The Great Waterway of Life

When a person encounters a river,

he/she is confronted by the following questions:

Where did it originate?

Which way is it flowing?

Where is it Destined to end up?

How deep is it?

How much flotsam and jetsam is it carrying?

What size shipping can it support?

How potable is it for drinking?

* * * * * * * * * * *

When a person encounters another person,

The questions are much the same.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Preface

Water flows downhill.  It’s what water does in a gravitational field.  It “gravitates” along a path of least resistance and most natural inclination – unless or until it meets a barrier it can’t overcome.  Then it either sinks into oblivion or becomes a brackish pond within and around which opportunistic scavengers proliferate. 

The extent to which a water puddle or pond has an ample continuing water supply is the extent to which it can grow into a much bigger pond or lake and eventually breach the crest of the barrier to continue on its way. 

With proper oversight and intervention, water can be directed to serve multiple useful purposes.  It can provide life-sustaining hydration, sanitation, irrigation, and recreation, and can even supply heavy industry with both power and fluidic formulations and processing capacity.   

Without direction and proper containment, water can cause major devastation, including erosion, floods and mud slides that can wipe out entire communities. 

Without water, life, as we know it, does not exist.  Without strategically directed and managed water, life is simply a “catch-as-catch-can”, tenuous existence. 

Get strategically directed and learn to manage You, Inc.,

as a purposeful and productive resource.

Quartermaster

______________________________

We begin life in a very protected, small pond – the nuclear family – with a wellspring of provisions for any and every exigency, as well as plentiful doting engagement.  It’s an idyllic existence.  By age two, we learn the power of the word “No!” and we’re ready to take on the world!   

But to expand our horizons for full-scale sailing, we must – eventually – move progressively into larger and deeper ponds.  Staying in a small pond too long makes the inevitable transition to independent navigation more cumbersome and often jolting.   

Learning early to swim is a significant advantage.  Learning “Seamanship and Piloting” and how to construct and maintain a sea-worthy craft affords much greater advantages, allowing one to move much further into deeper waters with expanded opportunity.   

Final Note

For maximum usefulness, water must be de-sedimented, sanitized, filtered, and, sometimes, turned into steam (see “Asymptosis”).  Then it must be fortified with special attributes it may not already possess.  In the human analogy, macro-attributes of knowledge, skills and experience are optimally complemented by micro-attributes (“Non-Cognitive Skills”), such as  noble goals/purpose, responsibility, initiative, flexibility, tenacity/persistence, communication, helpfulness/cooperation, service-mentality, creativity, and a sense of humor.    

What’s your capacity for “Carrying the Water”, which way are you flowing, where are you Destined to end up, how “Deep” are you, how much flotsam and jetsam are you carrying, what size shipping can you support and how “potable” is YOU, Inc.? 

The extent to which water is useful, life-supporting and enterprise-sustaining is the extent to which it is valued, protected and embellished for even greater purposes (viz., pharmaceuticals, specialized reagents of all kinds, etc.).  You, Inc. is approximately 97% water.  Pour yourself liberally into the mainstream.  Wade in, jump in, dive in and become a significant contributor in the Great Waterway of life!  Quartermaster

 

Asymptosis

Appearances can be deceiving.  Here are some scenarios that can’t be taken completely at face value:

I.              Nearing the end of the regular season in baseball, and in preparation for the World Series for 2013, it all comes down to one or two games to be won or lost by a very few teams left in the running.  One or two games …

II.            A promotional piece for a popular motivational book “212 Degrees: The Extra Degree” by Sam Parker and Mac  Anderson states the following:

At 211° water is hot. At 212°, it boils. And with boiling water, comes steam. And with steam, you can power a train. The one extra degree makes the difference. The 212° mindset inspires the extra level of effort that produces exponential results.

Only 1 (ONE) degree …

III.           The Ed Sullivan show was credited with launching a significant number of “Overnight Successes”, including the Beatles, in the mid-20^th century.  A single appearance …

 But the WHOLE TRUTH is a little more complicated. 

I.      To get to that single “defining” game in the season, a baseball team must already have won more than 80 out of 150+ games during the preceding 6 month span of the regular season.  And they must have gotten progressively better during the season; during the final stretch, they will very likely face teams that have already beaten them during the regular season and have gotten better, and they will have to outplay the very best teams in both leagues to win the final World Series pennant.  

II.    To get to 211 degrees Fahrenheit (99.4 degrees Celsius), a pot of water must already have consumed 1 calorie per gram per degree Celsius.  But that final ONE DEGREE (or 0.6!) rise in temperature to boil water and create steam comes at an extraordinarily high cost: The heat required to raise the temperature of water a SINGLE degree between the temperatures of 0 and 99 degrees Celsius (210.2 degrees Fahrenheit) is 1 calorie per gram of water, whereas the heat required to raise the temperature of water from 99 to 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit) – and, thus, create steam – is 539 calories per gram = 539 times the amount of energy per gram per degree it cost just to get to that point!  This incredible blast is called the “heat of vaporization” – roughly equivalent to sending molecular rockets into space. 

III.   Malcolm Gladwell underscores the reality behind “Overnight Successes” in his book “Outliers”, pointing out that breaking into the mainstream as a top level performer requires no less than 10,000 hours of time investment in progressive development.  

