Recently , Patty and I watched two documentaries on Netflix. The first was Live to One Hundred: Secrets of the Blue Zones. It was about centenarians around the world and how they got to be that age. Absolutely worth watching whether young or old. But here was the takeaway: Not one of them cared at all about social media and technology. They were about doing, keep doing. They were about community, sharing, giving back, one-on-one personal interaction. They were about deep and abiding friendships where healthy food and wine and conversation flowed in abundance. They were about doing something that gives back to family and community. Everyone of them (isolated on an island, high in a mountain, or in a Minnesota community) were moving outward not inward. They were about others not about self.
The second Netflix documentary was A Trip to Infinity. This was – as the title suggests – a discussion about the concept of Infinity through the eyes of Mathematicians, Physicists (particle and theoretical), and Philosophers. WOW! As soon as it started, I knew this was my wheelhouse. This was a lecture with examples and diagrams and animation. This was brilliant minds sitting comfortably in front of the camera and explaining their research, their excitement, pondering thought experiments about infinity while we listened and watched animation exploring the size, the concept, the philosophical conundrums, the mathematical beauty of it all. Very few times have I stepped away from such a documentary so deeply moved (I think Cave of Forgotten Dreams with Werner Herzog comes to mind).
And of course, I began to ponder the two events. In the first, it is a pursuit of… well something they can never achieve… infinity. How can humans who are finite, destined to live a max of – at best 110 years, most dying in 77/78 – somehow eat better, live better, act better and just maybe… maybe… if you are lucky and do certain things… die later. Hmmm. The second pondered forever, finiteness (the only thing we can grasp: the moment, the here and now) suddenly and eventually just… slipping… away… forever. I distinctly remember a thought experiment about an apple placed in a box. And we watch time unfold, and we watch the apple decay… into… particle dust… and eventually atoms smash into atoms… which creates infinite amount of heat, while they infinitely burn and smash and… turn… back… into… an apple. In fact, if it is infinite time, the apple turns into an infinite number of objects…. Mind sufficiently blown away.
If this is the first time you are hearing this… well, what planet have you been living on: we are all like the apple, slowly dying, and we are in a universe where infinity exists which means one of two things: our lives mean nothing or our lives mean EVERYTHING. At one point in the Infinity documentary, the scientists ponder how this concept unsettled them. One said at an early age he began to understand how meaningless it all seemed if we are just less than a speck of time to infinity. He paused. The camera zoomed in, and he said, “And then I fell in love, and that changed everything.” Another Physicists said that he came to understand infinity as beautiful, wonderful, sublime, and that it was unexplainable… it was God. Powerful stuff.
I don’t think we really get this. We live in a strange age of Selfies when such things are ludicrous when placed next to infinity. It is like those apple atoms taking pictures, documenting their moments while they burn themselves up. What seems to matter most to the finite human living in the digital age, in the end really means little at all. And when old finite beings (those centenarians living in the blue zones) take a moment to reflect, it would seem what matters is not selfies but selfLESSies, things like community, family, companionship along the way – as brief as they are – in this finite, very human life.
Greg Belliveau 