There are places I want to go, things I want to do, before I die. Not that I plan on dying anytime soon; that’s not on the agenda. But it’ll happen someday, I suspect. And before it does, I would like to visit Russia. And Asia. Africa, too. I would like to see the pyramids. I would like to hike the Appalachian trail and all 46 Adirondack High Peaks. I want to study French, brush up on my German, go back-country skiing at Tuckerman’s Ravine with my brother Danny, take a swing at ballroom dancing, clean up my string crossings on the violin and learn to play jazz so well that it oozes out my pores. I want to take a class in auto mechanics.

I’d like to re-read all the Faulkner I read in college, just to see if I admire it as much and understand it more. I need to consume Joseph Conrad to correct the failings of my youth; my late father loved him, and I’ve long regretted never sitting with him at the kitchen table and discussing his favorite books. Too late for that, now. And too late to learn Neapolitan, Daddy’s first language, because it’s one of those tongues you learn as a kid or not at all — and I didn’t.

But that’s okay. And the other stuff I never got around to and never will: that’s okay, too. A lot of my dreams, like memorizing chromatic scales or learning to fix my brakes, are perfectly doable. Why, I could do them now. I probably should do them now. But it’s likely I’ll get around to doing them eventually, assuming I don’t dip my toe into the wrong Albany intersection and croak next week. But the rest of it, the things I might not do and places I might not visit — that’s all right. I don’t care, because I’ll wind up doing other things instead. It’s not as though, excuse me, either I accomplish all these prearranged tasks or my life is a pathetic waste; life will unfold, events will occur, locations will be visited, in a manner neither defined nor predicted by me. And thank God for that. I’m terrible at planning things. I’m much better at winging it.

And by winging it, I open myself to unpremeditated miracles: the person I didn’t plan on meeting, the place I didn’t plan on going, the experience I didn’t plan on having. This fruitful spontaneity is the single greatest joy in being alive, because it allows for the intrusion of a divine and cosmic happenstance; we can set our goals and cover our bases and hatch our schemes and work like hell to realize them, but in the end, it’s the shit we can’t predict that blows our minds. Have you ever been pregnant? You, or someone you’re married to? Then you know what it’s like to have a baby. You spend nine months readying for a tiny, threshing, drooling stranger, and then, boom: the most beautiful and singular person in the world propels from the dark and arrives in your arms, and you’ve known that child for 10,000 years. Could you have predicted that? Could you have scribbled it on a bucket list?

So no bucket lists for me, folks. If I can, I’ll visit Russia. If I can’t, I’ll live until I drop. And then it won’t matter anyway.

My brother Danny and I were chatting about abandonment over the weekend. Yup! We were! And wasn’t that fun! No, we weren’t discussing the trauma of being dumped in a back alley with greasy hair and a torn Whitesnake t-shirt with nothing to eat but stale Ritz; I’m happy to say that kind of abandonment hasn’t happened to either of us. Phew. That’s a relief. No, we were gabbing about how little control we have over anything that happens to us on This Spinning Ball of Mud and Wal-Marts where, for just wee bit, we seem to reside. What little authority we have over big things, little things, in-betweeny things. Try as we might to understand and affect the arcs of these things, the universe and all its merry occupants are mostly beyond our ken and jurisdiction.

Danny remarked that everyone wants to control the world, but the idea that anyone can is “delusional.” He finds more inner peace, he said, with accepting people as they are than trying to sway them. And trust me, my brother is one persuasive fellow (said she, recalling her near-butt experience on a psycho-twisted icy black diamond that she skied at his suggestion). He’s persuasive even on the subject of not trying to persuade.

So, what choice did I have, I agreed with him. But I would have anyway. Because really, what influence do I have over any of the fundamental interactions that rule the cosmos? Weak force? Nuclear? Gravity? Electromagnetism? That’d be awesome to control! If I could control that, I could wrap myself and everyone I love in protective force fields like the ones they had on “Star Trek.” Then all that bad shit would bounce off their personal deflector-bubbles and splat into the Romulans instead.

