“When you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental…turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot.”   Arthur Schopenhauer

Is there perfection in the universe…some master plan where everything is weaving itself together like a great symphony? Or is life just a big mess and we spend day after day grinding through the chaos?

Following are three reasons I believe there is perfection and that all of our problems and struggles are necessary ingredients to our successes and triumphs.

1. Life on Earth

The fact that life exists on earth is due to a series of very specific conditions and factors.  Even the tiniest alteration of these conditions would be catastrophic. For instance, as we know all too well thanks to global warming, the earth’s average temperature climbing just 5 degrees would cause the extinction of up to 50% of species.  With advances in technology, we are learning of another factor that contributes to the perfect series of conditions supporting life on earth.  This past week, an amateur astronomer, Anthony Wesely, noticed a large black mark on Jupiter. It turned out to be a 5,000 mile wide gash that is most likely the result of a comet which struck Jupiter on Sunday, July 19. It’s the second time in 15 years that a massive comet has struck Jupiter. And many scientists agree that due to Jupiter’s  size and gravity, it acts as a gravitational shield sucking such comets away from Earth.

What one might perceive as the fragility of human existence, another might call perfection.

2. Intelligence of Cannabis

Author Michael Pollan makes the case for the intelligence of plants and attempts to see the world from a plant’s point of view. He singles out the cannabis plant and its particular stroke of genius.*

THC is the chemical in marijuana that causes people to feel high. In 1988, Allyn Howlett discovered a specific receptor for THC in the brain. It was highly unlikely that the brain had developed this structure in order that people could smoke pot and get high.  So researchers assumed the brain must manufacture its own THC-like chemical.  Then in 1992, this chemical was discovered and named “Anandamide.”  Due to some otherworldly and mysterious intelligence, the cannabis plant holds the precise key required to unlock a neurological mechanism in the brain. Pollan suggests that the cannabis plant’s mysterious intelligence and ability to effect the human brain has thus assured its survival.

Next time you smell pot, might you also be catching a whiff of “perfection?”

3. Time and Space

Without granting ourselves the time and space to take a step back, we’re bound to sense nothing but stress and chaos. But when actually making the time for rest, we start to notice the profound. Author Abraham Heschel says that in the midst of rest, we discover “a spirit whose reality we meet rather than an empty span of time that we set aside for comfort.”**  So often in this crazed Information Age, an “empty span of time” is a bad thing. It suggests laziness, lack of efficiency, increased anxiety that the emails are mounting every second that we step away from the computer. Like Heschel, I beg to differ. Embracing an empty span of time every single day, we allow the chance for perspective.

Alexander Steinbach said, “Stand close to a mountain and you will see only a massive wall of earth and stone. Stand at a distance and you will see the heights. Often we find fault with what we see, when the fault really lies in where we stand.”

In these tough times where so many of us are struggling to make ends meet and get through this recession, I’d love to share a thought from my book: it’s more healing to believe than not to believe; more soothing to rest and relax than grind and grip; more healing to ponder perfection than choke on chaos.

Today’s Playlist

If Dogs Run Free Bob Dylan
The King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1 Neutral Milk Hotel
UR Alanis Morissette
Stop-Go Widespread Panic
Buildings & Mountains The Republic Tigers
Your Memory Won’t Die in My Grave Willie Nelson
We Don’t Own It Joan As Policewoman

* from Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire

** from Abraham Heschel’s The Sabbath