Not Mine, Yours

From age five until the time that I nearly had completed elementary school,I lived on a magnanimous house, at least to my childish mind it seemed that way. In the backyard of this house, down a slight hill and through a intricate maneuver around vast amounts of canadian geese excrement that dotted the grass like green brown sprinkles was a lake that was surrounded by both properties in my neighborhood, but also properties from the neighborhood from across the lake.

On a particularly sunny day, my friend Kyle, a generally shy kid that lived three houses down from me, and I were outside in the attempts to catch fish in my backyard as we perched like falcons on the rocks that were placed just a few feet in the lake. To us, these rocks seemed like the perfect place to await the fish we so desperately wished to catch, as the rocks allowed us to be above the water while still being close enough to shore so that we could jump back and forth between land and the rocks with ease.

As we repeatedly cast out our rods with the impatience of any child at that age, we remained weary of the trees above that both provided us solace from the heat of the sun and also kept us from launching our lines with particular recklessness as when we did we embedded the hooks in the leaves above. Little did we know that this very day would be more recognizable in our later memories. I, being the one who had lived on a lake for a few years at this point, had caught fish before, so the task of catching fish was a much more mundane task to me.

As Kyle stood in front of me on one of the rocks and I laid on the grass behind him, well within the umbrage of the trees, we patiently waited for a fish to bite. What seemed like an eternity passed by as we waited for fish to come and take a bite of our bait, which always seemed to be either worms we dug up or stale bread that we had taken from one of our houses. Kyle soon grew bored of standing on rock with fishing pole in hand. When he turned to me to ask if we could just cal it quits and go back to his house to hang out in his basement, there was a light tug on his line and the bobber on his line dipped under the water. Fortunately for him, I noticed this and shouted out to him. “Kyle, Kyle! You have a fish on our line! Careful! Reel it in!”

As he went about the task of reeling it in, I had jumped up onto the rock next to him and stood waiting in impatient excitement. The moment the fish was pulled up above the water, I took off running up the hill and back to y house in hopes to find my father to take a picture of this momentous occasion. Within minutes, my father was beside me by the lake, taking a picture of Kyle and his fish. This fish was not anything special, not even the largest fish that ever caught on the lake, but it was his fish, his accomplishment, and that was all that mattered to him. He had caught his first fish.

Surgery

It was past midnight on a Thursday of my spring break, and to my fourth grade mind, it was extremely late. Unfortunately for me, I was laying awake in bed, stricken with nervous anxiety for the day that soon approached me, rather than rejoicing that I was still awake at such an hour. Months earlier I was told that I needed another inguinal hernia and that I would have to be operated on during my spring break, as it would be about a week of recovery until i could walk properly again. Typical of any small child I pushed the thought of surgery to the back of my mind until the last second. Now, as I lay awake in my twin sized bed staring at the white stucco ceiling, I felt the nearly palpable wave of nerves washing over me, I felt like I was hit by a crushing wave of horror. My sheets began to feel as though they were constraints that were stealing my breath away from me.

Even though I had repeatedly told myself that surgery would be fine and that i had even had the same surgery done once already in my life, I was still entirely unable to relax and drift off to sleep. Typical of anyone who is stressed out due to an outside source, I went to go and do the next best thing, distract my mind with some other stimuli. As a racked my brain with trying to come up with some sort of reasonable distraction at this late of an hour, my eyes came to rest upon what would become my saving grace, my Nintendo DS. It was nearly invisible on my wooden nightstand in the dark of my room. The device, a lustrous sapphire blue, well worn with scuffs and scratches from prior use, practically radiated calm feelings.

Flipping it open with the same happiness that had been eluding me that very night, i booted up the device and went about playing StarWars. It may have not been my favorite game, but it was all that I needed to distract my mind from the daunting day that soon approached. My DS, serving as a placebo for my worry, kept me entertained for two hours that just flew by as I mashed away at the D-pad and the 6 other keys as my eyes and brain were bombarded with the world of StarWars. Playing until my eyes hurt from string at the illuminated screen that cleared the darkness of not only the room, but my mood only seemed natural, and that is exactly what I did.

Soon enough, the unavoidable wave of mental fatigue slowly lapped at my mind and wore away me energy bit by bit, similar to the way a wave washes upon the shore and slowly wears away at everything that once was present. Sleep soon descended upon me like an angel from above, taking me away to the land of the comatose.

As i awoke to the voice of my mother at six a.m. the next morning, i came to realize that the time for my surgery had come, but my apprehensive nature that had plagued me the night before had now been dominated by an intense confidence that would stay with me until well after my surgery. My mind finally was at ease, and I got out of bed and got ready for my surgery as I realized that this whole circumstance was like what I had been told by my father many times prior, “Mind over matter.”

Evolution

Inspired by “Water’s Edge”

In the beginning there was nothing, but yet there must have been something to orchestrate such a magnificent array of impedimenta. Before the first creature to walk the earth, before the first creature to swim the seas, there was a driving force that orchestrated the chain of events that took place.

As much as many would like to believe, coincidence is to simplistic of an answer, and saying that coincidence was the impetus for the spatially great world that has come to be is not only vague and ambiguous, but it leaves too much up to chance. Perhaps one would like to believe that eons ago there was a guide such an elaborate creation as the current world we live in. As we, similar to many scientists, attempt to engross the image of the creation of the universe, many may wonder, how did such an elaborate system come to be be accident.

We can not help but try to understand the universe that we live in. Humans, by human nature, wish to answer all questions that plague their minds. Everyone requires justification. Whether accepted or not, there is a very plausible explanation besides the common Big Bang method. The method is some sort of guiding hand, some may say a deity, a divine being, or some other existing force that has driven the world to become what it has.

But our scientifically centered, be it a biology teacher at a high school, a undergraduate biologist, or a general scientist of any field, often beg to differ.

With their need for empirical data, an unimaginable force of nature that helped shaped the world into its present form is simply a ludicrous idea. Perhaps they are on the right track, but then how can the perfection of the true complexity of the entire world we live in be explained. There then is the idea that things do not exist without explanation. There then is no such thing as the great Bloop noise in the ocean, recorded on two separate microphones, three thousand miles apart. Yet there is a recording of this great anomaly.

From the moment of conception, we face a specific destiny that follows such an immense history of build up to create such a sophisticated system as the human. Humans, and animals a like, all follow the same pre-creation fate, developing from a land devoid of life, into multicellular, complex creatures.

There are many stories that tell of creator gods, divine interveners, or spectacular beginnings of the universe. and it bring one to wonder, maybe science offers explanation to many things, but are there things that surpass the ability of explanation?