While love and happiness prevail, my mind nevertheless wanders and wonders a lot. I see homeless people and realize that with only a wrong decision or two, that could have been me. I have been lucky, Very lucky.
I consider my life to be a success. Of the 117 billion born, surely I rank in the top one-tenth of one percent. In other words I am among the best 11.7 million Homo sapiens who ever lived. I'm tempted to improve this by another order of magnitude to 1.17 million, for it has only been in the past century that life became tolerable for most, but all this analysis is meaningless, for what is success?
In this thoughtful mood, I looked back on certain points in my life and wondered where I would be today if I made another decision.
- A big one was, which college?
- As a junior at McKinley High School in Honolulu I was only an above-average student, with no athletic talent and little social skills.
- Then my life changed. My blog describes this all.
- I did not bother to apply to the University of Hawaii, for I had the naive notion that either Stanford or CalTech would accept me.
Well, amazingly enough, both did, and I went to Stanford because they offered a complete support package that paid for everything, and even included a 2 hours/night from 6-8PM job in the library's rare book room. No one came, so that was their way of forcing me to study 2 hours/night.
But what if I had selected the California Institute of Technology?- In a way, that would have made more sense because my brother worked at the Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory in Port Hueneme, quite close to the Pasadena campus.
- Stanford steered me into chemical engineering.
- CalTech would have made me a scientist.
- But could I even graduate from CalTech, for a close friend I made during the summer months working at the Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory was clearly smarter than me, and was struggling with nearly failing grades, even though he studied all the time. Much later in life I googled Gary Chamness, and he was some kind of science professor at a good university.
At Stanford, they figured their selection process worked, and studying all the time was not part of campus life. They wanted you to expand your experiences. No one really flunked out. However, the high percentage of potential scientists/engineers mostly became economists and sociologists.
Stanford allowed me to take as many art courses as those in chemical engineering, and taught me how to balance my life.- I would probably have been a scientist if I went to CalTech, and would have had a totally different kind of job experience and lifestyle. I probably would have lived on the mainland for the rest of my life.
Getting married to Pearl was certainly part of my success, for she worked as a nurse when I went through the PhD process. There was always a job for her, whether in Hawaii, Baton Rouge or Washington DC. Another person and life would have been different. Children would have changed the life equation. She provided that balance to my life.
In my second year at the University of Hawaii before receiving tenure, the state of Hawaii had economic problems and notified all newly-hired faculty that they might not be continued. I was that summer working of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and again, life would have taken me elsewhere had I quit the UH.
The same thing happened the following summer when I was then working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on laser fusion. I left the lab 45 years ago, and a major breakthrough was finally made just about exactly a year ago. If the opportunity to work for the U.S. Senate had not come, I would probably still be living in Livermore, adjacent to the Wente Brothers grape fields. Gets up to 115 F in the summer. 45 miles from San Francisco.
Three years in the U.S. Senate changed my life. I could have stayed there for a very long time, but the University of Hawaii offered me tenure, so I went back in 1982, leading to a life in renewable energy, the Blue Revolution and everything else academia offers.
All those decisions and non-decisions above led to my life today, And it's been a productive one, awaiting completion. Or, in other words, I've planted seeds, and they show promise for germination, leading to pathways for Saving Planet Earth and Humanity. One of my postings, I'm Always Chasing Rainbows, describes the following. Click on each to read the details.
- The Blue Revolution.
- Hawaiian Onsens.
- Contact with Extraterrestrial Intelligence. This is another good link. And a third, describing an effort I made more than half a century ago to detect extrasolar planets before any was ever found. Oh heck, a fourth, on SETI. Or fifth, an excerpt from my book on Simple Solutions for Humanity.
While scrolling back in this blog site to find the references for the above list, I happened to see The Blue Revolution is the Optimal Solution for Japan. Read the comments. Most interesting. I recently had dinner in Japan with a current national leader in ocean development, and he showed interest in this specific subject. I will send him this link, which derives from my HuffPo, and add a TEDx talk I made a year ago.
I now live in a senior community in Honolulu, 15 Craigside, secure and comfortable. Maybe I'm close to being back in euphoria after just returning from a 5-week trip to Japan, looking forward to a lengthy around the world adventure next spring. Perhaps before that one of those above projects might suddenly come alive. But if not, life is good and I'm happy and contented.
So how do you make the right decision? Maybe the following might best explain my life.
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