Monsters That Eat The Past

OK, so only my son would get that obscure reference. Here's a picture I took this weekend on the way into the Rub al-Khali, the Empty Quarter, which I'll have more to talk about later. I like this picture for any number of reasons, but mainly because it got me thinking about what happens when you sit still too long. In one of his movies Woody Allen (and I'm wildly paraphrasing here), proposes that, "Relationships are like sharks, they have to keep moving forward. What we have here is a dead shark." Over the years I've repeated that line to my students many times, but compared it to civilizations and also to life itself. You do have to keep moving forward. Whenever I have done something meaningful or interesting with my life it has been when I definitively responded YES when life asked me if I wanted to try something new. Ten years ago Champlain asked me if I wanted to travel to the UAE on a site visit for the campus we had here then. I didn't even have a passport but I said yes, and so many extraordinary opportunities spun out of that trip. If I had said no then I would have never discovered my love of the Arab world and the desert and Islam and Rumi and Ibn Battuta and Ibn Khaldun and there would have been no Global Modules and thousands of students from around the world would have never talked to each other and I wouldn't have visited thirty countries and I would not have hundreds of friends from around the world and on and on and on. Yesterday I picked up a copy of Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands, which recounts his five years exploration of the Empty Quarter. He tells how he was determined to explore the Empty Quarter, the inhospitable desert that dominates most of the southern half of the Arabian peninsula, and which had, even as late as the 1940's, been largely ignored by everyone but the Bedu. He was having dinner one night and met some British official from some anti-locust organization that was looking for someone to travel into the Empty Quarter to check out the locust population. While truthfully pointing out that he knew nothing about locusts, Thesiger also promoted himself for the position and by the end of dinner he had the appointment - and his life and big chunk of history was changed forever. So, I guess the moral of the story is that you should always volunteer to explore and examine the locust population, no matter what form it takes. As Proust reminds us, memory is just regret, and regret for what you didn't do is the worst kind of regret. Or, as the great Canadian philosopher reminds us, Rust Never Sleeps.