Only the analog, the tangible, has a chance of remaining into the future, if in pieces: tattered scrolls sealed in clay pots, eroded carvings on stone pillars, newsprint entombed in landfills. Evolution is always an option as is staring at a cell phone for another sleepless hour.Īnything digital can and will be erased lost to time. Today it’s common for a casual acquaintance to mention their mental diagnosis as casually as the town where they grew up, and with the same matter-of-fact resolution that it can’t be changed. The second, as Jung predicted, is a psychic epidemic wherein mental illness is the norm. If Howl was written today Ginsberg might have observed that the best minds of his generation were driven to madness by subtweets and friend counts. None of this is new, but what is most present is most often overlooked, taken for granted, or passed by for the fresh and novel. Carl Jung in The Undiscovered Self writes about our obsessive distraction with “objects outside ourselves,” which subvert our striving toward our true and inherent callings. I want to be present and intentional with my time rather than using diversions as an escape from living. I am also spending less aimless time online. This is the year of the Tiger a year we all need to grow stronger. This month I am doing the CrossFit calisthenics workout Cindy each morning for the same reason. It was training to do what I didn’t want to do for which there was no reward or recognition. Last year I rucked, rain or snow, for miles every day in January. But I have started to make each day a link in a chain. After two years down I have reached a point where I have to either do what I am meant to do seriously or give up to avoid time wasted on dreams of doing. The past two years have been some of the hardest in my life as they have been for most who’ve been forced to sew their seams of being back together and reconsider what comes next. I enjoy the concept of rebirth, of resolving to do and be more than I have been in the past. Tonight, a million miles away from the Earth in orbit around the sun, it begins to search the incomprehensible vastness of time as we look ahead at a future that is equally unknowable.

This week it went online, after a period in which many of us were reflecting on our own past selves as the new year approached. It is hoped that it will reveal habitable exoplanets and insight into the oldest and most distant phenomena in the universe. This replacement and a massive upgrade in terms of capabilities to the Hubble Space Telescope will allow scientists across the planet to see further than has ever before. On this past Christmas Day NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope.

Into Thin Air by Cindy Miles