Mayan Mystery

Setting aside a few other topics I have been wanting to address, I will attempt to do justice to a matter that is perhaps more urgent: the END of the WORLD - - again.

Not wanting to make this a simple tirade, for which I seem to be known, I will treat this with some dignity.  After all, from the perspective of some, it is of the utmost importance.  The calendar produced by the Mayans is showing full stop in about thirteen months.  And people are concerned over this.  Even people I care about intensely are concerned about this end-of-the-world scenario.  Therefore it behooves me to give it the time as well as a sincere effort to understand so that I am not just offensive but perhaps persuasive.

Why am I not shivering in dread over the coming event to end all events?  Why did I toss off glib comments and make a golf date for the day pin-pointed as EW-Day?  (EW for End of the World in this case)  Why would I dismiss the whole concept as laughable in front of someone dear to me who first brought it to my attention?

The last question is the easiest to answer, actually.  I wanted very much for him to recognize instantly that I was probably right to be dismissive and to go about living as always with no continuing thought for the whole Mayan mystery.  But again, there's that thing called perspective that trips me up.  My perspective on a good many things, because I'm now an old fart, is going to often be vastly different from that of someone more youthful, more vibrant, more concerned with long-term planning.  But in this Mayan matter, apparently anything more than a year out is considered too long a term to plan.  So for some, this is a very big hurdle to clear.  Personally, I expect to be here plugging along in my off-beat way and getting in as much golf as my aging knees, feet, back and the rest of the old rack of aching bones will bear, for maybe another thirty years.  A friend of mine who was ninety-eight still played a pretty good game of golf until last fall when one fine day he finished a game and went home to sit down and fall into his final nap.  I aspire to this great accomplishment myself. 

Naturally, I will be really ticked if this whole thing ends in only thirteen months instead of allowing time for my personal plan to play out!  So I need to look at how others might feel, people who may have thoughts of fifty, seventy-five or more years perhaps to enjoy this life.

The key here, in my humble opinion, is to enjoy!  One thing my view from an older stance has given me is the ability to be more philosophical about it all.  I figure there's no way to control any of our ultimate futures, length of life, avoidance of accidents or destructive diseases, so each day we live is really to be cherished and appreciated for all it's worth.  My own son, wise in his youth, re-stated a beautiful axiom to me just recently.  Paraphrasing it here from memory: Yesterday is history, tomorrow is mystery; all we have is today which is a gift - the reason it's called the present.  I think this sums up a great deal of all the various reasons we need to focus on enjoying each day for itself alone. 

Now to the Mayan calendar matter.

My wife, upon hearing of the gravity some folks are giving to this subject, asked me if maybe they think the Maya were the oldest society on Earth.  I told her I didn't think anyone believed that, but even that possibility still wouldn't do it for me.  So what if they were the very first civilized people?  Would that mean they had special knowledge of how everything would end?  Everyone basically believes that the ancient Egyptians were the first advanced society, but does that drive me to want to learn how to read their hieroglyphics in order to reach some conclusions as to the end of the world?  Not at all.  They had not nearly as much knowledge in any way as do today's scientists and other dedicated students of life, and I would not give any credence to one of today's learned individuals who turns interesting conjecture into absolutism about the future and falls prey to total confidence in his/her own prognostications.  All of these people have the same gift of living today as we all possess.  And I submit that even the most capable and respectable student of life has no more insight than anyone else has into some end-of-it-all coming event.  The Maya included.

In all this discussion we should also understand that even though we respect the studies into antiquity, there is no certifiable proof that the facts we think we know about the Maya and their famous calendar are very trustworthy.  What if we read into their final chiseled symbols the idea that "Here life ends" when what they wrote was "Here we end our work."  Might even have been a typo, carved in stone!  There could be no possible proof that their ending of the calendar was their dire prediction that all the world would end.  Actually, being brutally frank, the world as Mayans knew it ended many centuries ago.  What might today be read back into the old clever symbology carved on stones in Peru is quite meaningless as a plan for my life.

  My personal opinion as to why their calendar comes to an end is that they simply stopped work on it.  They had to stop it at some point!  How could they continue to project future years following their own demise?  After all, their society became an interesting study in history because of their sudden demise.  Who would have been left to continue carving on their famous project, which apparently already reached more than a millennium beyond themselves?  That very idea, that these intelligent people would bother to project their calendar out so far beyond their own day, probably is what captures the imaginations of so many and gives the Maya something of a godship status. 

The only possibility I might see here would be to accept Von Daniken's concept of early human societies, especially Egyptian and Mayan, having been visited, influenced and guided by highly advanced extraterrestrial beings.  This could explain many things, including why all societies on Earth have wildly divergent yet eerily similar ideas about a supreme being.  To believe the hype about the Mayan calendar's meaning to us, I would need to accept carte-blanche the whole extraterrestrial thing, which by the way, is somewhat less of a stretch than are the multitude of "god" concepts.

To address all the thousands (quite literally) of other dates that have been set by other believers in doomsday events would be totally impossible for me and not any more clarifying really.  If some idea grabs a person and makes him/her delve into it with the zeal of a new convert, there is no reasoning that will make someone wake up to the zaniness anyway.  Back in May of this year, there were no doubt a few fringe Christians who waited expectantly when some loony pastor gave his pick for a last-day-on-Earth.  When that day came and went, a few of the folks bought into his new pick of a day in October, now about two weeks past.  I am absolutely sure that a few still hold on to the old pastor's newer prophesies (he simply has to have some), but his particular silliness has at last been dropped from national newsworthiness.

What is actually worthy of our consideration is the more studiously considered and scientific approach to the big questions of life.  The scientific method of seeking proof of any thing's substance is still not widely followed by the common man because the mysterious has always held humans in thrall.  Explaining something by believing in it is somehow acceptable to most people.  Not for me.  Believing in something completely un-provable is what makes most people tick.  That doesn't do it for me.  Give me the eyes to see and I can choose to do what I will with the scene before me.  If the scene is beautiful, I can adore it and gaze upon it; if it's ugly, I can try cleaning it up or walk away from it.  I can place my reverence in the cosmos which is awesome, knowable, still mysterious in its vastness but not hidden from view.  Anyone truly interested in substantial reading that can inspire without the use of fear should try grasping Worldview Eyelemica.  The title sounds erudite and some of the words in the text are not heard every day, but the content has so much more meaning than all the studies into all the myths to which man has given his time and devotion.

I believe in the human capacity.  Not to predict a day to end life but to live a better life each day.