The Egg by Andy Weir

You were on your way home when you died.
It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.
And that’s when you met me.
“What… what happened?” You asked. “Where am I?”
“You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words.
“There was a… a truck and it was skidding…”
“Yup,” I said.
“I… I died?”
“Yup. But don’t feel bad about it. Everyone dies,” I said.
You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. “What is this place?” You asked. “Is this the afterlife?”
“More or less,” I said.
“Are you god?” You asked.
“Yup,” I replied. “I’m God.”
“My kids… my wife,” you said.
“What about them?”
“Will they be all right?”
“That’s what I like to see,” I said. “You just died and your main concern is for your family. That’s good stuff right there.”
You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn’t look like God. I just looked like some man. Or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. More of a grammar school teacher than the almighty.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn’t have time to grow contempt for you. You wife will cry on the outside, but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it’s any consolation, she’ll feel very guilty for feeling relieved.”
“Oh,” you said. “So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?”
“Neither,” I said. “You’ll be reincarnated.”
“Ah,” you said. “So the Hindus were right,”
“All religions are right in their own way,” I said. “Walk with me.”
You followed along as we strode through the void. “Where are we going?”
“Nowhere in particular,” I said. “It’s just nice to walk while we talk.”
“So what’s the point, then?” You asked. “When I get reborn, I’ll just be a blank slate, right? A baby. So all my experiences and everything I did in this life won’t matter.”
“Not so!” I said. “You have within you all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. You just don’t remember them right now.”
I stopped walking and took you by the shoulders. “Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It’s like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it’s hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you’ve gained all the experiences it had.
“You’ve been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven’t stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you’d start remembering everything. But there’s no point to doing that between each life.”
“How many times have I been reincarnated, then?”
“Oh lots. Lots and lots. An in to lots of different lives.” I said. “This time around, you’ll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540 AD.”
“Wait, what?” You stammered. “You’re sending me back in time?”
“Well, I guess technically. Time, as you know it, only exists in your universe. Things are different where I come from.”
“Where you come from?” You said.
“Oh sure,” I explained “I come from somewhere. Somewhere else. And there are others like me. I know you’ll want to know what it’s like there, but honestly you wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh,” you said, a little let down. “But wait. If I get reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point.”
“Sure. Happens all the time. And with both lives only aware of their own lifespan you don’t even know it’s happening.”
“So what’s the point of it all?”
“Seriously?” I asked. “Seriously? You’re asking me for the meaning of life? Isn’t that a little stereotypical?”
“Well it’s a reasonable question,” you persisted.
I looked you in the eye. “The meaning of life, the reason I made this whole universe, is for you to mature.”
“You mean mankind? You want us to mature?”
“No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect.”
“Just me? What about everyone else?”
“There is no one else,” I said. “In this universe, there’s just you and me.”
You stared blankly at me. “But all the people on earth…”
“All you. Different incarnations of you.”
“Wait. I’m everyone!?”
“Now you’re getting it,” I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back.
“I’m every human being who ever lived?”
“Or who will ever live, yes.”
“I’m Abraham Lincoln?”
“And you’re John Wilkes Booth, too,” I added.
“I’m Hitler?” You said, appalled.
“And you’re the millions he killed.”
“I’m Jesus?”
“And you’re everyone who followed him.”
You fell silent.
“Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.”
You thought for a long time.
“Why?” You asked me. “Why do all this?”
“Because someday, you will become like me. Because that’s what you are. You’re one of my kind. You’re my child.”
“Whoa,” you said, incredulous. “You mean I’m a god?”
“No. Not yet. You’re a fetus. You’re still growing. Once you’ve lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown enough to be born.”
“So the whole universe,” you said, “it’s just…”
“An egg.” I answered. “Now it’s time for you to move on to your next life.”
And I sent you on your way.

Chinese Acrobats

Wow. Some people can do incredible things... I am really amazed by those young acrobats...

Earth Day: Give Earth a Hand

Nice advert about Earth Day.

The world would be better if everyone watched this.

Inpirational story about The Pale Blue Dot

See Things as They Are—Then Change Them

In college I spent part of a summer at John Denver's Windstar program in Colorado. We ate macrobiotic food, slept in teepees, practiced Aikido, and were treated to lectures by Buckminster Fuller — inside the teepees. Windstar had a pithy water-conservation saying for the toilets: "If it's yellow, let it mellow; if it's brown, flush it down." Which is certainly one way of handling it.
I was recently in Amsterdam, and the Dutch have a more ingenious way of handling "it." Instead of one flush lever, there are two — one large and one small — for two different volumes of water, depending on what the job calls for. When I figured out why there were two levers, I had one of those confusingly satisfying "Why didn't someone think of that before?" moments. A few of my other favorites:
- Countdown clocks on pedestrian "walk" signs. How stupid was it for us all to bet our lives on when the sign was going to change?
- The 60-mile long Breast Cancer 3-Day walks. Why were charity walkathons always 10 kilometers long? Who made up that rule? Why not create a really long walk and ask for larger donations?
- The escalators in London that only turn on only when they detect someone entering, instead of running constantly, even when empty. Genius!
- Kiva. Why not ask people to loan money instead of donate it? Who says that the donation has to be the only financial instrument for the expression of compassion?
- Wheels on suitcases. For decades we struggled through airports, sweating and exhausted, lugging our luggage around (that's why it's called luggage) before it dawned on anyone that we could put wheels on the suitcases.

What each of these innovations has in common is that none of them required a new technology. Just add a second valve to the toilet, a sensor to the escalator, some numbers to the digital pedestrian display that's already there, a some distance to a walkathon. Add the oldest tool in the universe to the suitcases.

This is the power of asking why. Why does this thing work this way? Why not turn it upside down? Why not put it in water?

It's not as easy as it sounds. To ask "why" is to ponder the is-ness of something, and to do that one has to be fully present in the moment. But human beings are addicted to living in the past or in the future or in our anxiety — anywhere other than the here and now. Business leaders are the worst offenders. Rarely are we truly present, seeing things for what they are and what they are not.

We don't notice the escalator running nonstop because we're too busy worrying about whether we'll make our flight. We don't realize we're betting out lives in the crosswalk because we're mentally rehashing the meeting we just came from. More often than not we see life through a barely translucent movie screen in our minds that is running nine shows at once. These inputs deafen and blind us to reality. It is a testament to our capacity for unconsciousness that we hefted luggage around airports for decades before anyone thought to put wheels on the suitcases. We literally couldn't see that they didn't have them.
You have to ponder the reality of a thing before you can ponder a new vision for that thing. Before it can occur to you that there could be two different flush volumes for a toilet it has to occur to you that there is presently only one. That requires zen-master presence.

It is the power of now, to borrow Eckhart Tolle's phrase, that gives us access to the power of why. No presence in the moment, no innovation. No now, no new. This is not taught in B-school. In fact, the B-school culture encourages the opposite of it. The hectic pace of our information overload existence makes us think that there's no time to be present. The truth is, our time is too valuable not to be present. The opportunity cost of worry, anxiety, stress, and incessant activity in terms of unmanifested innovation alone is inestimable.
Presence is a muscle that has to be developed. The more we develop it, the more we will see its rewards, and the more we will be incentivized to exercise it.
If we take the time to be quiet, be still, and be present, we may start to see things we haven't seen before — things that have been right in front of our eyes. And those are the things that change the world.

Got this article from Babi - thank you!!!!