The Last Word On Nothing

The older I get, the more people I know who have lost what they could not afford to lose.  I’ll repeat:  lost means gone, unrecoverable, not coming back; and what these people lost, they still need and want.  The problem is nearly universal and has no obvious solution, or rather, the solution is idiosyncratic and not necessarily found by looking.  Somehow it just, more or less, sorts itself out.  Meanwhile, daily life must be slogged through as gracefully as possible, looking as normal as possible, staying on the surface.  Otherwise you won’t get invited to dinner parties.  Geophysicists have an inelegant phrase, “mantle drag.”

The whole earth convects.  That is, heat rises.  The heat begins in the earth’s radioactive core and rises through the surrounding mantle in plumes.  The plumes hit the earth’s surface where they cool.  And cold falls.  The mantle plumes fall back down, get re-heated and rise again.  Between the rising heat and falling cold, the moving mantle rolls over and flows along under the surface, and drags on the plates that carry the oceans and continents.   The continents rift, split, spin, drift, collide, and meld into new continents.  The earth’s surface, riding on what’s going on underneath, shifts and realigns.

And that’s the metaphor:  trust the depths because eventually they’ll transform the surface.

Credits:  statue in Dublin:  Christopher Walker

hot air rising: Gary S. Settles