Sync

Sync.  It’s a term everyone uses now (in Oaxaca a sincronisada is a quesadilla with ham), but it’s relatively new.  It first appeared in written form in 1985, but its mother term was an invention of the Industrialization era, taken from the Greek word synkhronos, meaning at the same time, and used in 1879 to describe the synchronization of all those new timepieces that were the fad of the era.  One of the books I teach in Oaxaca is Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne (1873). Phileas Fogg, a clock-like man in his punctuality and precision (he fires his valet for bringing his shaving water at 84° instead of 86°), takes on a wager worth about 1 ½ million that he can make it around the world in 80 days, using the newly built Suez Canal, the Transcontinental Railroad in the US, and the linking of the Indian railways. It’s a tribute to machines and a foreshadowing of global tourism. Fogg races against the clock and makes it back just in time, checking his pocket watch all the way, but he thinks he has lost the wager because he is out of sync—he has not taken into account the time changes.

My daughter is enchanted by the style that today echoes the Industrial era and especially its “scientific fiction”: the flying ships, the machine-driven houses. It’s called steam punk, and it relies often on alternative histories set in the Victorian era, in other words, stories that happen in sync, “at the same time.”

My friend Larry from Lively is a psychologist. After I mentioned about mirror neurons (how our emotions are so synced with our kids), he sent me this video clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apzXGEbZht0  where a baby and her mother communicate without words. You see the baby check with the mom over and over to validate her emotions, her take on things. And then for one whole minute, the mom clears her face of all emotion and doesn’t react at all, and after a few attempts to engage, the baby becomes distressed and starts crying. No one is listening. There is no one to sync with.

When I walk into the radiation lab, Rob, the technician, asks me about my weekend and exclaims that he’s from Sudbury, and asks did I like it there. He is trained (I assume) and willing to make small talk to help me sync my emotions to his, to calm myself before going into a machine with my chest exposed to fire.  I watch as he syncs me to the machine, adjusting its beam to the four tiny black tattoos on my chest, pulling on the sheet under me to align my body. He explains how the machine adjusts the beam according to what the radiologist says I need, closing its aperture and shooting four or five times, honing in on one spot.

And in the evening, I drive to the city to join 70 other people in rehearsing Christmas music (we will be holding the concert Nov 27/28. Please come!) And we sync our voices, the timing, the volume, the energy (chop/chop; punch/punch; glo-ho-ri-ous) so that we are one voice, celebrating. And I listen to my neighbors, and I watch the director (who is a chop/chop kind of guy) and I listen to myself, and I adjust and adjust. I learn. And it’s a good feeling. I wonder if it’s what God felt when he made the world good.

All of life has this one purpose. To sync not our wildly different ways of doing things but our wild wills for doing them. Because the first and greatest commandment is this: Love God with all your heart and all your mind and all your body. And the second is like the first: Love your neighbor as yourself. And when the new creation is complete, that precise City, that flying Mansion, that one Body with members finally synced to work at a million things with one mind, we will all see that it’s been hard, but it’s been good. No regrets. No "undo."