Facebook And The Soundtrack Of My Life

   About a week and a half ago, to celebrate its 10th birthday, Facebook did the service of allowing us to view our individual "Look Back" videos.
   These were one minute vignettes of selected posts and pics that were deemed the most popular, or "viewed", dating back to when we each joined the social media site.
   I was moved by mine. I understand that many of us were and that some of us were even moved to tears.
   None of us saw pictures or posts we'd never seen before, obviously, and yet we were still moved.
   For me, it was the music.
   Yes, music was a big part of it but it was also the juxtaposition of the music and the particular photos that appeared on my video which truly touched me.
   For the most part, they were family-oriented and significant--pictures of our wedding, kids, and both of my parents.
   These pics were already significant to me but combining them with music and streaming them through my consciousness in such a manner seemed to give them that much more significance.
   I guess that's what a soundtrack will do, it will provide that extra aural and emotional context to what you are seeing. How many movies can you think of that are hard to separate from the music that accompanied them? Hard to imagine such movies as Gone With The Wind, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, The Pink Panther, Jurassic Park, Lawrence of Arabia and Pulp Fiction without the iconic music which accompanied them. One of my all-time favourite scenes from any movie occurs during Jurassic Park, at the moment when the visitors to the island come across dinosaurs for the first time. They are brought, literally, to their knees as the scope of what they are seeing becomes apparent. At this point in the movie, John Williams' music is both soaring and majestic as man comes face-to-face with...well...history. In my mind, an indelible moment is created as much because of the music as for any other reason.
   Without thinking about it too much, we took pictures. For a variety of reasons, we gathered up pictures which had already been taken. If the mood struck us, we said something that other people might have thought was pertinent, important or perhaps humourous. Singly, the significance of all these actions was possibly not obvious to us. String them together, though, and then add music and all this changes somehow.
   So does the music just add emotion or does it bring out the emotion that was already intrinsically there? Does it act somehow in a similar way as alcohol, heightening the emotional intensity of a relationship to a person or event?
   It's almost as if music breaks down whatever subconscious defense mechanism we've deployed to keep ourselves on the even emotional keel which gets us through our days. Throw in a little music, however, and we are emotional in a variety of ways over things which did not seem terribly momentous at the time they actually occurred.
   If you are at all like me, you may have been just a touch creeped out that Facebook was even able to do these videos. I realize that none of the pictures or statuses on my Facebook page are truly private but I was trying hard to imagine that nobody was paying any attention to, or had any vested interest in, them. This seems to not be the case. In an example of marketing at its low-key best, Facebook has wormed its way into our hearts and all it took was adding a little music to the soundtrack of our life. 
  
  
  

Escape Velocity (You Wanna Live To Be A Thousand?)

   Many, many years ago, I wrote something (a poem?) in which I postulated that ours was the first generation in the history of the world which had any sort of expectation of living forever.

   I stated this simply because of all the medical advances which (at that time) had been made and not because I was privy to any scientific knowledge which wasn't already available to the masses.
   Last week, as I was rooting around on the internet in an attempt to find out some info on Masters athletes, I came across websites which described terms such as "escape velocity", "actuarial escape velocity" or "longevity escape velocity". They were used in reference to the aging process and described the point at which the speed of the advancements in the medical treatment of age-related deterioration exceeded the speed of the deterioration itself.
   One website quoted well-known biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey as theorizing that the first person to live to be 150 has already been born and that in another 20 years the first person to live to be 1,000 will have been born.
   I found this both staggering and fascinating at the same time.
   It throws the world as we know it way out of whack.
   Not that we consciously think about it throughout our everyday life, but we run that same life under the assumption that we're going to die some day relatively soon.
   We set aside money for retirement, write wills, seek adventure and change relationships.
   What would you do differently, though, if you knew you were going to live for a thousand years?
   Because I am under the assumption that I'm going to die sometime soon, I am also planning my retirement and have begun to "count the days". With a lifespan of a thousand years, though, would I then be looking at working for eight hundred of those years? Think about that for a moment and tell me if you find that appealing. Exactly how would you spend a thousand years of your life?


Typical weekend at the beach?

   Back that many years ago when I talked about our generation looking at the possibility of living forever, I also envisioned bodies lacking in vitality. Aubrey de Grey, however, believes that medical advances will make the human body quite viable, giving way to the prospect of being actually able to enjoy our greatly increased lifespan.
   What then concerns me most, though, is what kind of a world will there be to live in?
   Our world, in many parts of it, is a nasty place and is becoming nastier all the time. We also live under the constant threat of terrorism and what seems to be the increased risk of nuclear conflict. Should these threats ever come to full fruition, I think the world will not be a place you'd want to live in, particularly for another 800 years!
   I like the idea of longevity. Part of the deal with "escape velocity" was that you need to be healthy enough to live until these medical advances become available. I personally just wanted to be healthy until the end of my life, say in my mid-eighties or so. I never figured on living anywhere from 150 to a thousand years. I was never aiming, and still am not, to attain "escape velocity".
   Think of a world where no-one dies a natural death. If nothing else, think how crowded it would be. At some point we would at least feel as though we were all shoulder-to-shoulder. You would have the opportunity to meet your great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren but how familiar would you be with any of them and how could you possibly play a real role in their lives. So what would be the point?
   I strongly suspect that, given the opportunity to live several hundred years, we would choose death at some point. When there were no new things to experience and the world was closing in on you, death would be the only thing left that would seem like both an adventure and an escape with a velocity of its own. 
  

