I want to divert for a moment away from explorations of mental illness and talk about something dear to my heart. I suppose it’s entirely relevant…it is a reality that preserves my own sanity such that I can continue to assist others in maintaining theirs.
I love the cosmos. I love quantum theory and the swirling, spiritual, scientific madness of space. I’ve often found myself in conversations where this concept feels foreign to my comrade. How could something so scary, so dark and so vast be soothing to me?
It goes something like this; in moments when I am bereft of hopefulness and caught-up in the banalities of my daily life, considering the glittering galaxy I exist in grounds me. Each one of us has somewhere in the vicinity of a 1 in 400 trillion statistical likelihood of having come into existence in the nebulous narrative of the universe. How can I possibly let that wholly impressive opportunity be wasted?
One of my favorite concepts that informs this immense sparkling spectrum we float amidst is Quantum Entanglement. In short, this phenomenon is the conduit of connection between subatomic particles across vast-nay prodigious distances of spacetime. I’m not a religious person, but there’s a powerful pull in the feeling of being swayed by the energy of the unseen. I find myself pondering if I am entangled with places...people. It certainly feels
that way at times. I can’t explain why certain faces set themselves like a seal in me. Why certain lands leave a brand in my brain.
There’s something so safe about the thought that perhaps the things I love and hold dear move in concert with me through even achingly inaccessible distances. Maybe we don’t perceive it clearly, maybe we don’t consciously hold the can to our ears and tug the string and concentrate on the sounds of the unseen attachments we carry. I imagine it like the train on a grandiose gown, drafting behind me and gathering a cushion of air as I swiftly scale the steep marble staircase of my story headed towards the pull of a passion I cannot explain.
I think Carl Sagan said it best. At Sagan’s urging, one otherwise usual day in February 1990, engineers turned Voyager 1 through the shafts of the sun’s light rays back towards our home, floating 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away. In a beam of brightness in the dark our tiny planet is seen only 0.12 pixel in size. This moved Sagan so deeply that he penned a poetic love song to the Pale Blue Dot on which we all interact at the conscious and quantum level.
I also love black holes, these monstrous invisible wells of gravitation that meet at a mark we cannot yet understand, perhaps we never will. Around a black hole the arrow of time dilates, and light lenses and warps wildly. At the inconceivable center of the black hole is the singularity; a point of infinite power that confounds the laws of physics. Does it exist? Where does it lead, if anywhere? Only cognitive leaps of faith provide any insight.
One of my favorite sci-fi references is Deep Thought in Douglas Adams’ delightful Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series. In this brilliant allegory, a set of hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings set upon creating a computer which will provide the answer to “life, the universe and everything.” After eons of computation, the beings return to Deep Thought and ask it excitedly what the answer is. Deep Thought responds, after a brief moment of contemplation with “42.” Naturally this is somewhat vexatious to the beings, as surely they have tight schedules to attend to and are in no mood to trifle. Effectively, Deep Thought challenges the beings that the answer is bent to be meaningless if one does not first attend to the question.
It is in the question that I find great comfort-all I am tasked with seeking are the abundance of questions that hover around me as I wander through my infinitesimally small territory in the cosmos. Paradoxically, as I seek the questions, I often discover my own intricate meanings of “42” along the process.
That is why space is soothing to me; it is the embracing constellation of beautiful questions in which I hover-a tiny creature of no ultimate import-yet made from the same shimmering stardust and improbability.
Playing "Crazy" 