Every week after lunch, there is a speaker who gives a presentation to the Rotary club meetings. Some speakers are very interesting, others less so. Last week was on a topic that interested me, regarding the local airport and its regulation and expansion plans. The speaker was flat and hesitant, and no matter how much I felt at home with his material, I couldn't focus on his delivery. By contrast, this week's presenter was dynamic and interesting, and never paused or seemed to falter. It was again a subject that I found compelling and familiar, and he had me from the moment he began until the club president had to stand behind him and discretely tap his wrist to signal he was out of time. Today we heard from a scientist regarding the volume of debris that is currently in orbit around the earth, and he outlined what the real risks are and what the plans are to do about it. In short, he addressed the assumption that space is indeed ginormous and the likelihood of an object the size of a marble or more striking another object is remarkably slim. Given that circumstance, the truth is that collisions do happen, and at 17,000 miles an hour, the results are, in a word, exciting. He said that in the low earth orbit (300-1000 miles above the surface, give or take), the "surface area" of the space in which potential impacts could happen is usually sufficiently large to avoid collisions, but the real estate is fairly heavily populated. In the much wider geosynchronous orbit, the surface area is significantly larger, but all of the satellites that travel there are contained in a band above the equator, so again, the risk/reward balance is delicate. And between the two lies the polar orbit, which seems to have the highest probability of two objects attempting to occupy the same space, as in 2009 when an old Russian Cosmos satellite that was dead and couldn't be repositioned hurled itself into an iridium satellite, creating at least 2000 pieces of measurable debris, at least half of which will still be in orbit for the rest of my lifetime. Can you tell I was riveted, to have retained all of this information on a day when I was running on two nights of almost no sleep? Just don't make me Google the name of the rocket that he said was the first hunk of metal we ever successfully launched into orbit over fifty years ago, that will still be swirling above us in a thousand years, just daring us to try to take it down. Vanguard? Was it a Vanguard rocket? Not sure I have the dedication to find out for certain.
This week, as the last time we met and read our work, some writers in my group focused on aging and nearing the end of their lives. There are several senior citizens in the group, at least three of whom are past the age of eighty. Their concept of old age and the prospect of dying soon has been fascinating. Rather than raging against the advance of time, they are highly curious about how the end will come and what, if anything, may follow it. One of our writers has written humorous musings on reincarnation (such as imagining the mundane, rewarding, or punitive reincarnations of famous people like Beethoven, Liszt, Henry Ford, or the Dalai Lama). Another has given us deep poetry written from his garden, wondering whether the universe would ever laud the accomplishments of all that grew there, and when he finished his reading, I told him that it felt like the logical conclusion was that the narrator of the poem would be buried in that garden, waiting himself for recognition from the universe for his contribution to the earth and what grew out of it. I can try but I may fail to express how moved I have been to meet with such expressive people who ponder their own demise with such grace and eloquence. I wish I could hear from them after they pass to gain access to their observations of the process.
My quest to create a clutter-less environment continued unabated today. I removed several more strata from the archaeological wonder of my dining room table, to the point that I saw several patches of varnished wood. My bedroom is tidier, and my car has been thoroughly detailed inside (although I ran out of energy before I washed the outside). I've managed to keep clean the other rooms I'd already completed, even as the living room requires constant vacuuming and the kitchen is a daily grind. I can tell that I'm emerging from the funk that laid me low for most of this year, beyond just the physical limitations I discovered with my diagnosis. I think my blue attitude is going away, and I find my old self returning in time to criticize how much junk had piled up and how stale was the air in the house. I'm compulsively freshening and sterilizing and eradicating the smell of low self-esteem. If that smell is replaced by "spiced cider" and "redwood," then all the better. I'm glad to be back in a world where I can breathe easier.
(For the record, I do not own this photograph. I rarely use other's works, but this one was part of the presentation today. It was taken by the Japanese weather satellite Himawari-8 in October of 2014.)
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