Fifty six times now I've made this trip
Around and around we go...
Some see it as a cycle, a circle well traveled
But I have learned that this is not so.
I arrived here on Earth knowing very little.
Yet is was enough to get me started.
Yet is was enough to get me started.
I knew my mother's voice, the voices of my family. I knew
about the rhythms of everyday life. I knew enough to open my mouth and to start
breathing.
I started learning from the get go...
That process has never stopped and continues to this day.
Learning is everything to me, and I would like to let you
all know that each and every one of you has played a part in that experience...
Thank you.
As we celebrate these landmarks each year we tend to see
them as being cyclical. Like runners on the track, counting laps as we mark our
voyages around the Sun.
The Earth's orbit is not circular it's elliptical; but
that's not the point I want to make.
The point is that we don't just circle the Sun... It is more
like a spiral because the Earth doesn't just go around the Sun... The Earth
*follows* the Sun as well.
By the time the Earth completes an orbit, say on your
birthday, we do not arrive back at the point we started.
For the Sun has traveled billions of miles over the course
of the year and the Earth has traveled with her. We are somewhere NEW,
entirely; someplace we have never been before.
Like it or not, we move forward.
Know it or not, it's always new.
Every day.
I mention this in passing because of something I learned
somewhere along the way.
Perspective...
Albert Einstein told me that it was ALL about perspective,
that reality was shaped by how big you are, how much mass you have, how fast
you are moving and where you are standing.
It took me a long time to understand this. Thanks Albert.
You helped set me free.
And so our view of the universe, including the phenomena of
time and space, is filtered through a lens of mass & motion. We don't get
to see it or experience it from a different perspective, not yet.
But we can imagine it.
And so it is here in this place we call cyberspace.
We all have beliefs and opinions that have been sculpted by
our individual perspectives in life.
Now we have an opportunity like never before to connect,
despite the constraints of time and space, and to share our experiences. What a
marvelous development indeed.
It is important to remember that we do not all share the
same perspective so we will not all have the same opinions. We would do well to
imagine why others may believe differently than ourselves.
Something else Einstein told me was that matter and energy
are the same thing.
He spent a lot of time and took great care to prove this and
the Trinity test in New Mexico bore him out.
But he also told me something more... Einstein suspected
that it went deeper than that.
He believed that everything, matter energy, particles, waves
and the very forces of nature, had all once been one thing.
He hadn't proved it yet, but he was pretty sure...
Recent discoveries from the particle accelerator at Cern and
the most distant observations from space are just now proving that Einstein's
theory of Grand Unification is most likely true.
So from that perspective, we are all one.
Whatever we may think.
