It’s so unusual to me to wake up in the morning and to know that I have hours ahead of me with absolutely no work to do and no schedule that I must adhere to.

My work deadlines are still there. But due to circumstances beyond my control, I cannot do any job-related work other than check my email. So my explanations of how the company supports Ethernet ring protection and generic routing encapsulation tunneling will have to wait until I return from Mexico.

Since we are getting room and board from a local Mexican family, I have no chores to do other than make my bed. No grocery shopping. No cooking.

Since I am many miles and hours away from my adorable grandchildren, I cannot possibly visit them.

Unlike our previous visits to San Miguel de Allende, this visit is so short that we did not sign up for Spanish school. So there are no classes to attend and no homework to do.

Micha and I did linger over breakfast, conversing with our hosts in our broken Spanish. It’s easy enough to understand Rosa Maria and Christobal when they speak to us, particularly since they are used to speaking slowly and clearly for the many foreign students that they have housed over the years. But whatever grammar I learned when I went to classes is hiding in the recesses of my mind. Nevertheless, I do speak and even tackle difficult subjects.

We started off talking about simple things like the weather and recent films that we’ve seen. But before we finished, we’d also talked about evolution. Rosa Maria finds it too difficult to believe that humans could have evolved from bacteria and monkeys. Why would some monkeys turn into humans and other not? I say something about the more intelligent monkeys getting together with other intelligent monkeys and so forth. Micha points out that the process took millions of years.

I say it’s possible to believe in both God and evolution.

Perhaps the Earth was visited by extraterrestrials at some point in time. Rosa Maria and I agree that with so many planets in the universe, it is likely that there are some beings on other planets. Could it have been extraterrestrials who designed the pyramids—how curious that they appeared both in Egypt and in the Americas--and the Nazca lines.

What about those Easter Island statues? Micha points out.

Now the physicists are telling us about “the God particle”, the glue that mysteriously keeps all the other particles together. So many things that we do not understand.

There is not just one truth. Or perhaps there is, but that one truth is beyond the capacity of human beings to understand. So for us humans, it is natural that people see the same thing and explain it in different ways. Multiple religions for a single God or for a force of nature or for whatever makes our world go round.