind of control can be more limiting or frightening than being under another’s control: Chaos, chance twisting among sharp debris in a tornado, turbulent tossing on a paddle-less raft near boulders in a white water stream. Without some sort of control, your specific future varies between being The Great Unknown and The Great Hypothesis--dark hallways with random holes in the floor. Stepping into those hallways doesn’t provide any sense of security or safety.

The reality, of course, is that having control is different from needing it. Often, control over action and place is in the hands of someone else, the pilot, the train engineer, the taxicab driver, the criminal, or the cult leader. We’re left individually with partial control in many places and at many times when control is reduced to the decision to take a plane or train, the decision to flee or fight, or the decision to reject or follow. You can hypothesize the future actions of others but you can’t be sure.

If there is a need to control, you need to understand how it plays out in your life and how it affects others. This is a question greater than “Who trims the hedge between two yards?” However, there is an analog in a property boundary. The brain practices a continuous geometry of recognizing or making shapes and boundaries in life, and that geometry manifests itself as a personal geography. You are a map-maker who has spent years drawing property lines between places beyond your control and places within your control. You draw maps not only of actual place boundaries, but also of emotional, mental, philosophical, political, and spiritual boundaries. Either you let the neighbor cut the hedge, or you cut it. Ownership of the hedge can be either a spoken or an unspoken agreement that entails an unspoken geography of shapes and boundaries.

Your mental cartography frames the limits of your control over every aspect of life save one: The Great Hypothesis. On your map of The Great Hypothesis you are little different from the cartographers of the past who wrote, “Here there be dragons,” beyond the boundaries that delimited their knowledge and control.

Maps are, regardless of their limitations, relatively good guides, if not into the unknown, then up to its very boundary. So, like so many others, you daily map to the borders of Chaos and Hypothesis. Without complete control you take a step into the margin marked, “Here there be dragons,” and that step eventually makes the Great Hypothesis into a proven shape with identifiable boundaries. Remember that your need for control doesn’t have to prohibit you from taking that first step to survey the unknown or walk into the midst of chaos. You crossed that map margin yesterday and the day before. Maybe occasionally, you encountered a dragon, but here you are, having made it safely through to today.