What is true about our life or meaning?

By Dan Barber

The other day I had a conversation about faith with one of my granddaughters when she asked me what I believed… Did I believe in God or Science?

I explained that I believed in both because I feel that science cannot exist without God, and maybe God can’t exist without science. 

In the news recently a story was broadcast about some physicists working on trying to recreate the Higgs Boson also known as the “God particle”… or the spark that science claims created the universe in a “Big Bang.”  The scientists stated that they discovered the particle… but couldn’t really see the spark because it was rediscovered in a mathematical formula… we just had to believe they were right, in other words we just had to have “faith” that their discovery was real.

The other night on one of my favorite TV programs, one of the physicist characters told his physicist roommate that his mathematical formula only worked because he had to create several other universes to make it work.

“Faith,” another word or belief in something, or maybe the hope, that something exists without physical proof. I was told in my Sunday school class when I was a child that no one could see God, but we know that He exists, we just have to accept Him and have faith.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have a conversation with God everyday. I thank Him for allowing me to wake each morning so I can have another day of doing what I really enjoy.  I thank Him for the beauty of the Universe that he created from the wonderful “God Particle.”  I thank Him for creating this great planet for all his earthly creatures to live on. I thank Him for the conversations that I can have with my grandchildren who have the faith that their grandfather is mostly right in what he says. I thank God for the laughter of my grandchildren when they laugh at grandpa’s stories and jokes. I thank God that I can still learn from the wisdom of my family and friends.

Science says that we carry our ancestor genes, but I also believe that we carry on genetic memories. When my oldest granddaughter was a toddler I would take her out for a walk and observed when she would spot a pretty little pebble. She would stoop over pick it up, spit on it to see if it was shiny then if collectable put it in her pocket. When I was a child and my grandfather would take me on walks I remember seeing that same process, but then it was my grandfather, the avid rock-hound, doing the collecting.

Yes, I believe that God and Science are inseparable.

What is time, and how is time defined?

By Dan Barber

I just watched another one of those TV programs that tries to educate us in 60 minutes… no, not that program that has the stop watch running in the opening credits…

The program’s premise was, “Is time for real?” I don’t know if it is real or not, I do know that time is ‘relative’… old relatives think I’m young and young relatives think I’m old. My brain still thinks that I can do the same things I did as a kid, like throw a ball across a baseball field from right field to the left side of home plate on a straight line. I tried that once and only once because my arm didn’t cooperate and took about two weeks to stop aching. I tell my wife that if she tried to do that martial arts sweep kick to my face that she used to show off with, her leg would fly off from her body.

Time has a way of putting things into perspective for us. As we get older, it tells us that we have to put the brakes on to our youthful miss-adventures, for example we can’t jump off the roof of a house anymore without causing serious damage to our bodies.

Time also speeds up or slows down depending on our age. When I was 8-years old, it took the darn clock above the chalk board in my class room forever to reach the end of the school day. Also, it took forever for the school year to reach summer vacation. Then when class was dismissed for summer vacation it was a time for great celebration for us kids and Summer seemed to last forever for both kids and parents… then when school starts back in the Fall it was and is a great celebration time for the stay-at-home parents and a time of dread for the kids.

Fast forward 30 years and it is now time for the grandkids to be out of school and at home for the summer. When my daughter tells me that her kids are driving her crazy with their fighting, I just smile and say “payback is hell,” she replies by sending her fighting kids to my house for a time-out! My son also sends his kids to my house for a ‘vacation’… I’m not sure who’s on ‘vacation.’ I guess parenting is a life-long commitment.

I am now facing a dilemma. Next year I can choose to retire or continue working. My short-term memory is starting to affect my work, I can no longer multi-task like I used to. I have always made a practice of doing routine tasks immediately so I don’t have to worry about them later… the problem now is I forget that I did the routine task five minutes after I completed it… this goes on in a cycle 3 or 4 times each morning until I write a note to myself to stop!… it’s done!

