As I was thinking about what to share with you today I couldn’t escape this growing sense of how tired we’re all getting of the current state of things and how it seems like life has just been reduced to an endless cycle of mask wearing and politics. I don’t know how to solve that problem, by the way, but what I can do is remind you that everything else in the world is still there, the world is still an endlessly wondrous and amazing place, and there’s still so much more to think about and learn and do and become if we just read beyond the front page and spend a little time anywhere other than social media.
Here are just a few examples of some OTHER news you probably haven’t heard:
Africa is slowly peeling apart. I don’t mean culturally or politically. I mean literally peeling apart in Ethiopia and Kenya where three of the earths tectonic plates meet. Geologists are just now seeing evidence of the formation of oceanic crust along a 35 mile rift that will, in about a million years, completely separate from the rest of Africa and form a new ocean. There are about a dozen tectonic plates on the earths surface that over the last 4 billion years have combined, separated and recombined to form several different oceans and different continent configurations. All of human history has taken place on just the most recent remodel but this rift in Africa reminds us that there have been others and in a few million years there will be others still.
Speaking of new continents, many scientists now believe there is an eight continent that has been here, now right under our noses. New satellite imaging indicates that New Zealand is not just an island nation off the coast of Australia but rather the high point of an actual continent, right next to the Australian continent, that is mostly underwater.
Did you hear we now know where the giant 30 foot tall, 25 ton monoliths at Stonehenge were quarried? New forms of spectrometry have allowed archeologists to solve a debate that has gone on for centuries. The monoliths came from West Woods in the English county of Wiltshire, a little over 15 miles away.
Mathematicians have figured out why tropical stingless bees build their honeycombs in beautifully complex spirals. I know, you’re thinking, “I didn’t know there were stingless tropical honeybees or that they make spiral honeycomb.” Well there are and they do, and now we know how. They appear to be following the same simple algorithmic principle that governs the way many crystals form and that also determines the shape of many mollusk shells.
Finally, researchers who study bonobos—the cousin to the chimpanzee and likely the most intelligent species of non-human primate—are becoming more and more convinced that language itself grows from our emotional needs for one another. The breakthroughs have come in realizing that the language skills of Bonobos, who are capable of mastering lexicons of some 300 advanced concepts like “please,” “thank you,” and “I’m sorry,” vary greatly depending upon how emotionally connected they are to their human teachers. It appears the more emotionally complex the relationship, the more we reach deep for language to help us communicate what we’re feeling. Every woman—who as a whole are more verbal and more in touch with their emotions—will tell you how frustrating it is to ask the apes, mean men, in their lives how they’re feeling only to hear, “I dunno know.”
So what’s my point with all this? Just an encouragement that if you’re feeling stuck in a loop that feels more and more like the movie groundhog day, you can change it. The wonders of this world are all still there to explore. All it takes is for you and I to want to find them. So perhaps it’s time to search for some different stories, and then let them inspire you, even in the midst of all this, to keep building yourself a beautiful life.
