Life according to Pi

In my pursuit to watch all the academy awards nominees for Best Motion Picture I recently went and watched Ang Lee's "Life of Pi". First off, I like movies that make you think, and this movie did just that. Enough so that I walked an extra round around my block before returning home because I needed to process what I had just seen. Without spoiling anything, the movie asks the viewer to make up his own mind as to the stories being told in the film, and through that choice determine whether or not you are a believer. I do not really care for the religious message in the film but I do like that it leaves interpretation fully up to the viewer. (Which is always the case in some sense) Besides that there is some beautiful cinematography in this film, very fitting for the 3D format in which I saw it. Some of the images definitely stuck in my mind especially the CG animals that crowd the film, most notably one of the lead characters, the tiger Richard Parker. My own favorite animal, sharks, made numerous appearances as well, the one that I remember most vividly is the sharks fighting it out with a hippo underwater at night. Pretty stunning image! The stunning imagery continues in my favorite scene in the film when Pi and Richard Parker are both on the brink of starvation and Richard Parker is gazing into the abyss below. The camera then tracks his view into the depths and reveals the plethora of life that exists beneath the waves in a dreamy, surreal manner. Seldom has my love of the oceans been so beautifully condensed into on sequence. That scene also reminded me of my earlier idea of everything in the world happening at once, see the post entitled The Water is Still Running in the Niagara Falls. As a Divemaster I have a natural fascination of the underwater world that goes back to when I was a kid. Particularly the open and deep ocean is something that continues to fascinate me today. Just thinking about what amazing scenes take place deep below the waves where no human eye can see blows my mind. Just imagine, kilometers below the surface giant squids are fighting to the death with sperm whales as featured in the scene in "Life of Pi". The ocean is such a treasure trove of life where only a brink of it ever comes into contact with humans. Doing my Deep Diver Specialty here in Sydney some months ago I had a genuine Circle of Life moment doing my safety stop after diving to 40 meters. Just below the surface right in front of my face was these small blue cylindrical shapes, no longer than half a centimeter. At first I thought they were just thrash pieces floating around but when I approached one with my finger it actually jetted away from me. It was alive, I was surrounded by tiny life forms. And that after a dive which had offered more convenient oceanic life such as sharks, rays and fish. That experience further enhanced my fascination of the deep and expanded my own personal world, as explained in the Niagara post. That is something that often strikes me when looking at the waves, especially at open seas, how much stuff is going on right now under the waves, just like Richard Parker in the film. This realization is sometimes overwhelming to the point of being scary which is something I will come back to when I get around to writing about one of my favorite authors; H.P. Lovecraft, who also has a morbid fascination with the mysteries of the deep.

The road taken

One thing that keeps striking me about life is how big a part coincidences play in deciding where you end up. Think about all your best friends, how did you meet them? Mostly through school, geography or work probably. In that sense which school your parents send you to as a kid, where you grow up or what job you end up getting greatly helps shape who your friends are going to be. In my own experience, it's always through some random conversation at a crowded bar or casually zapping over different channels on the TV that suddenly form ideas and concepts about a following course of action. Ideas forming like that are highly dependent on circumstance, be at the right place at the right time sort of thing or as a friend recently put it, "the planets just aligned". This I guess is what people term as "fate". An extraordinary set of coincidences that lead you through life on a set course. What I don't like about fate is the idea of a set course. Like Neo from "The Matrix" I don't like the idea of not being in control of my own destiny. I need to know I have a choice. Choice and fate can co-exist though. The way I see it we are free to choose our own destiny, but in doing so we are all highly dependent on coincidences in guiding our decisions. These coincidences determine what information is presented to us when, and what people we come into contact with thus further assisting us onwards on our "set course". This course is however a one-way traffic road with no going back. Thus it can be determined as fate, as life can only be lived once and nothing ever happens twice or differently. What is is and there is no changing it, but that does not mean you do not have a choice to decide for yourself where your road takes you. And because there is no going back on this road, there is absolutely no sense in wondering about the hypothetical "road not taken" as made famous by Robert Frost. The road not taken does not exist as there is only one road and that is the one you are always on. Things can only happen the way they do and you just have to follow wherever your road takes you. Your choices in doing this are always half-chance, but I take comfort in the thought whatever direction I let my road take me, it is the way it was supposed to be and thus unchangeable. To bring back the concept of fate, you can then say that everything does happen for a reason as things can only happen in one way and thus everything that propels you forward on your road serves exactly that purpose, to move you forward. Where the road takes you however is totally up to choice and coincidence.

