Sea Squirt

Years ago, looking up information took a lot longer. In researching papers for high school, more often than not I would head straight to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Walking to the east wall of the library, I would find the EB set for the current year. The sheer weight of the volumes, the mass of the books, caused the shelves of the book case to bend in frustration. If I remember correctly, the library housed copies of the EB for at least five years. So, hundreds of pounds of knowledge took up most of the east wing. I never understood why the EB printed a new encyclopedia every year. How much could change in one printing? I suppose discoveries and wars and people make the headlines, but really, was it worth it the heavy price on the bookshelves?



Now, information is as quick as how long it takes to type in a search word. No longer do we need to have an intricate knowledge of the Dewey Decimal system or even alphabetical order, for that fact; we simply need to know a few words of a topic, and Shazaam (I had to get one TV show reference in here) out spits millions of pages of trivia for whatever idea that might come into my head. Looking information up on the web is so predominant that "Googling" is an actual word in the dictionary now - a verb, amazing. You can Google anything including your own name. I was astonished to find that I am indeed a real person now that I can find me on the web.



I typed in four random words last week - bowl, chapstick, cardinal, and Lee Laaveg last week and it's amazing the kind of websites you can navigate to.



I also typed in something I heard on the radio. I Googled "Sea squirt." One of the radio announcers was long-windedly speaking about this tiny little creature of the ocean. Sea squirts are not a large link in the food chain; they don't take up much space in regards to the vastness of the ocean; they don't eat the shrimp that I like to order (for that, I don't have a personal vendetta against them.) Sea squirts are simply... there - out of sight, out of mind for the most part. Anyway, the DJ said that sea squirts, after completing their larval stage, affix themselves to the bottom of the ocean and then, get this, proceed to ingest their own brains. They don't need them anymore. I looked it up - sufficiently googled and wikipediaed. It's true (according to the web source - I didn't look up EB for final satisfaction). Once a sea squirt is fixed in a certain spot it digests it's own brain, it eats the very thing that allows it to move.



I've met a few human sea squirts in my life. Sometimes we become so entrenched in our daily activities, sometimes we become so complacent with our lives (our spiritual lives included) that we set our brains aside and refuse to move. We somehow convince ourselves we don't need them anymore. A sedentary society becomes mired in academic mediocrity. Sometimes we fill as if we have learned enough and disengage because our brains feel full. At times, learning becomes either frightening, dull or (seemingly) pointless; knowledge seems a burden. A co-worker wrote to me in an e-mail last week that you are only old when you stop learning - it doesn't matter what age you are.



So, I'm on a mission to get off my tuckus and learn. I'm getting up, searching around in my own head for my brain and affixing a lifestyle of reading and writing (not typing). How can I broaden the very borders of my mind and thus open up new opportunities to enrich my life? How can I turn my back on living life more abundantly?



So, my dear reader(s?), don't be sea squirts. How's that for a nice, pithy ending?