The gift of experience

“What is e-x-p-e-r-i-e-n-c-e? Is it big?” This is what my niece, Cheyenne, asked me a few years ago, when she was five when I told her and her older brothers that from now on, I was going to give them the gift of experience as holiday gifts. I then told Cheyenne that experience is the gift of story that she can live out with me in a time and place that we choose. She seemed excited. She loved stories and perhaps the prospect of living out one with a crazy aunt tickled her five-year-old brain.

I think the gift of experience is the gift that lasts you your whole life because it becomes tucked in the folds of your being as memories. It is a gift that cannot be recycled like an unwanted fruitcake and its worth cannot be masked with glossy wraps or bedecked ribbons. It is a gift that cannot be couriered since you have to be there to offer it with all that you are because your presence in those irreplaceable hours in your life within the life of the universe, is what makes for the e-x-p-e-r-i-e-n-c-e.

Each column that I try to give you every week is an experience for me. It is an experience because each week, I chase after a mystery or a problem and share it with you. I find that kind of involvement quite intimate. Each time, I try to wrap my understanding around something that people in the sciences have found to be worth their lifetime, devotion and resources to study. Please know that no matter how haphazard my understanding seemed to be in the columns, I was there, totally immersed in the affair of meeting your minds in this weekly space for science. If I had seemed uncertain of what the studies I have taken up actually mean in real lives, it was because I really was uncertain. And to be uncertain is to leave room for doubt which is what science has always reminded us to do, if we are to grow in our understanding of ourselves, of others and of the universe. But in all columns, please know that I gave you my all, given the time and resources within my weekly reach. I think readers who give us their time deserve no less.

Writing the columns has also been an experience because of the letters I get from those who are NOT my readers. I know they are not my readers because their e-mails do not carry even the faintest shadow of a connection to the science columns I write or to science in general. Those who write to me know that I answer each and every e-mail I receive, even if at times, only out of my own curiosity as to why some took time to write to me. And to satisfy your own curiosity, these irrelevant e-mails included: smear campaigns of strangers who have personal vendettas against people I also do not know, a running photo journal of a judge who had a curious inclination to constantly consult elves, ex-politicians whose lists of ideas about our political life are dwarfed only by the font used to write their names, some shops in China informing me about yet another thing they can mass produce at an incredibly low price, offers to attend marketing seminars and buy condominiums and yes, invitations from people I do not know (not even in e-mail) who want me to join Friendster or some other e-group and chat with them about their virtual lives.

But to my readers, I want to take this one chance that I take in my Christmas columns to express my deep gratitude to you for giving the columns the chance to swing and dance around your minds. And thank you even more to those of you who even took the time to write to me to encourage these weekly attempts or to point things that I missed. You have enriched my experience of writing because you have revealed to me aspects of understanding that I may not have been aware of when I was researching and writing the columns.

For years now, I have been asked by readers why I never include personal details of my formal “credentials” in the columns. I do not because I think I am only as good as the understanding that each column fosters. If the column fails, then no PhD, authorship, directorship or any other “ship” in the public understanding of science that I may carry can make up for a bad column. I also think that the topics that science comes up with every day are so fascinating and interesting, not to mention important, that details of my personal life would seem like a really bad commercial that would ruin your one weekly chance to lock eyes with science herself and maybe even “check her out” regularly as a good partner to consult when making sense of the world.

I have long made science as part of my regular dance to enrich my one life. I took it a bit of a step further five and a half years ago, by sharing it with you, every Thursday in this weekly space. Here, we meet and maybe fumble or step on each other’s toes or awkwardly hold each other’s thoughts but always, we engage, invisible but alive in a mutual struggle to understand, even just a little bit more, this puzzling but deep and rich enterprise of being human. And as Cheyenne asked me then if “experience” were “big,” I would say it is. Indeed it is, as that experience has made the difference in the way the columns have evolved through the years. So thank you dear readers for experiencing this map of knowing called science with me. It has been quite a journey.

Merry Christmas.

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