I am finding that the older I get, the more empathy I have for just how little each person’s world is. Whether an individual’s solace lies in a warm cup of coffee or a glass of gin to a fancy luxury car, a trophy wife, or a ph’D. They are all equal in terms of smallness and inconsequence. Don’t get me wrong. This is not a statement made in arrogance. Friends of mine will tell you that my world is probably the smallest one of them all. Make-belief villages in a glass snow globe will probably think themselves urbane compared to my very limited world. I guess that’s why I can sympathize.

The upshot of this is that once I “see” these important things as surface acquisitions, I begin to ask, “what isn’t superficial?” And THAT, is where the journey begins. Personally, I think that which isn’t cosmetic, is, by definition, invisible. Off the bat, I can think of a few things. The search for quality is one. Striving for quality is putting the concept of evolution to good use. Do we complacently accept the comfortable status quo around us, or do we advance the generation by a notch, and do things better than the way our ancestors did them?

The search for love is another. Sure, skeptics will wonder, in a post-structural question mark, whether we love using the definition of love, love what attracted our eyes first, or “make do” simply because we have ran out of choices and are too embarrassed to admit it, so we heighten that choice to the lofty reaches of this abstract emotion. In defense of love, I have come across many variations of love – some merely between brother and sister, mother and daughter, or boy and pet. There are really no “choices” involved there.

I am uncomfortable with the fact that each of our personal universes are so small, but I also think that in knowing our vast limitations, we begin to question the notion of how happiness is created.

I used to think that many musicians in the ’60s who went multi-ethnic and non-Western kicks were just hopping on the bandwagon of Indian yogis and mystics who preached “contributions-over-mind”, but looking back, I think the ones who were serious, actually did see a burning bush of world music, a vast ocean of rhythms and microtonal syntax. When they came back, somehow, those 12 notes and the 4/4 beat didn’t seem adequate anymore: It was the equivalent of going traveling outside of your country, then coming back, and saying “How was I able to be content – all these years- with just these simple cravings for the latest and greatest toys that television and a peer of friends and neighbors have created in me?”

I groan out loud whenever people think they are paying me a compliment when they tell me I am intelligent. This is not false humility or fake modesty: I honestly believe that the more you know, the more you realize just how little you know. I am, hands down, the least intelligent person I know. I am always fascinated at the information friends are in possession of. I don’t wish I know what they know….that’s why I befriended them in the first place: less reading ahead.

However, I live in the perpetual fear that I won’t absorb enough knowledge and wisdom, that I’ll pass away stupid and only less dumb then when I started out. Perhaps this may have something to do with the fact that I think intelligence is completely over-rated.

I watched a beautiful program today on documentary television. It is called Blindsight, a film about Erik Weihenmayer and Sabriye Tenberken’s efforts to bring blind Tibetan children to the summit of Mt Everest. Sabriye Tenberken and Paul Kronenberg’s website is Braille Without Borders. To me, Blindsight is awe-inspiring in the same way the closing scenes of Werner Herzog’s movie Heart Of Glass is amazing, where a man stands on top of an island mountain looking out to the sea, day after day in a Caspar David Friedrich vista. He is the first one to doubt. One day four men on the island decide to set off on a boat, they wanted to reach the edge of the world to see if there really is an abyss. This was a defining moment in my experience and perception of my life and how it related to the world. It made me think: what is out there? Who among us is brave enough to go beyond the walls? How do we nurture this dissatisfaction with the complacency of what we know, and to risk going out into the unknown? That, to me, is the true spirit, of being alive.

I think Blindsight captures that sentiment accurately. Children who are blind are willing to risk their lives to go to a place they cannot see, and that there are blind people who believe it is important enough to want to show them the way. But what is even more important to me than the quest, is the humanity. Intelligence is nice, but nothing impresses me more than kindheartedness, compassion. You can have all the brains, beauty, and money in the world (in that order, and for me, by necessity and through impossibly abysmal stretches!), but what is it all worth, if you don’t have compassion for your fellow man and woman?

I’m not sure if this is even related, but my late father was fond of pulling me aside and saying, “never be arrogant on being human in relation to earth and animals, we humans have only been here for 200 thousand years. That’s a meaningless drop in the bucket in the timeline of earth and the cosmos. Before the next drop, we’ll be extinct.”