Letters to My Daughter

Today is the second day of Ramadan, a time for atonement, reflection, and a healthy dosage of 16-hour hunger pangs. Ramadan is a lot like Christmas, except the gifts are from God. The lightness of being, the clarity of thought, the cleansing of the palette and the physical and emotional systems. The body and soul fasts. The body abstains from food and drink; the soul fasts from evils of the heart. The spirit is renewed because there is greater meaning than sitting in front of a computer taking CAT exams. There is more to life than the self. There is more to a house than cleaning rituals. There is more to life than this daily existence. The first few days of fasting, or abstaining from food and drink, during the summer is particularly difficult. In my daze, I actually threw out my family's iftaar, thinking somehow that the beans my mother cooked were meant to go in the garbage. To my dismay, they were freshly prepared for our evening meal, and I had, in some stupor, thrown the food...

"What most human beings really want to attain is not knowledge, but certainty. Gaining real knowledge requires taking risks and keeping the mind open—but most people prefer to be reassured rather than to learn the complex and often unsettling truth about anything." Human beings prefer to be reassured of what they already know, rather than to confront the "complex and often unsettling truth about anything." This applies to scientific discoveries as well as personal truths. For the most part, scientific discovery is not the result of the knowledge quest. During the Scientific Revolution, individuals sought to learn more about the universe God had created. When Copernicus developed a heliocentric theory of the universe, and challenged the geocentric norms of society, he was not attempting to gain more knowledge about the universe. He also was not trying to challenge the Church's teaching. In the process of scientific discovery, he found "unsettling truth...