Whats Happening?

 What’s Happening?

By Vern A. Westfall

“What’s happening?” or “Wie Gehts?” or “的情况怎样?” is a familiar greeting used around the world. It isn't a sincere inquiry made to illicit a full explanation, if it were, we would be hard pressed to explain everything going on in the universe at that moment. The greeting asks only, what is occurring in your life that is significant at the moment, or in the recent past? It also assumes that the greeter knows your location. If I ask you “what’s happening? And the last I knew you were in Denver, I expect your answer to reflect your recent activities in Denver. But as we have learned in previous blogs”, position and time are comparatives which are affected by motion and we have invented conventions that allow us to ignore most of reality’s swirling confusion. But if I ignore reality, and call Denver from London at 8:00 AM, I will wake you in the middle of your night. I am setting in the sunlight having a cup of tea, and if time were a real static thing you would be awake and having a cup of coffee, but instead you are trying to sleep. Your static position is relevant to my static position only in that we are sharing a ride on the surface of a giant ball that is spinning and traveling in an orbit around a star.

When I ask, “What’s happening?” and you answer, “Nothing much,” you make a universal understatement. We are bobbing up and down while we spin around on the outer arm of a spiral galaxy, racing away from hundreds of billions of other galaxies, except Andromeda, (with which we will eventually collide) and, (because of our newly invented methods of en-masse communications), are evolving a new type of living awareness.  If I accept “Nothing much” as an answer to, “What’s happening?” as a sufficient answer, I am not really expecting an answer at all, and if I explain this to you by pointing out that we are bouncing our voices off satellites in geo synchronous orbits, you will probably tell me to go to Hell, and hang up.

The point is that we are tiny specs on a tiny planet lost somewhere in space, busy feeding and breeding, trying to remain oblivious to the discoveries of our curious scientists as they expose miracle after miracle for us to explain, or ignore. We don’t have to climb to the top of a mountain on a clear night to marvel at the stars, or travel the world to marvel at the diversity and persistence of life because the curious among us have captured these marvels in language nets and as digital information and made them ready, on demand, as shared synaptic realities. Our scientists, mathematicians and philosophers are fisherman, catching facts with intellectual nets drawn through inner and outer space by tools invented to let us see further and think faster.

We have become a significant part of the many miracles that make up the magnificence around us, and when another advanced awareness from elsewhere in space eventually contacts us and asks, “Hey, what’s happening?” How will we answer?  

Hopefully it will be with something more significant than, “Nothing much.”