12DEC04 - Light

What's important in life? What really matters? If you hold in any esteem Maslow's hierarchy of needs, then perhaps survival and safety is the highest priority. And what enables survival and safety? For most of us it is light.

Fire, with its dancing sparks ascending heavenward to keep company with the stars, used to keep us warm and enabled us to see what might be attempting to prey on us in the dark.

In better times, fire was tamed to produce candlelight. With little of the smoke and heat, it was condensed luminescence. Light to walk in cold, stony hallways. Light to plan intrigues with one's friends against one's enemies. Light to read and fall sleep with in the night.

And then a few men tamed the electron and with it heated a coil of exotic metal to eternally light the darkest nights. And with bright bare light bulbs glowing in darkened laboratories, plotted ways to rip energy and light out of the fabric of matter and destroy those they hated.

But a child, in awe, holds the same energy in his hand and plays a game that gives him joy and grows his mind. Perhaps with those minds our children will once again understand what light is truly for...

(Four year old boy playing a game on a Pocket PC)

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