The Sunday Letter #19: Infinities
Last weekend, I spent a few days at my parents’ place out in the country. We were celebrating my dad’s 70th, and one night, after a delicious dinner at our favourite local spot (hello, Twisted Lemon friends!) and some time back home with gifts and cake, we gathered on their porch to say our goodbyes.
The night was dark and cool and clear, and the stars were tremendous. I tried to find Polaris and could not, and then showed my nieces Cassiopeia.
“See?” I said, pointing. “It looks like a wonky W, just there above the house. Do you see it?”
“I do!” my niece said, looking up, a thrill in her voice that I instantly recognized. (Would that I’d been able to feel that thrill back when I was almost ten. I wish I hadn’t spent so many years being afraid of the night sky.)
“There’s Orion’s Belt,” my brother said, and we all turned and looked. There it was, shining bright and blue against the blackness of space.
I looked for the Big Dipper, but couldn’t find it. After everyone had left I walked around the front of the house and saw it, lopsided and hiding behind the barn silo. It was not as bright as the Big Dipper I had seen hanging over the West Sands. Almost as though it wanted to stay hidden this time, as though other constellations might, in that moment, have more to teach me.
Orion’s Belt is composed of three stars—Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka—that sit 1,200, 1260, and roughly 2,000 light-years away from Earth, respectively. This means that the light we see from Mintaka today left that solar system before Jesus Christ began his ministry. All the way back in the year 23 A.D., give or take.
The light that came later, from Alnitak and Alnilam, left the stars in the 800s, when Charlemange was the Holy Roman Emperor.
Think about how many billions of people have lived and loved and died since then. Now think about how many trillions of thoughts and hopes and dreams have lived and loved and died with all of these people. I have always found it difficult to conceptualize infinity, but looking at the stars has helped me to approach something on the edge of understanding. (I think. On my best days, I hope.)
Trillions of thoughts and hopes and dreams multipled by billions of people. It’s a lot.
Now think: all of those trillions of thoughts and hopes and dreams disappear the instant someone dies.
Another thing to think about: light is made of photons, which are tiny particles comprised of waves of electromagnetic radiation. We understand space and time through measuring these tiny particles—everything in the universe is measured against the constant of light.
Nothing in our known universe moves faster than these photons. This means that a photon itself does not experience time, because time is calculated relative to light. When you move through space quickly, you move through less time. The faster you go, the less time you experience. (This is, also, incidentally, part of why Matthew McConaghey’s character doesn’t seem to age in Interstellar.)
So a photon moving at the speed of light will be emitted from its star and cross billions of lights-years of space in an instant. From the point of view of the photon, time doesn’t exist at all.
For our purposes, of course, time exists an awful lot. In the months after Jess died time felt like it was endless—one long, slow march of my own toward death. I did not want to die myself, not exactly—life just felt long and empty. How could I survive another twenty, thirty, forty years without her? How could I stomach “moving on” and building new connections in my life again? Falling in love? Going on dates? Maybe even having a child? All of it felt at once impossible and pointless. I walked around for months with a hollow space between my ribs.
These years later, that hollow space has filled in a little bit. Even so, I can’t help feeling hollow every time I look at the news. I have spent the last four years grieving and loving and steeping in the loss of this wonderful, beautiful, extraordinary human, this soulmate friend, this sister-of-the-heart that I loved (and love!) so very much. And every time I open Instagram these days I’m confronted with the harsh reality of how this pain is being visited upon the people of Gaza, and on Israelis, and on the people of Sudan and the Congo, and so many other places. So much death and destruction and terror. So many trillions of thoughts and hopes and dreams just extinguished every time a rocket falls.
For a brief span of time on that night this past weekend, I looked up at the stars and did not think about death. But I return to it again and again now, every time I revisit the memory. How much pain have we inflicted on one another in the time that it took for that light from Orion to reach us? How much pain will we continue to inflict as that light keeps on coming in its journey?
Buddhists often remind us that death is enough—all the pain and suffering we will ever need. It is, at its deepest root, not necessary for us to wage war and inflict suffering on others. The natural fact of being humans on a brief and finite planet will see us suffer simply through having to let go of those we love. That is it. That is all. And yet we continue in these impossible, unfathomable quests for land and revenge and vengeance and domination.
All the while, those photons from the stars of Orion travel to us from light-years away—billions of human years away—and fall on all of us equally. Light just is. It does not care. It was travelling to the world long before you and I were here; it will still be travelling long after we are gone.
Our lives here are so brief. Some of us get eighty years. Some of us get five. Why are we not focused on wringing as much joy as possible out of whatever years we have?
Almost three years ago, I stood in the snow in my parents’ backyard and looked up at the stars. It was cloudy, so I could only see the moon. And for the first time in my life I felt like I understood—or, as above, had approached the edge of “beginning to comprehend”—what infinity meant. That deep, bottomless well of grief? That felt infinite. The deep dark arc of space stretching out over my head? That felt infinite too.
All the people on this earth, bowed low amidst the carnage and the fighting and the children buried under rubble? That feels infinite too, in the way that waiting for light can sometimes be.
And yet the light is coming in its own, inscrutable time. I am already here, it says to me, to you. I have left my star, and I am already arriving. Dig deep, hold on, and breathe.
It’s a terrible, hollow world of ours sometimes. And yet that world manages to be beautiful too, and filled with so many things to be thankful for even as we rage and grieve.
Which is infinity in its own way too, isn’t it. Almost puts the light from Orion’s Belt to shame.
Currently Reading: In Light-Years There’s No Hurry, by Marjolijn van Heemstra
Currently Watching: The Crowded Room
Currently Eating: Homemade veggie burrito bowls!
Currently Substacking: The Glimmering, by Joy Uyeno, which you should definitely be reading if you aren’t already.