I’ve always ranked things. I don’t know why. It has always been the joke of my college friends. I honestly can’t help myself. I like to judge. I like to rank. I’m not proud of it, but its just something I do. I think it’s from this need to quantify. The need to see life in numbers. Numbers are absolute. Numbers make patterns. Numbers help me cope. Numbers should shed light on the infinite roads in the yellow wood.
But the numbers just boggle my mind again.
I’ve stopped ranking. I’ve stopped quantifying. I’ve stopped period.
As my numbers just don’t make sense. They make me question if they are even real.
What are the odds that Jacob would be NED and be ready to go back to school and school is closed indefinitely?! What are the odds of that?! When has school closed like this?
What are the odds that during this time we would need to be in New York for 7 consecutive days for Jacob to start radiation? What?! That we have to run the “numbers” on what is more dangerous for this family. Bringing Steve and Jacob into a medical facility full of immune-suppressed people during a pandemic or Jacob missing his radiation to move forward on his cancer protocol? How does one even calculate that? Do I calculate my parents and the risk of them contracting the virus as we hunker together in that math?
It’s just unquantifiable.
And that is the lesson I have learned. Science, mathematicians only know the past. Sure we can make models. We can project the future by looking at the patterns of the past, but that is just what they are “projections.” There is no EMIT (truth, all-knowing). Nature is the ultimate decider and sadly we know very little about it.
We have computers in our pockets and can fly robots to Mars, but know very little about the very earth we inhabit nor see it as a viable thing to protect.
We treat nature just like cancer. We BURN (radiation and fire), we CUT (surgery, deforestation, hunt, etc), and we POISON (chemo/ chemicals like pesticides) and we are not one step closer to understanding the WHY (why these things happen). We just deal with the aftermath.
Just left to deal.
So yes there are projections out there. There are models. There are numbers we all want to cling to or run from, but they are not absolute. That I can tell you. So as you hang on that TV’s every word, remember that the absolute is nature. That life can change on a dime and the only EMIT is right in front of you, life itself. Go study that.
Wish us luck today. This has always been the step I’m most worried about and now we have a whole new spin on it…
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