No dreams to report today.
I have to go out today and tomorrow: this morning, to take Miko to the vet’s for a checkup and blood test to monitor how she’s getting on; and tomorrow I’m going for a mammogram at the hospital. I don’t mind too much – we are both getting older and creaky, and it’s good to know someone is looking out for our health. Miko is less than thrilled, as she can’t have breakfast because of the blood test – I wish I’d got an earlier appointment than 10:30, I didn’t think about it till it was too late to change – must remember next time. The vet is checking her quarterly at the moment, though it seems to have gone fast since the last time.
Yesterday I started talking about fate. My yoga teacher once said that Destiny is what is supposed to happen and Fate is what happens due to our actions, which sounds as though it makes sense, but doesn’t really when you start to think about it. Is Destiny what’s going to happen, or isn’t it? If it can be changed, by individual actions or collective, then in what sense was it ‘predestined’? I’ve been described by people as a ‘gloom and doomer’, particularly with regard to climate change, but I’ve never claimed that it was inevitable, just that trends in the scientific understanding and a knowledge of human behaviour have made it increasingly so over the three (nearly four) decades I’ve been observing it.
When I was an undergraduate, almost half a century ago, I read the ‘Foundation’ trilogy by Isaac Asimov, in which an interplanetary federation developed computer systems powerful enough to model all physical, social and economic trends and predict the future of the galaxy. In the story, the ability to plan for and control the threads of destiny was disrupted, initially by a mutant human who developed psychic abilities and took over supreme power, and although he eventually got his comeuppance (I forget how), events were never returned to their original trajectories. Since then, a lifetime of experience and observation has convinced me that it doesn’t take a mutant dictator to throw Destiny into confusion, just the usual work-in-progress of individuals and groups interacting and living and doing what people do without understanding, or caring about, the outcomes of their collective actions – all conspiracies collapse under the weight of sheer unadulterated human cock-up.
For years, scientists have been warning that we were overdue for a global pandemic – it could have been ebola, it could have been SARS, or bird flu, or swine flu – it wasn’t any of those, but the stories popped up every couple of years in the news, and were forgotten by most members of the public, (apart from geeky doomer-types still harbouring the soul of an over-excitable 18 year old statistics student). Medical and population trends continued to predict it was bound to happen – sooner or later.
Welcome to sooner – and funnily enough, no-one was prepared for it.