|
|
|
|
| Google |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
In Search of An Answer to What's Up
|
|
 email Michael Z.
 email this story
 print
|
When I was in elementary school I took it upon myself to compose an appropriate response to the greeting: "What's up?"
"Lights." This was true, but only indoors.
"Air." Sure, air was always up, but if you went too far there wasn't air anymore.
"God." Maybe the white-bearded God that lives in heaven in the clouds with the angels was up, but not the 'God is everywhere and always' version. He wasn't just up, he was down and around.
God was the answer to "What's in all places at exactly the same time?"
I thought, prayed, and dreamed. There had to be a better answer.
"Sun." The sun wasn't 'exactly' up. In three dimensional space there really is no up or down. If you took it in the literal sense, that the sun was above us, I could only correctly answer sun for about four hours a day. Between 10am and 2pm.
Twenty out of the twenty-four of the day, answering "sun" would be an incorrect response.
"Stars." That was a nice solution to the time problem. Stars were always up, in a sense, as long as one got over the directional aspect, because no matter what direction you chose to be up, stars were there.
Then I decided that if a natural answer wasn't going to get the job done that I should explore linguistic ones.
"What's down?" Seemed a point-blank response. Not inclined to answer the question, I chose instead to challenge the premise of it being asked in the first place. This seemed to combine my previous reservations about direction with a quick-witted retort.
"What isn't?" Was much too existential. The original question never really challenged that there was a greater existence independent of the specific entity or event that was, at the time, being 'up.'
"What IS up?" Always a good route to answer a question with the same exact question.
Unfortunately, none of these options were stacking up. I decided to try a more philosophical approach. I answered "God" again, this time as a vague construct. God was always the right answer, so no matter the question, I couldn't be wrong.
"Jesus" for some reason didn't work as well. He's too much of a person, instead of an idea. If I told people Jesus is what's up, they'd look around for him, wondering if he was in town for a visit.
On the other hand, "Devil" seemed to confuse people. The Devil was technically down, so to say he was up meant that he was up for me. I was unwittingly implicating myself for a crime I did not commit.
I would have, if I knew about them at the time, answered "Plato" or "Voltaire" or "Hegel", but frustrated with the no good answer to the question, decided my only logical choice was to not ask it myself.
That would be one less person in this world that put upon others the unfair challenge to answer a question that seemingly had no right answer.
That's why, at an early age, I would greet my friends with "Hi, how are you?" Not as cool, but twice as genuine. |
|
|
|
|
Reader Comments
|
|
|
post comment
|
|
