Sweet Spots

Life is a series of long boring stretches with brief moments of extreme along the way to help us remember anything at all. In between the sour spots are occasional sweet spots where everything works out right for once. October is the sweet spot in time for yellow leaves on trees. That is also the month when the tarantulas migrate.

The planet Earth certainly sits within the sweet spot zone in the sun’s warmth. Alongside Mother Earth is the Moon which also represents the perfect balance between living too close together and someday collide or too far away so they eventually wander apart. If the moon were too big it would take over more than our tides and if it were too small it would only be a token.

The sweet spot is not always at the middle. Being wealthy or powerful is best savored at the top just as the sweetest golf score is down at the bottom. Like the old joke that goes; “When they called for brains I thought they said pains and I didn’t want any”. When we line up for brains you want to be first and for pains the best place is last.

Carbon owns the sweet spot on the Periodic Table of elements by virtue of being flexible enough to bond with more neighbors than anyone else and in more ways too. All the good stuff is made with carbon and not just living matter. The hydro-carbon bonds cover everything from gasoline to plastic. On our planet in this galaxy with this set of universal physics, there is no better building block than carbon.

The color green sits on the sweet spot of our visual spectrum. There are good arguments that we specialize in green because plant life did it first but in any case there are more shades of green than any other color and it sits right in the middle of visible light between the extremes of infra-red and ultra-violet.

Goldilocks can be the cheerleading mascot of the sweet spot philosophy; finding that best of all worlds, the middle ground between too much and not enough of whatever is under discussion at any given moment. The banana belt is a kind of sweet spot, geographically speaking. Sweet spots are out there, everywhere and anywhere but it’s up to us to find them and I am hoping to find mine on vacation next week.