I guess I need to explain why I need to kill time.
Here is a tribute to her I wrote just a few months ago.
Vera
Without sparks our world is a dead world without fire, without warmth, without life. The cavemen needed the spark of lightning for his first fire; later the farmer needed the spark of the flint to heat his home and cook his meal. Still later, it was the spark of the match doing the same, in our homes and in the furnaces of our industry. Throughout man's history we needed and depended on the sparks in the minds of our creative geniuses who turned darkness into light, cold into warmth and ignorance into understanding.
This rare and invaluable property of the human mind is the most important and the least understood in our Universe. We know about neurons in the brain and the electrical impulses jumping from one to the other when they fire, but we don't know what turns these sparks into creative human thought. We only see the result and sometimes it is spectacular; but often it is unrecognized for a long time - until the ground is prepared for the spark to start a fire.
The most important element of creative human thought is the ability to look at things out of context. It sounds so simple, but it is the most difficult of human achievements. Most of us learn to accept context through years and years of training from the earliest childhood. We have been told and told by our parents and our teachers and our siblings, peers and leaders that "this is the way the world is" and we ended up taking it for granted: inevitable, immutable, the nature of things. Very few of us managed to hang on to a shred of critical thinking and insist on questions that were consistently dismissed by everyone as childish, naïve, disruptive, even evil.
The second important element is the ability to free-associate ideas. To try unusual combinations of concepts never tried together before is the best way of finding new thoughts, new ways of making things work, of solving unsolvable problems. You need an element of playfulness bordering on the whimsical: to achieve this, you must be able to find delight in play for its own sake. We all remember those moments when hearing about a new and marvelously simple idea, we felt a pang of regret: "why didn't I think of that?"
The third element (without which the other two would languish unrealized) is the courage to be different. We are basically herd animals, with the instinct of cattle grazing together on a meadow. We are so terrified to stand outside the protective circle of our peers that very few of us risk the insecurity, doubt and fear that comes from standing alone. Never mind the scorn, ridicule and resentment that is an automatic reaction of the herd toward their troublemakers.
You need that invaluable quality that very few of us possess: being self-sufficient, knowing who we are, what we think and how we feel, completely independently from, and often in spite of, anyone else around us. Sculpted from a single piece of marble as it were (rather than a patchwork of roles, identities, opinions, attitudes that most of us picked up here and there over a lifetime) these self-sufficient, self-defined creators amongst us are like pieces of art: self-evident, self-consistent, immutable, beyond analysis and most of the time beyond understanding.
The rest of us have our places and roles and they are necessary functions, required to give life to the creative idea. We must understand, appreciate and support it. It needs engineers and organizers and craftsmen to give it shape and substance, but without the spark that started it, the fire would not come forth from the heap of dry leaves and twigs and branches that we gathered: you need the shaman with the lantern that guards and sustains the spark.
And this is the best tribute I can give to the gods for letting me spend the past fourtyfive years of my life in proximity with one of these creative human beings who is my wife and my best friend. Through my experience living with her I understand more about myself and about human existence than I could have, had I read a whole library on the subject. Love and admiration combined together turned out to be the best teacher in my case.
