Let's look at what was happening before work. For millennia people didn't know about work. They had no books to search out the meaning, no one used the word, no one got paid the way we do. So people didn't work. They simply tried to survive.

Even during the Agricultural Age, when people looked after their farms, the term "work the farm" didn't even exist. Only as North American farms grew larger and required "hired hands" did "working the farm" enter our grammatical lexicon. Although in Europe the word "peasant" has really meant "worker" for centuries.

Before the Industrial age, no one got paid separately for working as opposed to what else they did. Life, which changed little for millennia, just was. Only during the last few centuries have we accepted this weird notion of "work." Preferably, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. And those hours are relatively recent. "Sunup to sundown" was the routine for most of man's existence. The invention of the timepiece started all this funny talk about "work." Time doesn't even "go round" any more. It's all digital now -- another change that is already invoking other changes.

So why is everyone so hung up on working? Half the world's population hasn't even joined into this working idea, even though it has been around for a few centuries. And many once into-work are now out-of-work. Surely, there will be other, even more wrenching, changes in the life of "work."

It is hard for me to think I've worked all my life. I've really just been playing as I swam through the river of life. It actually is much more fun and rewarding economically and socially.

Find something that interests you and that you enjoy, then work becomes play and the payoffs are greater.

Try to escape from a curriculum driven into you in your youth when you didn't even know your options. Don't work.

Play hard. Live. It's a lot easier.

Strange, Weird, and Wonderful

Most of the old ways are not working today.

People raised in a mechanical culture only paid homage to what they could see and touch. Such people become uncertain when the world around them goes organic. They are comfortable with order and logic, with the linear, the ABCs and the 1-2-3s. The difference between the old world and the new is like the difference between the comfortable, ordered and manicured lawns of England and the jungle wilderness of the tropics, with its apparent disorder, where death springs out of life and where life springs out from death.

It seems that I have been in training for such a time all my life. My early days were spent in the swampland of the Everglades, flying over the waves and barren lands bordering the North Atlantic, and observing the strange ways of the people who make up the Parliament of a Thousand Languages -- that of Papua New Guinea. The weird taught me my most indelible lessons. I learned most from a four-foot-tall chief of a small remote jungle village in the Kikori rain forest of PNG, who stood tall in the knowledge of his jungle, who taught me what would be inside the computer that neither he nor I had ever seen.

I spent two years in and out of a voodoo temple in Port au Prince, and I met people in rural Haiti or on islands people would never leave yet who had talents rare in the sophisticated cities of North America and Europe. Communicating with people who knew no so-called civilized language is a strange but wonderful feeling.

The unknown that most people fear can be a warm sanctuary, once the right door is entered. I entered several of these doors, many during the seven years --and 9,000 mentally active hours --I spent with patients and subjects as part of a medical research team working with LSD (lysergic acid dythilamide), mescaline, and psyilacybin. These chemicals were the closest thing to cyberspace in those days. These were the most rewarding, the most educational, and the most stimulating days of my life --so far, at least.

When I first encountered cyberspace, it was just another jungle, only slightly different in the action of its vines and the attraction of its strange flowers and fruit. What made me see it so differently? What makes this new age suddenly take on new life forms so like your average jungle? Perception. It is the way you see the world.

How can these tunnels of silicon and glass let me feel and see so easily along their paths? I thought that could only happen when holding a jungle vine and feeling the life within. Maybe that is why the bedroom aboard my houseboat has such healthy, ivy-like vines constantly caressing and reaching out. The greenery matches the close-by, spaghetti jungle of black electric cables in the office below. What happens when they join together? Someday they will. Just thought you should know.

If anyone -- artist, farmer, scientist, or executive --were kept in a closet for many years, he or she would have little to relate to if suddenly released into a new world. Any new world would be frightening without the comfortable darkness that was so familiar. Bright sun would appear as fire. Even a floor not constructed like the one in the closet would seem uneven, rough, and dangerous. Such a person would have little to refer to for comparison between the known and the unknown.

