Worms, Meaning and Relevance

The other day I was standing in the rain looking down at the ground. The soil was saturated from a fair amount of rain and I contemplated the water cycle and its deep circular complexity. Ok, not really. As I stood there doing little more than looking at the ground and cement sidewalk, I started noticing worms slithering here and there. They were everywhere.

I just kind of stood there and said to myself, look at all those worms. Where have they been all this time? Why don’t I ever see them more often on any given day?

Then I actually started thinking about them and thought to myself, you know they are really always there, just under the surface, just under that rock over there, just around the corner, and sometimes for fleeting moments out there in plain sight wiggling along right in front of me. On this day, the rain just served as a mechanism for them to be out in the open and visible.

As I contemplated these interesting creatures, I started to think about a thought provoking book I have been reading, “Homo Deus—A brief History of Tomorrow” by Yuval Noah Harari. It and the worms really had me thinking about the visible and invisible nature of our world; our connections, our interactions, our humanity and where we are going. I had seen his book at an airport bookshop and found myself in a quandary as I contemplated buying it. Somehow it suddenly appeared in front of me, whereas other books from previous travels were still on the best sellers list. How is it that this one caught my eye, on this particular trip?

My quandary? Do I buy this book that was then at # 8 on the best sellers list, or do I buy Emotional Intelligence 2.0 that was at #2? As I tried to decide between taking a #8 or taking a #2, I also thought that maybe I just needed to wait and first read Harari’s other book “Sapiens” to get me to think about where we came from before I take on something as heady as a history of tomorrow. Alas, Sapiens was not in this store. So, no offense to the author of the #2 Best Seller, but I chose #8.

As I began navigating through Harari’s book, I found myself at another airport. Literally walking by another book store I just happened to glance at a lower shelf as I walked towards my connecting gate and wallah, there right in front of me, I spied Sapiens. It will be next on the list and I guess my journey to better understand the other authors perspective on Emotional Intelligence will just have to wait until the next time I find myself at an airport newsstand in need of something to read.

Ok, sorry got distracted there for a second.

Back to the worms.

So there I was getting wet while standing in the rain contemplating the interesting world of worms. Initially I just kind of marveled at these little Nightcrawlers. As I watched them the first thing that came to my mind was, why are they called Nightcrawlers if they are crawling around during the day? Then I reminded myself that the soil was saturated and these poor little crawlers probably couldn’t breathe so they came out of their wormy earthly domicile for a breath of fresh morning air. Then again, maybe because they spend most of their time with their heads underground, they just don’t know the difference between night and day. There were so many questions, so many insights, and so many brilliant or not so brilliant contemplations that flooded my brain as I watched them slither to and fro on the cement.

My neurons and synapses started firing and humming into high gear. I could go into a diatribe about humming birds and the fact that it took us a lot longer to see them this year. We love to watch them speeding here and there and showing themselves in fleeting moments of rare beauty as they visit our strategically placed feeders. This year, we kept up to date daily on the national hummingbird sighting maps and migration status as they moved back up north. It seemed like they were being seen by everyone but my family. Their delayed arrival to our rustic Kansas front yard this year was like a suspense thriller where the mounting anticipation caused a fair amount of angst and tension within the confines of our normally calm country domicile. Ok sorry, got distracted again.

Back again to the worms. While I watched my natural friends ever so slowly moving along the pavement, believe it or not, I had a totally unrelated thought enter my head. I started thinking about a graphic I had seen on several occasions that is used to underscore the simple beginnings of brilliance and innovation that led to something new and transformative. You know them, the ones that show us the megastars of industry and their humble beginnings that originated out of one’s garage.

I am not sure why, but as I looked at these little segmented beings, the vision of garages and my own personal mega-stars started running through my memory banks. I didn’t think about the normal cast of megastars, I thought about my grandmother who lived on a farm. She and my grandfather were humble folks who didn’t have a garage. Heck, they didn’t even have a bathroom inside the house. I never knew my grandfather, but I knew he was a farmer and was told many stories of his life that underscored just how smart a man he truly was. He was an innovator in the world of agriculture and an avid historian. I also thought about my grandfather’s brother, my great Uncle Ern. He had a pickup and a garage. For some reason the truck was always outside, never inside the garage. They also had a bathroom and an outhouse.

I thought about when I was a toddler, going to visit my grandmother and during the winter months having to navigate the long, lonely and cold odyssey to the outhouse to conduct my various necessaries that would arise and move me during the day and night. At night it seemed like my struggles to crawl barefoot and uphill both ways to and from the privy was an ordeal of a lifetime. When she finally broke down and converted a closet into a bathroom with a running toilet, it was a monumental event. Hey wait a minute, isn’t that why they call them water closets? John Harington, Joseph Bramah, George Jennings and Thomas Crapper would be proud, but I digress.

As I stood there, I chuckled to myself as I remembered my “nightcrawling” escapades to the outhouse, and then tried to put my observation of these earthly worms into perspective. I simply got kind of philosophical about worms, meaning and relevance.

