WaterNotes

Obsessed with Questions

I have been obsessed with questions since I was small.  “Why why why why why?”; annoying and precocious.  In other words, a giant pain in the rear.  I’ve always wanted to understand people, places, concepts, and things.  I’ve always searched for the hidden in the obvious, the subliminal messages and insights between the lines on the page.

Lately though, questions haven’t had quite their original appeal.  

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was assigned to my literature course this fall, and reading it has been an interesting ride.  I certainly fall into what the author defines as a romantic personality.  I’m drawn to the whole instead of the parts and process in systems.  I find symbolism meaningful.  I see the big connections.

The main character - if you can call a veritable split personality a single character - goes through a crises in his early life as a scientist.  Questions lost their appeal.  The sense of ‘knowing’ something lost its meaning.

I’m in the same state.  Every question I ask in science yields more questions in an ever-radiating-outward spiral.  Zen proposes that its a flaw in the scientific process.  I cant decide if  I agree.  I do know, however, that I could probably dedicate my life to understanding how seagrasses uptake iron through their roots by working out the fine points of signal transduction in root tissue and pinning down the sequence of genetic cascades and messages that make it all happen. 

I could probably take on a project with seahorses and decide, for all time, why some of them grow fanciful hairdo’s (called cirri) and some dont.  Or the reason for spots on whale sharks.

For what?  For the far-out chance that someone, somewhere, will follow behind me in my career and take up the ball and continue the study? 

I think I’m past that.  I’m past the intellectually satisfying questions and beginning to see myself taking a position that uses knowledge to effect change.  

I want to be the person who realizes that seagrasses can be grown in coffee filters and transplanted with a 62% success rate.  I want to be the person who realizes that anchoring macroalgae-mats in disturbed seagrass areas encourages fish to recolonize the habitat.  I want to be the person quantifying the seahorse populations and pressing for public policy that will protect these little fish and their seagrass homes.  I want to be the person who’s out in the field, holding her nose against the sulfide smell of the mud, quantifying shoots and seeds.   

I’d rather be the person that makes things happen instead of idly sitting back in a lab, safe in my slow collection and publication of knowledge, hoping for a better world.

I’m tired of hoping.  Aren’t you?  Aren’t you sick of listening to the endless warnings and calls to action?  Aren’t you sick of hearing about the end of the world and feeling powerless? 

Hope can be a deadly narcotic if we let it rob us of our ability to change the world around us right now.

Lets make it happen.  Lets run away from our lab coats and into the water.  Lets remember that all this learning and knowledge doesn’t mean a thing if we aren’t using it towards an idea of a better world.