At the other extreme there is the person who has been dipped daily into continually changing worlds. That person would have thousands of contact points for testing new sights, new experiences, and new feelings. To someone who has traveled through the valley of 10,000 experiences could 10,001 be frightening? Strange, perhaps. Weird, maybe. Wonderful, for sure.

Get ready for tomorrow. Virtual reality will be bringing it all to you with few of the physical dangers in the past. Psychological? That's something else.

Sure glad I didn't go to conventional schools.

Formation Flies Forever

Ever since early man first witnessed the annual migration of wild birds, the image of flight formation has been something that many of us cannot resist watching. My life-long passion for flying makes me prejudiced in this regard. Fast-moving developments in the skies are going to present constant on-going spectacles to keep our eyes gazing skyward.

Consider this scenario. One morning you wake up and overhead in the dim light of early dawn you see in tight formation a chevron of half a dozen aircraft doing a lazy, eight-kilometre-wide flight maneuver at an altitude of 60,000 feet (12 miles or 20 kilometres) in a turbulence-free flying zone. This could be the flight that never ends.

Though easily seen with the naked eye under clear conditions, and optimally with binoculars, the image consists of black, unmanned, solar-powered, ultra-light aircraft performing, in a communications sense, like Canada geese in formation with constant efficient communication between all birds.

This is the latest communications satellite, one that uses new materials, much lower construction costs, and state-of-the-art solar batteries. It will be as permanent as the moon, and be capable of bouncing sound, data, and pictures back and forth to ground and to other fixed and moving spacecraft. This is just one of the many forthcoming wireless communications vehicles that will dramatically alter everything, everywhere.

This squadron will be a Low-Level Flying Platform (LLFP) that will handle ground communications and receive signals from satellites in higher orbiting or fixed locations. At any time, one of the formation birds may drop out and return to earth to be replaced by an updated model, but the formation itself could operate forever.

How? These ultra-lights run on solar power collected through an array of efficient solar panels covering the wings and the "twistable" tubular fuselage (used by the Wright brothers in their first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina). Each ultra-light may fly for years but land only once. Continual changes in this fast-moving field will require major upgrades for replacement. As people learned more about what enables migrating birds to cover amazingly long distances, we have learned how to translate their efficiency to man-made devices. Geese fly in formation because it is easier than flying alone.

When gliding or flying in formation, birds are following a known law of aerodynamics. They are adjusting to the wing upwash from the flight leader (or any bird or birds in front), which reduces considerably the effort required not only to stay aloft but also to progress along a fixed or changing flight path. When the leader thinks she has done her stretch for the day, she can fall back into a following position and ride easy for awhile. A "coaster" will move up and take over for the next leg of the trip. Airline pilots have been doing something similar for decades.

Energy savings in formation flying are considerable, up to 50 percent under good meteorological conditions. One ultra-light aircraft can maintain both altitude and a flight speed of 100 kilometres an hour on 1.5 horsepower of solar energy converted to spinning a push propeller designed for the thin air at this higher altitude.

What else? The formation creates a single big wing. Collectively, it can serve as a microwave reflector for digital and analog cellular phones, pagers and computer wireless communications.

If it was not the fact that black is a much better colour (absorbs more light) for these flying machines, they would be painted green -- they are so environmentally friendly. No fumes. Operating at lower levels, they use cheaper lower powered transmitters. Repair or replacement is relatively simple and cheaper than satellite repairs.

This is past the dream stage. Boeing, in partnership with UCLA and NASA, have a prototype weighing around 125 to 150 lbs. Revised designs call for a finished product weighing around 85 lbs., including solar panels covering the 13-metre wingspan and 90 percent of the fuselage is made of epoxy, mylar, and tubular spars.

A nine-kilogram instrument payload (environmental, atmospheric, infra-red sensors, a Global Positioning System, and other communications systems) may even be aboard during the first test flight over the Mojave desert in southern California. If all succeeds, a six-vehicle flight formation will then test out this perpetual flying machine. As now done with uplink satellite ground stations, this array of easier-to-build smaller machines provides a single large wing. Criteria call for flight control capable of "within-one-inch" formation.

Eternal flight! What would the Wright brothers say?