inexistence

When we moved to Denmark, we shipped two pallets of boxes over on a shipping container. We created a spreadsheet and determined the items we could not easily replace in Europe. Within one of these black plastic containers, shoved with some art pieces wrapped in sweaters, were my journals. These pieces of me and my life until that moment were destined to meet me again across the pond. The stress of moving internationally and packing my life away clouded over the value of these not-at-all waterproof journals, and off they went on a two-month journey across the USA on a truck and the Atlantic on a ship.

If we move again, these will be coming in my personal luggage as they continue to grow in value. I had a few nightmares about the boxes being lost at sea, and I really only would have mourned the journals, something immaterial that could not be replaced. 

These written words on flimsy pages. All from my brain, with the vast majority written before the time or without the influence of LLMs (large language models) and AI (artificial intelligence) that will forever now shape our thoughts. Slowly, our existence is being defined by the internet and the chatbot models these LLMs are trained on (ChatGPT is an AI chatbot running an LLM). In these writings, I hope to extend my existence into the internet while still maintaining my independent thought. 

Have I watched too many sci-fi movies that have scared me into paranoia? I guess we will slowly find out. 

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October 19, 2016

I’m sitting here on day 3 of 4 on my last outdoor education trip teaching on Catalina Island. The sun is shining, and the group I am supervising has a lot of excitement to be in the outdoors. I’m feeling very complicated in my mind, and some of these thoughts stemmed from a night lesson of stargazing with my student group. We did some lessons about the solar systems and learned about the scale of time that the universe has existed. Then, we sat in a circle and stargazed. During this time, students, on their own time, posed questions to the groups to ponder, not to be discussed. Some posed were: I wonder if our sun is in the constellations of other galaxies?, How can people go through life without looking at the stars? Is there such a thing as fate?

These questions came from students aged 11-12 from an all-girls school. They are all in their 20s now, what a thought to ponder. I hope they still look at the stars and remember those cool California nights, and have kept their sense of wonder about the world. I was always stunned at how bringing kids (or anyone really) outside of their comfort zone could so easily bring new perspectives into their lives and allow thoughts to exist that do not typically cross your mind in a normal day. What a gift to be able to stare at the stars and ponder questions aloud to your peers. We don’t do this enough anymore. This connection to our natural world is slowly slipping away as we can electronically connect almost anywhere.

Could you imagine staring at the stars? We as humans always seem drawn to their power. Since we have existed as conscious humans, we have connected to the night sky. 

The mystery, the power, the elemental particles that our world, the unknown.

 Maybe many thousands of years from now, we can look at our sun in a constellation from another galaxy, and even then, I hope the mysteries the night skies hold continue to captivate our minds.