I was watching the clouds move earlier. I found a place- on top of a small stone wall on the outskirts of our condo complex. The wall sits on the crest of small hill, and if you're facing the right way, you get a wide-angle view of what I call Interstate Valley. From this vantage point, you can see traffic traveling east, west, north and south. It's a breezy spot, and I love the breeze, which is coincidentally the force behind the moving clouds I was watching.

It was the pace of the clouds, compared to the pace of the traffic, which catches my attention in retrospect. The clouds moved so gracefully, deceptively quick, deceptively inanimate. They looked as though they had purpose which they did not have. There were no obstacles in their path, each cloud merging seamlessly, with a complete lack of frustration. The traffic, on the other hand, stirred weary feelings. It moved in erratic patterns and with a stifled haste, each car accelerating in a hopeful but short-lived manner, deprived of the freedom to move by a thousand others just like it. Unlike the clouds, the cars were driven by purpose, or so it seemed.

It's hard not to entertain judgmental feelings when I watch life being acted out from afar. I forget that I too am part of the drama. But in that moment, I become a critic of its actors. I question their roles, their motivations, their reasons and their methods. I see the cars crammed together and it represents to me the mechanical, isolated, indolent and polluting way in which we go from one place to another. I imagine drivers tapping their fingers on the steering wheel, checking their cell phones, catching themselves listening to terrible radio commercials for furniture store sales. I see high car notes with little or no money down. I see the courtesy brake check paid to passing ambulances, the emergency of the stretcher occupant inside them passing in and out of their consciousness as quickly as the speeding emergency vehicle. I see police cars screaming to the rescue, passing under electronic signs warning citizens about air quality, arriving at the scene of a fatal accident.
I see all this and I lament the unfortunate byproducts of modern society and the price we have to pay for the benefits of technology.

The irony of the peace I felt as I watched the innocent clouds move above me is that those clouds, gray with the color of rain, rain tainted by the exhaust of the frustrating traffic on which it will fall, return in tiny droplets of acid the fumes which we offer up to them. And I realize now that the point of watching life from afar is not to judge its actors, but to step back from the cycle which we propel and see its causes and consequences, and ask if this is the way it should be.

As Thoreau once said, "it is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise."

N

Raining here, flashflood there, car-jacking, uprising, earthquake in Canterbury, deserted cities in Libya, desperate dictators clinging to scraps, pundits opining endlessly, victory for Rahm, angry state employees, justice department flip-flop, pranking Governors, what about Africa?

Oh sorry I was just reading my mobile feeds. Sure is a lot of information. It is information, isn’t it? Information: noun: knowledge obtained from investigation, study or instruction. That poses a dilemma, because I don’t know where half of this stuff is coming from. It seems to me like once one news agency stamps a story with their credentials, it gets picked up by a thousand others, and before you know it—bam! Information.

What’s the alternative? If we limited our acceptance of information to only that which we gathered through personal observation or investigation (and by that I mean using rudimentary tools—paper, pencil, magnifying glass, tweezers, or anything we happen to invent ourselves—to collect data on the observable world around us), we’d be starting from scratch. We make conclusions on a regular basis that force us to rely on layers and layers of knowledge, built up over centuries, which we really have no way of verifying. Bravo to the ancients who spent their whole lives observing the natural world and humankind just to conclude a few things that actually stood the test of time.

A good balance is always nice. “Take it with a grain of salt,” they say. Don’t believe everything you hear, unless of course it supports your predetermined conclusions and worldview. Then it’s probably true. If I’m a liberal I listen to NPR and fret over the warming oceans, because I believe they are warming, I’ve seen satellite pictures of the Arctic, which I don’t have to go to school to interpret. If I’m a conservative, I smugly comment about how the BP oil spill was exaggerated and how Al Gore used a private jet to travel everywhere on his “Inconvenient Truth” tour. Or is that just what liberals and conservatives think about each other? How do I answer that without googling it?

Someone says, “read Atlas shrugged. It’ll blow your mind.” Someone else says, “you have to read The Shack—it changed my life!” A third says “I don’t read. Why not accomplish something instead of just sitting there, reading?” I ask: is it possible to reach adulthood in this modern society and not already be a closed book? The question seems rhetorical, because if I am asking it, then I must not be a closed book type of person, right? But can you really be open minded if you're closed minded to close mindedness? I mentioned balance a minute ago—that could be the answer. Truth and falsity exist in frequently unknown proportions within bodies of information. The aim should not be to confirm what we feel, but to identify the truth, regardless of its consequences for our realities. The right mix of incredulity, doubt, a genuine desire to know the truth, and a good capacity for observation and deduction makes neither an open mind nor a closed one, but one that sees or tries to see the world for what it is. So just develop all those things, okay?

By the way, you have to read “A Confederacy of Dunces”—it’ll blow your mind and change your life.


N