The water is still running over Niagara Falls

The first epiphany I'd like to share is one I had a while back on a bus ride from Lima to Cuzco in Peru. Crossing up into the Andes mountains in the middle of the night, the night sky was absolutely incredible. A sight like that puts everything into context, and it was then I realized just how big and complex our world is.

My journey to this realization had begun a week or so earlier when I visited the Iguassu Falls in Brazil and Argentina. My friend whom I was travelling with had earlier asked me to compare my experience of Iguassu with my earlier visit to Niagara Falls and Angel Falls years before, to decide which waterfall was the most impressive. Unbeknownst to both of us he had thus primed my mind to make a connection between the two waterfalls that would later result in my epiphany up in the Andes. The connection was established later that same day after our visit to El Gargante del Diablo, the single most impressive waterfall of Iguassu. Staring into the huge watermasses plummeting down the Devil's Throat, I did think of Niagara Falls to determine which were more impressive. In doing so it suddenly occurred to me that at that very moment while I was looking at the water of Gargante del Diablo, the watermasses I had witnessed in Niagara was still running in all its impressive grandeur as when I visited. Walking back a Brazilian guy who lived in our hostel asked me an apt and great question: "Did you have any philosophical thoughts while looking at the waterfall?" Through his question I realized that I had actually had an enlightenment of sorts, that a place I visited years ago is still the same as when I visited and what went on that day is still going on today with new visitors receiving the same impressions I did when I visited. It wasn't until the aforementioned bus ride however that I put the thought into perspective. Looking at the night sky over the Andes mountains I realized that all the places I had ever been to was still there as living and vibrant as when I was there. I guess I had just lived in an "out of sight, out of mind" state not really realizing how much stuff is actually going on at any given time in the world. It's like your mind creates a world out of the places you have actually physically visited, whereas when you only here about a place you only have an abstract idea of what that place is like. There fore the more places you go to, the more places you explore, the larger your own personal concept of the world becomes. I guess that is also why it took me a while to get to this realization, as I have now been to 17 % of the world (at least according to one of my Facebook apps) and has thus stacked up a great arsenal of actual places in my own personal world, making me realize the vastness of the globe. Every single place I have ever been regardless of when I went, is still there right now at this very moment, being explored or revisited by others or maybe enjoying peaceful seclusion waiting to be re-explored. Once you realize this, I mean really think about it, it really puts existence into context and lets you appreciate the size of our world. Looking at the night sky in addition made me realize how many empty spaces are out there in the universe, actually existing right now even though not a single person on this planet has ever been there. Looking at the stars always puts things into perspective for me, and never more so than on that night in Peru.

Welcome to my new blog

Greetings,

Since I am currently holding the job of night receptionist at a fashionable hostel in Sydney and have many quiet waking nighttime hours to pass, I now have ample opportunity to start a blog which is an idea that has lingered in the back of my head quite a while now. It will also fill the writing vacuum that my leaving university last summer has left, giving me a chance to keep up my written English skills with maybe the occasional post in Danish, just to keep up my mother tongue as well. As the name of the blog suggests, I will try sharing some of those interesting thoughts that occasionally just blind-sides you at 4 am on some idle Tuesday, the thoughts that really makes sense of the world around you. Besides that, I will however also be posting about more down to earth subjects like my continued travels and impressions received on places and persons encountered along the way, as well as reviews of books, films, tv-shows and other creative output that tickles my fancy, both new and old. Those at least are my intentions at the get-go, yet since I am a blog-virgin I am confident that they may change back and forth several times along the way in what will hopefully be a recurring habit of posting, even after I leave my nighttime job. So stay tuned for some Danish insights into this amazing world in which we are fortunate to be alive in!