I often enough think about how amazing it must be to participate in the scientific endeavor – to join with your whole heart and mind a collective effort that is centuries old and stretches indefinitely into the future, to which your contribution is simultaneously tiny and important, that will never be finished, and which it is not your responsibility to do anything more than add to.
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@adamgreenfield you can do it if you want. no one can stop you.
@bea Meh. No interest, no ability, no perspective or particular point of traction on any matter of interest – whereas I like what I already do, and have developed a threshold level of competence for it over a great many years. Horses for courses.
@adamgreenfield sure of course, i'm not saying to give up your life and go work in a laboratory or anything, just that if you stumble on a question nobody has answered, and manage to answer it, or you see something nobody has seen, and you share with the world? then you're part of it too.
@adamgreenfield reminds me of #christian mystic Howard Thurman’s “WHATSOEVER A MAN SOWETH” “All my life have eaten fruit from trees that I did not plant , why should I not plant trees to bear fruit for those who may enjoy them long after I’m gone?”
@wb2ifs That’s right. It’s not incumbent upon us to complete the Great Work, but neither are we at liberty to desist from it, etc.
@adamgreenfield yes but there is intentionality. We bend the arc towards justice it doesn’t just go. I am more than the answer to the prayers of my enslaved ancestors. I am the result of their actions. I was born in Brooklyn and not in the south because my family wanted something Better than #segregation and they had the means to make it so.
@adamgreenfield What will we dream of and for? What seeds will we plant? I'd really like us to stop blunting the dreams of young folks toward getting #jobs.What I want is to see is the focus of #STEMEducation shift towards making #firstcontact and away from getting a job pushing papers from one side of the desk or screen to the other.