One can add to these examples the fabrication and filling of a dam for production of hydroelectric power.  No power gets generated until the dam is high enough for gravity-fed water to run the generators and until the water fills the reservoir behind the dam.  Hoover Dam, located on the Colorado River between Nevada and Arizona, took 5 years to build.  Then it took an additional 20 months to fill Lake Mead behind the dam to a level capable of producing power.  Of no small consequence, a total of 112 men died during construction of the dam. 

So we need to understand that much of life is a stretch beyond mere stepping stones on level ground.  And, generally, the higher you go, the tougher it gets.  Exponential results require exponential energy and are not won by simple degrees.  This is represented graphically by the asymptotic curve below, which shows that the closer one gets to a Goal, the more energy one must expend to make tangible progress. 

The good news is that if we keep piling up capacities and consistently overcoming the associated challenges, we can eventually start generating the power required to move us ahead.  Anyone who ever thought or said it would be easy or that significant sacrifices would not be required is either living under a rock or selling snake oil.  Quartermaster

“The heights which great men reached and kept

Were not attained by sudden flight,

But they, while their companions slept*,

Were toiling upward in the night.”

 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“The Ladder of St. Augustine”

*… alternatively, were watching television, Tweeting, Twittering, Texting, playing video games …

Lifecourse Diagram

Ain’t life grand! 

Most of us come into the world with a complete set of equipment on board, which only needs time and nurturing to fully develop.  By age 1, most of us are walking, by age two, we’re talking, by age 5-7, we’re reading, we matriculate through the educational system, advancing each year to a new grade, by age 16 we get a driver’s license, by 18 more than half of us graduate high school, and at age 21 we’re declared “adults” with all the independent rights, privileges, amenities, immunities and entitlements thereunto appertaining.  Wow! 

But what happens “NEXT” is a sobering “New Reality”. 

·         Some “lucky” ones make it, but more than a few “unlucky” ones don’t. 

·         A significant number of ostensibly “privileged” find themselves woefully unstrung.

·         And a significant number of “underprivileged” rise to the top despite overwhelming odds and challenges. 

What is it about “NEXT” that’s different and why such a colossal divergence/dichotomy – all-of-a-sudden, never-so-much-too-soon? 

Clues about “NEXT” are found in looking at what’s happening – and what’s already happened – above and below the waterline of survival and behind the front stage scenery.  Much of the divergence/dichotomy centers around intrinsic disparities: Disparities in expectations, assumptions and presumed entitlements; disparities in understanding what got us to age 21; and disparities in understanding what life is going to require of us the rest of the way to our ultimate Destiny.  [NOTE: This discourse does not seek to diminish the fact that there are very real extrinsic disparities, such as in wealth, privilege and opportunity.  However, the focus here is on disparities in vision over which the individual has some presumptive control.  We first need to eliminate those disparities, divergences and dichotomies and “GET WITH THE PROGRAM”.] 

More graphically, what’s happening above and below the waterline of survival looks like this (see figure below): 

In the beginning … 100 percent of our wellbeing is provided by significant others – mainly our parents and immediate family.  Financial estimates for 2013 suggest that it requires approximately $250,000 to raise a child from birth to age 18 = roughly $14,000 per year.  That’s not counting the sweat equity of nurturing or intellectual capital contributions.  Add in the societal cost for libraries, schools, roads, city and state parks, police, fire and emergency responders, community programs, etc., and it comes close to $350,000 – just short of $20,000 per year.  

But that’s about as far as the train goes, boomerang homesteading notwithstanding.  This is not a sustainable world order paradigm!  Society’s contribution is an investment, not a hand-out, and it expects that investment to pay dividends.  It is a term-limited proposition that eventually runs out. 

With time, we are expected to put in increasing amounts of our own sweat equity, do more of our own nurturing and invest our own intellectual capital – to the full extent we are able, not just to the extent we are “willing” – eventually reaching and then going beyond the point of independent survival (approximately 10,000 hours, according to Malcolm Gladwell), and ultimately contributing toward the success of the greater social order and next generation.  A “New Reality”-based transformation to productive, self-disciplined self-coaching is required. 

To do less – e.g., with willful defiance in the pursuit of pleasure and diversion while artfully side-stepping responsibility with profuse excuses and explanations … salted and peppered with indignant claims of injustice – is to endanger our Dreams, Destiny, sanity and overall wellbeing while engendering frustration, stress, anger, bewilderment, hopelessness, bitterness and regret.  

So mere, sheer survival is not alone the goal … albeit, betimes, as much as we can muster.  Mastering ourselves and our circumstances to a point of thriving, with navigability in deep water, is the goal.  There we find the importance and value of a completely different social contract involving much higher denomination investments.  Whereas we start out as “consumers”, we need to transform to “producers”, then to “sellers”, for which we need willing “buyers”.  Our job is to bend the line of societal investment forward toward our own Destiny – making ourselves “investable” … worthy of gold bond investing by highly significant others.   This we do by being, creating and offering someone/something of intrinsic, authentic worth.  Worth-y-ness is where True Destiny begins.  Your fulfillment IS worth it.  Make it so.  Quartermaster