Life presents us with opportunities

By Greg Bird

One of the endearing tendencies of human beings is to occasionally step out of living our daily lives and reflect on understanding this larger thing we’re wrapped up in.

Individually, our lives are significantly comprehensible. Eating, eliminating, seeing, hearing, speaking, touching, working, thinking, sleeping—all and more are done daily and are the substance of our lives. Our memories and consciousness provide familiarity with our lives led to this point.

But even our individual lives involve millions of other individual lives that are the subject of constant and hugely expensive study—just to understand those lives that occur inside our bodies. The bacteria living in our gut and elsewhere, which help digest the food that nurtures us, are only visually perceptible with the aid of expensive and precisely-crafted machines only recently developed in the course of human history. Then there are the discrete players of our body systems, which act out their appointed tasks with considerable, though directed, autonomy—another seeming set of lives inside each of us.

Then there are other sets of lives—those legions of people whose work lives are spent perfecting a body of knowledge about these discrete beings’ lives, so as to be able to understand enough about the interactions of all these lives to make intelligent interventions that may help to extend an individual person’s conscious time in quantity and quality.

And all these efforts extend across any landscape people have come to perceive since time began.

Some might consider the exercise of writing about the question of “What is Life? ” annoying and pointless, “navel-gazing,” “wheel-spinning,” impractical. But such efforts are nothing new and take their place within a grand tradition. The discoveries that fill up the lives most of us lead, with conveniences of services and products, were all at some fundamental level consequences of efforts by people to better answer the “What is Life?” question.

So, cynics, your protests are just. They help with betterment. Someday, such may be confessed, and your purposes may become positively helpful.

Meanwhile, life has other characteristics that get at the “what” of it. Those characteristics dance around the other questions—“Who?”, “Where?”, “How?”, “When?”, ‘Why?”. So, as life is wont to do, it probes and stretches efforts to contain it. In doing so, there is competition and cooperation.

Life, then, at its most basic and unimpeachable, is not one thing. Life defies a simple label, some neat encapsulation that would end debate about it. For all the countless efforts over milennia to settle the question, it hasn’t happened. Yet the question still fascinates for a while, because beyond just being fascinated about life, the largest portion of our time living must be spent enjoying what we do with life, and not getting wrapped in a knot trying to figure out what life is.

Now that the stage has been set a bit, it’s time to focus, for the purpose of this brief attempt, on some facet of life.

A part of peoples’ lives that is particularly pressing would present a subset of life that would be likely to be useful.

Energy is such a pressing issue. What is life when it comes to our energy uses?

First, just as it is in government policy about using energy, the question must be addressed as to how we use energy in our lives. What are our lives like using less, as energy costs rise?

Some may look at life as having more of a challenge, and be invigorated to meet the mental tasks of finding survival practices. A positive attitude is usually important to success in life. So, part of what life is has to do with is the opportunity to choose how we look at life.

With the projected shortages and increased costs of energy, life is presenting us with the opportunity to be part of an enormous societal and economic change that will set lifestyles for many generation to come.

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Greg Bird is an inventor who calls Milwaukee's Bay View neighborhood home. He has lived, traveled, and studied across the United States and closely follows local and national politics. Often found at public meetings or at conferences related to energy, environmental, or lake issues—and not shy about vocalizing technical questions that force committees to adjust their agendas—Bird is a civic critic but also a consummate citizen. He lives as he preaches, bicycling whenever possible, advocating wind power to anyone who will listen, and drafting letters to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as often as their policies allow. He is a proponent of "bioregionalism," as articulated by M. Mcginnis, and also advocates replacing survey-staked, straight-line municipal boundaries with natural boundaries like watersheds so that governments will better respect natural environments in making decisions about human environments.