In words that seem to be quoted with increasing frequency these days, the poet William Yeats once observed in his Second Coming that when, "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned."
     We may think that because we live in reasonably accomodating human communities on planet Earth, and that because these communities, and the planet itself, seem, despite various ups and downs, to keep going, that a center indeed remains.  There is a starting point, there is a goal, there is an end.
     And I suppose there is:  us.  But where are we?  And where did we come from?  And where are we going.  Most important, how do we know we are the center?
     We don't.  We only know we are here.  And absent a creator, we do not know why we are here.  We assert a center without any evidence that there is one.
     And anarchy, some good, some bad, ensues as the human adventure continues apace, rumbling and roaming on its merry way.  Does the world have a center?  Indeed, it does.  But most of us have forgotten what it is.  Most of us have forgotten that we cannot be the center unless a center is already present.
     Too many of us have forgotten that a center is nowhere unless someone, someone who is not us, we who have no center, decides and ensures there is one.
     Otherwise, we're whistling in the dark.