post # 118 – My father told me…..

Hey, once upon a younger year
When all our shadows disappeared
The animals inside came out to play
Hey, when face to face with all our fears
Learned our lessons through the tears
Made memories we knew would never fade

One day my father—he told me,
“Son, don’t let it slip away”
He took me in his arms, I heard him say,

“When you get older
Your wild heart will live for younger days
Think of me if ever you’re afraid.”

He said, “One day you’ll leave this world behind
So live a life you will remember.”

When thunder clouds start pouring down
Light a fire they can’t put out
Carve your name into those shining stars
He said, “Go venture far beyond the shores.
Don’t forsake this life of yours.
I’ll guide you home no matter where you are.”

My father told me….

Post # 115 – Life Lessons

Son, life is like a book. It has numerous chapters. It also has many a lesson in it. It is made up of a wide variety of experiences and resembles a pendulum where success and failure, joy and sorrow are merely extremes of the central reality. The lessons to be learnt from success and failure are equally important. More often than not, failure and sorrow are bigger teachers than success and happiness. You are a cricketer and sportsman. You are fortunate to be representing your country, and that is a great honour. But never forget that this too is just another chapter in the book. Typically, let’s say a person lives for seventy or eighty years or so. How many years will you play sport? Twenty years; if you are very good, maybe even twenty-five years. Even by that yardstick, you will live the majority of your years outside the sphere of professional sport. This clearly means that there is more to life than cricket. I am asking you, son, to keep a pleasant disposition and maintain a balanced nature. Do not allow success to breed arrogance in you. If you remain humble, people will give you love and respect even after you have finished with the game.

— Sachin Tendulkar —

Post # 113 – Life Looks For Life

As children we fear the dark.

The unknown troubles us.

Anything might be out there.

Ironically, it’s our fate to live in the dark.

Head out from the Earth in any direction you choose
and, after an initial flash of blue,
you’re surrounded by blackness,
punctuated only here and there by the faint and distant stars.

Even after we’re grown, the darkness retains its power to frighten us.

And so there are those who say we should not inquire too closely
into who else might be living in that darkness.

Better not to know, they say.
There are 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy,
of this immnse multitude,
could it be that our hum drum sun
is the only one with an inhabited planet?
Maybe.

Maybe the origin of life or intelligence is exceedingly improbable.

Or, maybe civilizations arise all the time,
but wipe themselves out as soon as they are able.

Or, here and there, peppered across space,
maybe there are worlds, something like our own,
on which other beings gaze up and wonder, as we do,
about who else lives in the dark.

Life is a comparative rarity,
you can survey dozens of worlds and find that on only one of them
does life arise and evolve and persist.

If we humans ever go to those worlds
then it will be because a nation, or a consortium of them
believes it to be to its advantage, or to the advantage of the human species.

In our time, we’ve crossed the solar system and sent four ships to the stars.

But we continue to search for inhabitants.

Life looks for life.

Post # 112 – The Frontier Is Everywhere

“We were hunters and foragers. The frontier was everywhere. We were bounded only by the earth, and the ocean, and the sky. The open roads still, soft and cause. Our little  terraqueous globe is the madhouse of those hundred, thousand, millions of worlds. We who can not even put our planetary home in order, riven with rivalries and hatred, ARE WE TO VENTURE OUT INTO SPACE ? By the time we are ready to settle even the nearest planetary systems, we will have changed. The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us. The necessity will have changed us. We’re.. an adaptable species. It’ll not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other new by stars, it’ll be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses. More confident, farseeing, capable and prudent. For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness. What new wonders undreamed of in our time will we have rot in another generation and another. How far will have our nomadic species have wondered, by the end of the next century and the next millennium. Our remote descendants safely arrayed on many worlds in through the solar system and beyond, will be unified. By their common  heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that whatever other life may be, the only humans in all this universe, come from earth. They will gaze up and stream to find the blue dot in thier skies. They will marvel that how vulnerable the repository of war potential once was. How pairless our infancy. How humble our beginnings. How many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.”

— Carl Sagan —