I look forward to going to work every morning because the work I do I still find very interesting, I fear that I will become very bored if I stay at home everyday. Diane, my wife wants us to travel. She plans for us to buy a motor home and hit the road like Gypsies… I worry that we will get lost somewhere in Death Valley in the heat of summer and the motor home will break down. The grandkids worry that they will no longer have a place to spend their ‘time outs’ or Summer ‘vacations.’

Another worry that I have is that we won’t be able to afford to travel and we will sit around home every day getting really bored until the grandkids show up… time really slows down where there is nothing to do and there is too much to do.

Why are we in a Big Hurry?

By Dan Barber

Each morning on my 8-mile commute to work there are many vehicles speeding along passing me. But it seems that when I arrive at the traffic light those speeders are setting there waiting for my arrival. Also, I’ve noticed on more than one occasion that we all arrive at work within seconds of each other. Why waste that gas and risk a possible expensive speeding ticket for just a few seconds of time.

If speed is their need, they might want to consider that all of us are speeding along on the same path and we will all reach the untimate destination eventually, some will arrive at their final destiny sooner than others… I would prefer to reach it much later in life.

I used to have that need for speed. Before I reached the age of 18 I was one of those traffic violators. I received a letter from the California Department of Motor Vehicles telling me that if I got one more ticket for speeding I would loose my driver’s license until I reached the age of 21… as a 17-year old kid in California and not having a license to drive was a fate worse than…death?

Well maybe it’s not that bad, but since that DMV warning, I tried to become a very responsible driver. In the 40 plus years since, I’ve only received one speeding ticket. Perhaps the older we get the slower we get. I recently asked Diane, my wife, to “hurry up,” so we could get somewhere, she replied, “I am hurrying!” That struck me as very funny because she was moving real slow… my new pet name for her now is “Slo-Mo.”

I guess the kids now are just the same as kids have always been… they want everything right now, or as I call it “instant gratification.” It seems like just yesterday when I was sitting on my grandparents front porch thinking that my life was about to be over because my Mom and Dad were moving us out of grandma and grandpa’s house in Omaha Nebraska to a new home in Council Bluffs, Iowa. But when you’re 5-years-old that 5 mile distance might just as well be as far as the moon is from the earth.

During a cross country trip once, I took my wife and children by the old neighborhoods I lived in as a child. Everything seemed really small. When I was a child and had to walk to school in the Iowa snow it seemed to take forever. Actually the school was only about two short blocks from my old house. We then drove the 5 miles across the bridge over the Missouri River to my old neighborhood in Omaha… everything there also seemed really small.

I guess when we are small and believe that we are the center of the universe, everything is bigger, better and everlasting. But when we travel at the speed of life to our eventual destination we come to learn that we are not immortal, but just a speck in the infinite universe traveling on a planet that is speeding through space along with our galaxy at nearly 830,000 miles per hour, and with the earth spinning at the equator at around 1,000 miles per hour and orbiting our sun at more than 660,000 miles per hour.

Maybe it would be a good idea to slow down and enjoy the majesty of our existence while we still have the time.

What is Rattling Around in Your Head?

By Dan Barber

I have stuff rattling around in my head constantly… I can be easily distracted which causes me to sometimes take a little longer in accomplishing assigned tasks, so I apologize to my four or five followers of my Saturday Morning Post blog for being late, or sporadic with my posting. And please forgive me if I am repeating my self, or becoming abstract in my thoughts… I am starting to do that more and more these days.

I think the older we get, the more we start thinking about the “after-life” or the hope for one. I do believe that we have an after-life, or a “forever-life”. A few years ago my father was being kept alive with medical devices. My mother, along with my siblings knew that he didn’t want to continue living like that so we decided to have the hospital turn off the equipment and let our father pass.