How the heck, you ask, could one get so philosophical about watching a bunch of worms? Well I tried to put them into context with the world I live in. A world that is just one planet yet far too often, in context, goes unnoticed. A world of 7+Billion people that live within one planet and despite our differences are all uniquely tied to each other as human beings and the natural surroundings of this One Earth. I tried to put the worms into the context of my being human and the meaning of our own unique individuality. I just tried to put it all into perspective and it led me to contemplating my relevance and/or irrelevance within the context of my engagement with others and the myriad of things going on across our planet.

I started thinking about all the things we take for granted. All the things that are right there in plain sight but we just don’t see them because we are too busy, too distracted, too focused on other things. I tried to put into context the nature of my use of and engagement with the earthworks of social media. In looking at these worms, always there but rarely seen, I thought about the duality of writing and engaging with others around the globe on any given social media platform. Sometimes things go viral, sometimes people become enduring icons, constantly visible and megastars. Other times things have a very short lived existence, and sometimes people live within the digital grounds of the internet and merely surface now and then for a moment or two and then back into the realm of anonymity and obscurity.

The worms just served to give me a point of reference that I don’t think about too often. For the vast majority of their existence, worms exist but are rarely seen unless one is just lucky enough to be standing in the rain when they come out, or puts forth a specific effort to actually look for and see them. So there I was, looking and actually seeing what was around me. Listening to and hearing the sounds around me. Birds chirping, rain drops dropping, wind blowing through the trees, cars passing nearby, and voices in the distance.

In my little sphere of influence, and my interaction with others on this earth, I thought, hey you are not a megastar but you are you. Right here, right now.

So I thought about it for a second more. I do have a home. We have a garage, we have three bathrooms. We are lucky.

To be honest, I think the only thing I have successfully invented in my garage is a mess. If I could sell making a garage mess, I might be able to become a megastar. To think of it, I may start working through a business plan and approach to selling my approach to garage mess making and personal branding. I will keep you posted on how that goes but I think I may need to get my ADD in check first.

I use the garages and outhouses of social media platforms as a means to stay up to date on current events, share common interests and affinities, and keep up with what my friends near and far are doing.

You know those sites and platforms where you can keep current on what someone had for dinner; what their baby looks like; or the cute little thing their cat, dog or goldfish just did. The ones you can use for networking and job searches. The ones that you can use to write, blog and pontificate regardless of whether you are good at it or not. The ones that you can take a picture, post it and within seconds the picture somehow mysteriously goes into never never land. The ones that you really have to think hard about what you’re trying to say because you only have a handful of characters you can use to make your point. There are so many of them out there, they just make my head swim in a digital cornucopia of wormy connectedness.

In a world awash with social media platforms and an exponential amount of data and information we are becoming increasingly connected-each of us to each other and informed and up to date on anything and everything we want to know. At the same time, I found myself thinking that because of its pervasiveness it also comes with a corollary of relative insignificance and in some respects a real lack of meaning. Unlike those whose garages have made them rich and famous, the vast majority of us have fleeting moments of megastardom. Sometime singular in nature (not to be confused with the quest for singularity) and sometime episodic and/or repeatable. These moments are tempered by a surreal world of disconnected reality and a superficial yet relative sense of insight, knowledge, meaning, expertise and relevance.

Statistically my realm of networking varies by platform and in the grand scheme is insignificant. Some sites I frequent have large numbers, most do not. Some I visit daily, hourly, or by the minute because I have this thing called a smart phone that keeps me constantly engaged and at the cutting edge of instant information and gratification. Others, I check periodically or only when I get a reminder that says “hey dummy, you signed up for this site either check in or check out.” Yet plug along I do and for the most part I just enjoy the experiences while trying to not get saturated in the downpour and storminess of interaction and engagement. I don’t get enamored with numbers. I don’t get enamored with how long something I post stays active or whether or not it becomes viral. But I do revel in the experience, engagement and interactions as time permits. There are times when my work schedule becomes so chaotic, I just have to step outside and take a walk. There are times when I get over saturated with personal, professional and societal issues at large. And when I do, just like these worms I have to step out of my environment and just come up for air.

For the most part I am but a mere speck in my cosmic surroundings. As hard as it is for my ego to accept in the grand scheme of the Thing of Things, for the most part, statistically I go unnoticed. I crawl through my little world on earth and do what I do, say what I say, contribute where and when I can, and live like I live.

Despite it all, I try to live my life with a pension to want to make a difference in my wanderings. In doing so I find myself on a constant search and intellectual quest to find the goodness in our world. As such, I will continue to embrace the world around me whether I am visible or not. I will do so in an effort to find meaning and relevance in each interaction, each connection, each relationship and each thought I care to share or is shared with me.

As Descartes is attributed as saying “I think, therefore I am.”  Some may disagree with that statement, but for now I am ok with contemplating the quote and thinking about where I am today, and where I may be tomorrow.

And since I think and since I am, I have the pleasure of pursuing the passions that I have chosen to pursue that have meaning and relevance to me on my voyage of trying to be the best version of me that I can be.

And to think, this all started because I was looking at a bunch of worms.