Tag: Douglas Adams

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It’s a Big World, After All

“Space is big,” Douglas Adams once wrote in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

Don’t look now, but he may have understated the case.

Remember the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble that sent back amazingly clear star field images last year? Well, it’s back for another round. Astronomers studying those images have found six tremendous galaxies dating back about 13.1 billion years … which means the early universe was about 100 times bigger than we thought.

“We’ve been informally calling these objects ‘universe breakers’ — and they have been living up to their name so far,” astronomer Joel Leja told CBS.

Another put it even more simply to the press: “We just discovered the impossible.”

Now, depending on your perspective, this might not seem like such a (pardon the phrase) big deal. After all, it’s not something that’s going to instantly clean the atmosphere, bring peace on Earth and lead the Broncos back to the Super Bowl. Lots of stars? So what?

But from another angle, it’s huge. Not only does this add to our knowledge, it forces us to revisit it. We had an idea of how quickly galaxies come together. Now it looks like we were being too modest. And if so, old ideas need to give way in the face of new information.

That’s a basic tool of science. It’s also something we’re not terribly good at in our day-to-day lives.

Previously in this column, I’ve mentioned what I call the Paul Simon Rule, derived from a verse in his song “The Boxer”:

Still a man hears what he wants to hear,

And disregards the rest.  

Put simply, we’re a stubborn bunch. Sometimes that’s been our saving grace as a species as we outlast war, disaster and the rise and fall of Jerry Springer. But it also means that we tend to hold onto ideas long past their sell-by date.

Why? Because staying with what we “know” is comfortable. Certainly more comfortable than having to rearrange our mental furniture and maybe even acknowledge we were wrong.

Take a look at the last Super Bowl. A thrilling, down-to-the-wire game exploded into controversy because of a holding penalty that basically killed the Eagles’ chance for a comeback. And even after the player in question admitted he had been holding, it didn’t really change anything. Fans had already staked out their positions on whether it was justified or a joke, and nobody was budging.

At our core, we are storytelling creatures. We’re happiest when things fit a pattern. And if the story fits what we already believe, well, then we’re golden. Studies have suggested that our reasoning originally developed to win arguments rather than to find facts, especially since we’re so often better at seeing flaws in someone else’s logic than our own.

So when something comes along that forces us to rethink, it’s a big deal indeed. Even more so when we succeed. It’s a moment of humility that moves us forward, allows us to learn, opens up new worlds that we might not have considered before.

In its own way, those moments rebuild a universe at record speed. Maybe even faster than those ancient stars.

Let them happen.

You might just find that they give you space to grow.

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What Counts … And What Not To

In “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Douglas Adams declared that the answer to life, the universe and everything was 42.

So this year, maybe Heather and I have all the answers – but we’ve got them exactly backward.

Yes, it’s official.  The charming couple of Chez Rochat has logged 24 years together.  Twenty-four years since a brief moment of sunshine on a rainy day, with my hair refusing to stay down as we said “I do” in a friend’s garden.  

Fast forward to the present. My hair stays down perfectly now – mostly due to lighter population density. We’ve lived in four different places, only to end up just down the street from two of my childhood homes.

And after all this time, we’re still grabbing for moments of sunshine anywhere we can find them.

It’s weird to look back like this. At 24 years, a marriage has started to go beyond “Aww, congratulations!” and begun to reach “Wow, really?” You’ve gotten past all the bizarre anniversaries you used to joke about – the paper anniversary, the tin anniversary, even the yes-it-exists furniture anniversary – but you’re still a year away from reaching the ones that everyone’s heard of. You know: the silver, the golden, the diamond, the bearer bonds and so on.

I suppose that’s not all bad. After all, if you haven’t quite reached your silver anniversary yet, you can still lay claim to being crazy kids, right? Right?

Well, it was worth a try.

But it does sound strange to say “24 years of marriage” when in your head, you’re still 25. In a way, time stopped on our wedding day. I guess it does for a lot of people. Oh, the days go by with plenty to fill them. But it’s like driving across the plains on I-70; there’s no obvious clue to tell you how far you’ve gone until you happen to check the mileage.

And once you do, you wonder how the car’s kept running this long.

But maybe it’s just in how you look at it.

If you’re a Broadway fan, you probably know the song “Seasons of Love” from Rent. It famously opens with the phrase “525,600 minutes ….” Which sounds pretty gargantuan until the song reminds you that it’s just one year.

More than half a million minutes. But we’re not counting the minutes. We’re living the year.

And at the other end, we’re rarely counting the years. We’re living the days. Live enough of them, well enough, and the minutes and years take care of themselves.

I know, I know, easier said than done. Even at our first anniversary, Heather and I were joking about “When does the ‘in health’ part start?” Over the years, we’ve weathered disasters, mourned family, stacked up medical bills like a game of Jenga, and watched a leaking ceiling “rain” all over our kitchen table.

But we’re still standing. A lot of times, we’re even smiling. Sure, sometimes we’ve had to fight for every bit of sunlight. Sometimes we’ve been going on a mixture of routine and caffeine just to make it through the day. But we keep reaching for the next day. And the next. And the next.

Reach for enough of them and it can be pretty amazing. Maybe even amazing enough to rival life, the universe and everything.

Maybe when we reach 42, we’ll know the answer for sure. But for now, it’s enough to be looking for it together.

For now, this answer’s pretty fantastic. Backward or not.