For a few weeks after that action I worried about my part in the decision until I dreamt that I was having a conversation with my Dad and I asked him, “If we can bring you back to life, do you want to live again?” He said no, he added “I am able to relive the joyous moments of my life all over again as if it were the first time.”  After that I was able to find peace in the knowledge that my Dad was having the, “Times of his life” in his Heaven.

Many years ago I thought it would be a good idea to write a science fiction story about some ancient alien beings that created a device to gather all knowledge that would never be lost and these alien beings would be immortal if only in memory, or “knowledge”. The title I thought about was the Gathering of Data… or the acronym G.O.D. I thought that a good way this device could use to collect the data would be to implant a soul into every living thing or being. So upon death, the information could then travel back to the creators to be downloaded into the Gathering of Data… told you I had weird stuff rattling around in my head… Now whenever I watch the “Discovery” or “History” channel on TV, some of the stuff aired rekindles some of my ideas that I once had about my story idea. One physicist, Stephen Hawking, claimed on one of these TV programs that nothing can escape a black hole, not even knowledge… I thought well there you go, the Gathering of Data!

The more I wrote my science fiction story the more I thought about the need for a conflict. I decided that to create a conflict, the Gathering of Data would download the information from the recently arrived soul and then send out the recycled and hopefully blank soul to other living beings to gather more information. Here is where the conflict starts… some of these souls, weren’t blank, they retained some memories from their previous lives or even the memory of being with the Gathering of Data… GOD!

Recently, I had another dream. This dream involved my grandmother who passed right after my daughter was born. I remember the day my grandmother died. Earlier in the day she sat in a lawn chair holding my infant daughter while watching me work on my car. Later that night I got a call from my Mom telling me that my Grandma had died.

I dreamt that I was viewing my Grandmother in her death bed with a person holding a baby next to the bed. It was like viewing a painting through thin gauze, but my Grandmother was moving and the person holding the baby was comforting her by telling her that this was the resurrection of life.

So you see I know that we have an after-life or a life-forever… enjoy your today-life, and please forgive me if you believe I am being blasphemous… I do believe!

Pay Attention to Your Life

I believe that if one sells their soul for fame or fortune then they will eventually have hell to pay… whether you have faith or not, our history shows us that this statement is true.

There are those who obtained what they thought was very important to them only to discover that it caused great pain.  Perhaps they reached the pinnacle of their life early and then had to live on for many years on the downside of that high to the end, always missing what they once had.  How many once famous people have recognizable faces but seem to be adrift because no one cares about them anymore because their talent burned itself out, or they no longer have a purpose in people’s lives.

I thought that I had a goal once… a goal that would have destroyed me and the ones that I love if I had achieved it. Fortunately I discovered the path towards that goal was fun, but the goal was not really my life’s purpose.  For a long time I thought that I needed to have someone write a script for me to have a personality or purpose. I discovered that I have a whole team of writers giving me purpose. My entire family is the team who give me my personality and purpose. I am very grateful for that discovery. My destiny was and is my family. Our children and grandchildren give us our immortality if we can leave them with good memories of us and life lessons that they can pass on to their descendents. Only then will the memory of us will live on long after we are dust. I like being referred to as Husband, Dad, Grandpa, Brother, Uncle, Cousin and Friend. But with some of the grandkids living just across the street one of the titles can be exciting. There is currently a television advertisement on when a little boy cries out “Grandpa”… that startles me every time, it will wake me from my nap quicker then anything because I think that something has happened with one of the kids and they are seeking my help!

As I stated in an earlier blog, if our heavenly reward is to relive our life experiences over and over again as if it was the first time, then we need to create as many good experiences as we can right here on this earth. Don’t drag dreadful experiences to the grave with you because wouldn’t it be hell to have to relive those bad memories for eternity?

A very smart young lady that I know told me that it is very hard going through life being angry all the time… it is much more fun to be happy.

I was once required to attend a self awareness seminar at my work several years ago… the one thing that I can still remember from that experience was the question that was asked..."at the end of your life do you want to say I wished that I had spent more time at work, or more time with loved ones?"

