observing change
5/6/26

there is a certain strangeness to existing for a long time. i'm being a little dramatic - i'm only in my early 40s, not really that old (no matter how much i thought people in their 40s were ancient when i was a kid). but four decades is still a long enough time that i can see some changes happening around me. there are befores and afters, and if you talk about it the wrong way you come out sounding very old man yells at clouds about it all. but to me, it isn't about how things were better when i was a kid, but just about the fascination and awe of seeing that absolutely nothing is static in this universe and that wow - things are different than when i was a kid.

today i saw an article about how tornado alley is moving. moving! it's heading east and a little bit north. that's something that i never would have considered or predicted or expected. tornado alley has been tornado alley my whole life. it exists in that middle part of america and that's just how it is. but i've now been alive long enough to see that no, tornado alley is not an immutable fact, and actually, the alley is mobile and alive and setting its sights on the atlantic.

i remember in my AP biology class in high school 25 years ago, my teacher had a big poster display of the human genome as we knew it at that time. it wasn't complete. it's hard to imagine a time when we didn't have human DNA mapped out, but there was. i remember my teacher talking about how one day, we would know the whole thing. and now, not only do we know it, we can do so much with it. we are using it to create vaccines that work smarter and better than ever before. we can do a test to see if your genes are predisposed to certain cancers or illnesses. the knowledge we've gained and how far we come is actually mind blowing.

it is really an amazing thing to have been alive for so long and see how humanity and the planet Earth have changed and grown. i wonder if this is just how everyone throughout history has felt, or if there were ever periods of time where someone could live a whole life and feel as if existence was the same at the end of their life as it was at the beginning.