A Sad Week In Running

   Last week was a sad one if you were a runner. Twice, the running world was shocked and saddened to hear of the deaths of Meg Menzies earlier in the week and then James Callaghan, a few days later.
   Both died while doing something they loved...running.
   Meg died as the result of being struck by an alleged intoxicated driver. James' death is still under investigation but it is believed he was struck twice by vehicles as he lay on a road in dense fog. There is speculation that he may either have been on the road due to a hit-and-run or possibly due to a medical emergency.
   Regardless of who you are and what you do, the death of these two people, long before their time, is sad and unspeakable. If you are a runner, their deaths carry an extra sting.

Meg

   Were I not a runner, it's quite possible that I may not even have known about these sad events. Runners tend to be absorbed by what they do, however, and because we spend as much time as we do following runners and running bloggers the sad news spread quickly.
   While out running Saturday morning, I thought of Meg and James quite a bit. Actually, runners from all over the world were being asked to run in Meg's honour that day and I understand that over 90,000 runners did just that. We are a unified bunch!
   I am still trying to figure out, though, why such a response.
   I think there is a visceral response every time a young mother dies. Not to diminish the role of a father but you start off your life inside your mother and it is through her that most of your needs are met as a child. Whenever a mother is taken too soon, you center in on her kids. And you remember that you were once a kid and the pain then becomes almost palpable.
   For a variety of sad reasons, we lose young mothers all the time and not too many of those losses invoke 90, 000 heartfelt responses, as they did in Meg's case.
   So the running aspect of her death comes into play. Not only was she a runner who died, she died running!
   Probably only once in a blue moon, as I'm lacing up before a run, do I think about the inherent danger in what I am about to do. From the beginning, I followed all the suggested safety tips around traffic, visibility, weather and the odd wacko out there but then that became pretty routine. For the most part, I am able to stay on sidewalks or find places to run where there is no vehicular traffic. Cars are sometimes a nuisance but my experience so far is that they do their best to steer clear.
   In no small way, though, this has now changed. For me and I suspect a lot of runners, the reality of what can happen has hit home, like a hammer to the heart. The vast majority of us will continue to run but I suspect we may somehow run differently, without taking the act as much for granted as we used to.
   As a life activity, a love of running can sometimes be difficult to explain to someone who doesn't run. With most other life activities, at the end there's generally something to show for it---a painting, a knitted  scarf, a carving or sculpture, perhaps a piece of writing. At the end of a run you have...nothing. Well, nothing that can be seen. What's more, along the way you likely suffered some level of pain or discomfort for all your effort. In this way, it's difficult to justify the activity to the uninitiated.


James

   My point is that I think there's something special about running and that we as runners experience it but, at the same time, are both a little mystified by and also somewhat in awe of it. And because it takes on an almost spiritual aspect, when one of us is affected in such a drastic way as Meg and James were this week, then by a strange ripple effect we are all both shaken and moved. Our response is to do that which binds us all together. Run.
   By all accounts, Meg and James were wonderful people with wonderful families. In a world where bad things seem to happen to good people, we are all left, once again, trying to make sense of it all. James was a loving father of four whose death has received less of a public response but his passing hits a little closer to me, a middle-aged man. As mentioned above, there is some speculation that he may have ended up on the road as the result of a medical emergency before he was even struck by vehicles there in the dense fog. I personally am in good health but am also at that age where the risk of a stroke or heart attack, particularly during strenuous activity, lingers in the back of my mind and in the recesses of my chest cavity. For this reason, I was also running for James Callaghan on Saturday.
   One can only hope that if there might be some lasting legacy from a very sad week that perhaps it will be that we will all be just a little more mindful as we run and cautious as we drive. Two people are dead but some motorists' lives have been horribly altered, and possibly destroyed, as well. One of my biggest fears is that, as a driver, some brief moment of inattention on my part might result in the death of an innocent person. I'm not sure that I could live with myself if that happened and perhaps Meg and James will forever remind me that it can happen.
   Not surprisingly, their respective communities have risen up in an attempt to support both James' and Meg's grieving families. Below are two links you can access if you wish to help out. The first one is to aid Meg Menzies' family and the second is a link to the Facebook page of a running group that James Callaghan belonged to. It was a link I found in a local newspaper article about his passing and it was suggested that people could donate through this group. When I went to the link, however, I could find no way to actually donate. To date, I'm awaiting a response from the writer of the article to see if she is aware of any way to donate. When and if I receive more info on this, I will pass it on.

https://www.bonfirefunds.com/meg-cross-Menzies

https://www.facebook.com/groups/164401273668020/