In my work I have to read and watch a lot of news. I can see the hurt, that perhaps well meaning people, can have on others because they are trying to push their own values on to the masses. I see politicians trying to twist the truth around to fit their needs.  I thought that I had one way of looking at things once until I happened to have a hate spewing (self-proclaimed) Marxist professor for a required Sociology Class and a quiet and very polite Political Science professor directly following.

Because of the type of job I have some people ask me what my political leanings are, I reply it depends on the issues. I do know that some of the news that I digest each day makes me feel really sad. Sometimes I get angry, and sometimes I can’t help but think how some very smart politicians can think that the masses are really stupid.

I see conservative pundits every day bad mouthing “public employees”… I am a public employee, most of my adult life I have been a public employee. First serving in the U.S. Navy for 20 years and now working for the Department of Defense as a civilian employee. I tried working in the private business world. But quickly found out, in my case, that private business owners sometimes aren’t very loyal to employees. Working as a “public employee” you work for the public, and for the most part the public is very grateful for the service that is provided to them

I recently read in a liberal leaning newspaper that a mock congressional hearing was held by a former house speaker and her only “expert” witness was a law student who wanted the government to pay for her birth control. Many people took this seriously and became really upset about it… or at least is seems they are really upset... maybe it is just an act.  My thought was “o boy” I can’t wait to see how the late night comedians handle this one. But of course if they did anything with it or not, I wouldn’t know, because I can never stay up late enough to watch.  I imagined that the lines would go something like this… “Apparently the law students at Georgetown law school are learning how to screw people, and like a good lawyer they are just trying to get someone else to pay for the malpractice insurance.”

Until next time, pay attention to your loved ones, think for yourself and be aware of the lessons others are trying to feed you...and live everyday like it is your last day… one of these days it will be.

What beholds our future?

By Dan Barber

Every week I read a lot of news from many sources, and from the news that I read this week I would like to make a prediction.

I predict that a new technology will be invented within the next year and shortly thereafter will be made available to the public, and because of the clever marketing of the company who owns the new gadget, people will camp out on hard sidewalks for a week or more just so they can be the first person in line to buy this new miraculous ‘doodad.’

What kind of prediction is this you might ask? Not much of one, because we see this scenario in the news quite often.  What isn’t in the news is that the ‘doodad’ has become obsolete almost immediately because the same engineers in the same company who created ‘doodad’ has now come out with a new and improved ‘widget,’ which the company’s marketing folks will convince hoards of people to pitch their tents on Main Street so they may have the honor of being the first person on their block to replace the old ‘doodad’ with the new ‘widget’… am I boring you with this story? I’m certainly bored.

Some technology is really great.

When I was returning home from Vietnam, I needed to call home from the Philippines’ to let my wife, Diane, know that I was on my way home and would be there in a couple of days. The call only took a couple of minutes, but cost me nearly a quarter of my weekly “tax free” income of a Navy second class petty officer in 1972. We didn’t have the convenience of free calling cards or cell phones with unlimited minutes. 

A massive improvement in communications was just appearing on the horizon.  Pay TV (cable) was a major source of debate between politicians, and the broadcast executives representing the 3 national networks, and the Federal Communications Commission.  Public meetings were even held so the average person could let their feelings on the subject be known. See how that has worked out. 

We can now sign up for “cable/satellite” TV, the Internet and our home and cell telephone service all with one company!  Because of the new technology of cell phones you can even save a bit of money by not having a landline phone at home.  The monopolistic telephone companies can no longer charge us whatever they can get.

Now my wife can talk to her sisters and cross-country friends on her phone for hours, or until the battery dies, for just one low monthly fee of just a quarter of a week’s pay. I also have hundreds of channels to surf through on my big flat-screen high-definition TV while at the same time surfing the World Wide Web on my cell phone, or any number of new thing-a-bobs I might be willing to camp out to buy at any number of big box discount department stores. But because of where I choose to live, I would have to drive for nearly an hour to get to one of those big box stores… a fact I am rather proud of.

