positive science and exact demonstrations

Hurrah for positive science! Long live exact demonstration!
Fetch stonecrop and mix it with cedar and branches of lilac;
This is the lexicographer or chemist...this made a grammar of the old cartouches,
These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas,
This is the geologist, and this works with the scalpel, and this is a mathematician.

Gentlemen I receive you, and attach and clasp hands with you,
The facts are useful and real...they are not my dwelling...I enter by them to an area of the dwelling.

I am less the reminder of property or qualities, and more the reminder of life,-
-Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

I've spent minutes and hours and months over the past few years learning about the sciences. I've bent over graduated cylinders and beakers and painstakingly titrated acids and bases. I can draw long chemistry reactions on the board and show you how electrons hop from atom to atom to create specific molecules that we can manipulate for personal use. I can tell you the number of CFU's of a certain organism are in a given sample of food, provided I have the proper lab equipment. I can draw you structures of amino acids and tell you which ones our body can synthesize and which ones we have to consume in order to avoid PEM. I can use NMR spectroscopy and IR absorptions to come up with molecular structures.

But at the end of the day, I walk outside to my car. Sometimes it's dark outside and sometimes it's not. But as I walk to my car, I can look at the mountains and everything else I love and sometimes I think "The facts are useful and real...they are not my dwelling...I enter by them to an area of the dwelling."

That "area of the dwelling" is a plethora of things.

But mostly it has to do with all the things that bring joy. It's life, but more than that, it's life so real and vibrant and passionate that you can't qualify it through reactions or quantify it with numbers. Sometimes I forget that after hours in the library or in a lab. And the question begs answering--if all that one learns in school--those facts, those things--if they are not my dwelling, than why do they matter?

They matter because all those things and many other things add up to create the "Carpe Diem" moment. That moment where all of you just kind of comes together and you just freaking seize the day. Over and over and over again throughout an entire lifetime. I think that's why I love research, why I love exploring, why I love learning, and traveling, and reading. Science and math and facts from the pages of history--all of it can be used to pursue life wholeheartedly. It exists outside of the books. It explodes into real life.

Happiness is hard to measure. In fact, experts within international development have struggled with how to measure "happiness" and "satisfaction" for decades, and I think that we still haven't figured it out. Maybe it's not possible. But it's what I'm trying to make my dwelling.

And as I walk, I think

"I am less the reminder of property or qualities, and more the reminder of life--"

and I am happy.

Carpe diem, folks.