The “Star Trek” analogy hit me, as “Star Trek” often analogies do, after eight seconds of deliberation. After another eight seconds of deliberation, which I performed just so I can appear to be a deeply reflective person chewing on a giant garlicky pickle, I concluded that there are, in fact, a grand total of four things over which I have control:

1) Nothing;
2) Nothing;
3) How I respond to everything that happens to me; and
4) Nothing.

Sometimes Numbers 1, 2 and 4 involve the stuff of sweetness and light. Sometimes they do not. Sometimes they involve the stinky and the dark. Jobs being scored, babies being born: Good stuff. Layoffs and deaths: Crap stuff. Danny’s right; we can’t control any of the people, forces and things inside our worlds.

But no matter what the sweetness-to-stink quotient of such nothings and everythings, Number 3 is vitally important in the aftermath. If hunger happens to me, I respond to it by putting wasabi peas into my mouth (or not). If love happens to me, I respond to it by giving my whole heart back (or not). If injustice happens to me or someone else, I respond to it by speaking truth to power (or not).

The tricky part lies in its figuring-out, in the mystifying calculus occasioned by all that happens to us. That’s where the posture of abandonment makes the least sense and yet requires the most of us — because, and this is the part I can’t stand, we must abandon ourselves to the powerful likelihood that we’ll make the wrong decision. We could screw up. We could put the wrong things in our mouths; love the wrong person or not love the right one enough; say the wrong thing or go mute at the wrong time.

I don’t know about any of you, but this scares the shit out of me: I hate making asinine and off-the-mark decisions. I hate making a boob out of myself, whether my boobishness is minor or monumental. And yet the universe is pretty darned insistent that I take that chance on a regular basis, or what’s the point? Are we just going to flop over in the face of Numbers 1, 2 and 4? Do nothing? Lie prostrate, planking ourselves before the gathered cosmic forces of all that we can’t control?

The toughest and most important form of abandonment to master is that one that says: I could be an ass. I probably AM an ass. I might do the wrong thing. I might make the wrong choice. And then, what the hell, I make it anyway.

One morning, while munching on toast with Nutella, I found myself chewing on something else: reports that psychiatrists are now zeroing in on a new way to categorize, diagnose and (possibly) further medicate children. Specifically, daydreaming children. Because, this was news to me, these very children apparently suffer from something called “sluggish cognitive tempo.”

As I am not myself the speediest of thinkers, this took me a while to process. Sluggishness set in post-haste. But once my lollygagging intellect helpfully kicked into gear, my first response was:

Crap! No? Really?

My second response was: Of course! Why not! Let’s just medicate people right out of the womb! Psych diagnoses for EVERYBODY! HURRAH!

Finally, the plodding lump of soft tissue known as my brain noted the pairing of “sluggish” and “tempo,” which suggests a sheet-music designation for agonizingly slow symphonic music. As in: Adagio, Largo, Lento, Larghissimo and Sluggish. Can’t you just hear Toscanini’s angry direction to the woodwinds on this one? “Oboes! Stupidos! Slower, slower! That passage is tempo sluggishimo!”

As I (slowly) read more about this, I (slowly) became more confused. “They’re the daydreamy ones,” explains an expert-ish-y person to The New York Times, “the ones with work that’s not turned in, leaving names off of papers or skipping questions, things like that, that impinge on grades or performance. So anything we can do to understand what’s going on with these kids is a good thing.”

Wow. Great. You want to know what’s going on? SO ASK THEM. Ask “these kids” what they’re thinking about, where they are, when they’re daydreaming. Because I’m here to tell you they’re somewhere. What looks like nowhere to everybody else is actually a place of rich and idiosyncratic cognition; I say this as a person who’s spent 50 years in a semi-permanent space-out, elbow on desk, chin on hand, drool snaking down the side of my mouth. But the time spent in that airless, drooling vacuum isn’t all bad.

Slow thinking isn’t wrong thinking, ineffective thinking or counter-productive thinking. It’s oblique and improvisational thinking — thinking that goes on a cavernous detour and then returns into the daylight with some newfound chunk of understanding (often accompanied by a hypoxic gasping for air). It’s mental spelunking.