To the horror of those network television executives back in the late sixties, because of all this new technology I can record what ever I want to watch, even out in the middle of the Mojave Desert without a 100’ tall TV antenna, whenever I want to watch it… and I can even fast forward through commercials.

Sometime in the future those unsightly telephone, television and electrical transmission lines that scar our landscape will be a relic of the past when every newly constructed building, development or home will be required to be self-sufficient with its own power source from a combination of solar, thermal and wind power. Perhaps some other new source of power will be discovered and put into use. Also, the kids can also create their own TV programming, filmed of course in front of a large mirror with their latest edition of a smarter cell phone with a video camera application and broadcast those programs world wide, via the latest social media program.

This can only be possible if the “public utility” companies, energy companies and governments can figure out a way to get out of the way of each other and let it happen.

What are you going to do when everything is gone?

By Dan Barber

My horoscope read today that I needed to write… Well here is another entry to my blog spot on my philosophy, right or wrong, it’s my thoughts on the mystery of life.

I just read an article about how the web split in 2011.  First we had the World Wide Web (WWW or web)… but now we have applications (apps) and the “old fashioned web.” In an earlier post I babbled on about my phobia about computers and the new definitions of every day words that used to mean something else, but now have a different meaning altogether… like backup, server, crash, hacking, cracking etc. Language has been evolving ever since our first caveman lexicographer starting calling a rock something else besides “rock” when they discovered that they could use the rock for cracking nuts, it then became a “nut cracker.” Then an industrious clan educator painted a picture on the cave wall to educate others in the clan how to use a rock. Our very first dictionary was actually a “Pictionary” and some Anthropologists and some Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) researchers have spent their entire careers trying to figure out what our ancestors were trying to say with these Pictionary’s. 

Now we need a dictionary to tell us what acronyms mean… the Navy has had one of these dictionaries for years… I keep it nearby on my bookshelf at work. I work at the Naval Hospital Twentynine Palms (NHTP) on the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center (MCAGCC)… in military speak it would be pronounced as Nav-Hosp 29 Palms at the Mac-Cack-See… in texting it would probably look like (NHTP@MCAGCC).

Now everywhere I look people are holding their various communications devices and typing away with their thumbs in an acronym language that is totally foreign to me. My teenaged granddaughters are constantly pecking away at their cell phones instead of talking on them. I think the funniest thing that I ever heard involving acronyms was in the Neil Simon play “The Odd Couple” when Oscar said (paraphrased) “It took me a half hour to figure out that FU on the note that you left on the fridge that said, ‘need milk FU,’ meant Felix Unger.”

When I signed away two years of my life on a contract to get a cellular (cell) phone, I told the young sales girl that I only wanted a device that I could make and receive phone calls… I didn’t need a camera, the cell phone screen was too small for me to watch TV, I didn’t need to send or receive e-mails, and I didn’t need to know where on the earth that I was positioned at any given time… although at my age my family might find that particular “app” handy when I get lost while taking a walk in my neighborhood.

Our Southern California electrical power supply utility company just announced the other day that they were going to have to cut off power to different areas of our community for several hours so they could make repairs to the electrical grid. In our local community underground chat room, people were in an uproar over what were they going to do without power… no cell phones, no television, no lights, no computers! “How are we going to be able to charge our cell phones, read our book apps on a dead reader?” Perhaps we should not be so ready to do away with print newspapers or books… all you need to read one of these at night is a candle. A fire in the outdoor fire pit would be nice while star-gazing at our pollution free desert sky is a possibility, face-to-face conversation with family or friends is could be a positive experience… no batteries or charger required.

Maybe the Inca’s and Hopi Indians, and even the “web-bot” app have it right about life as we know is about to end in 2012… What are you going to do when everything you do in your everyday life is gone?