I do this all the time and always have. I tune out; sometimes I tune out so far that people are forced to wave their arms and bleat AMY AMY AMY AMY AMY or MOM MOM MOM MOM MOM until I blink awake, muttering a slurred Whaaaaaaaapplllll? And I have a tape delay: Sometimes I need a second or two for things to register. My mom used to call this “coming in slow freight.” She also used to say, “Sometimes it takes a while for the stone to reach the bottom of the well.” What’s more, she often said “people’s ears keep growing throughout their lives,” and maybe she was right (when I’m 90, will my lobes be slapping against my thighs?), although this has nothing to do with cognition.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make here is this: my first-gear cognition hasn’t ruined my life. True, I spaced on my GRE’s, ignoring an entire page of bubble questions, but I didn’t need them to apply to J-school, anyway. Columbia took me anyway. I made deadlines anyway. Life unfolded anyway. And now and then, in the midst of my mental meandering, I go somewhere interesting or useful. I stumble across some revelatory nugget of truth that helps me out, or inspires me to write, or pushes me forward. But this landscape can’t be traveled quickly. It takes time, and that’s okay.

There’s this video floating around the ether — maybe you’ve seen it, but if you haven’t, it’s down below — of a happy Stanford physicist named Andrei Linde being greeted at his front door with news that one of his theoretical babies, something called cosmic inflation, had been confirmed with freshly detected evidence.

From what I gather with my pinheaded layperson’s grasp of science, a team of researchers possessing either sensitive equipment or super-sized ears picked up gravitational ripples that pinged out billions of years ago from the Big Bang. These ripples suggest that the results of said large Bang evolved not in some laid-back, leisurely, bon-bon-eating fashion but in a lickety-splitty instant. And in this instant, all that became the cosmos exploded into being.

I have two responses to this news:

1. Holy freaking wowz!

And

2. Ain’t science awesome?

Apparently, not everyone is having these reactions. Some creationists are less than impressed, citing the Book of Genesis as proof that God didn’t use the Big Bang to whip the universe into being.

I don’t get this. I DON’T GET IT. How can anyone, especially people who call themselves “creationists,” insist on one narrow and literalist reading of the cosmically butt-kicking Creative Genius behind all of existence? How can anyone can regard a scientific revelation of this order with anything short of wonder? Research that tells us so much about the moment of creation — a moment both impossibly brief and infinitely large — ought to give believers, all of us in every sect and stripe, yet more reason to honor its Creator.

Think about this cosmic inflation business. There was nothing. Then suddenly there was something, a lot of something, more something than we can ever fully grasp. Sounds kind of biblical, no? KABLAMMO! INSTANT STUFF! No sitting around waiting for the heavens to expand overnight like a little blue sponge toy on the counter. It came to be. Thanks to Linde and his colleagues, how it came to be is a little less of a mystery than it once was. We know a little more about its genesis, be it capitalized or not.

I never understood this idea that science is somehow arm-wrestling with religion –- or engaged in an angry and vicious cage-fight, noses broken, chest tats bleeding. I think they ought to get along. Science, after all, is only trying to understand and describe the dimensions and dynamics of all that came to be, all those molecules smashing through time and space from some distant then into now. Comprehending how this universe was made doesn’t mean nobody made it. It doesn’t mean it’s any less amazing. Maybe it’s more.

I’m reminded of a class I once took in physical anthropology –- i.e., human evolution. The guy who taught it was in the thick of a disquisition on randomness and mutation and adaptation and happenstance when some kid in a back row raised his hand and said: “Sooo. . . what you’re saying is: It really is a miracle that we’re here.” And the teacher nodded and replied, “Yes. Exactly.”

I happen to believe that this and other miracles have an author behind them. But what I believe, what you believe, what anyone believes, doesn’t or shouldn’t matter in the conversation about our cosmos. Arguing about it is as futile and tiresome as arguing over the sunset. (It’s red! No, it’s light being refracted! No, you dumbass, it’s red! No, it’s refracted light! Yeah? Well, your mother’s an idiot! Yeah? Well, so’s yours!)

What this bigger-bangy revelation tells us is that truth and beauty are one and the same thing. We can ascribe to them divinity or chalk them up to the sublime creative forces of chance. It doesn’t make a difference.

They’re a miracle either way. And either way, we should stand in awe.