The Sunday Letter #24: Multitudes
I have been wondering about what to focus on for today’s Sunday Letter for a while. There are so many things floating around in my head at the moment. But I keep coming back to this video I saw a few weeks ago on Instagram. It’s a slice of sweet potato under a microscope. You’d never know unless someone told you.
Earlier in January, while reading the audiobook of True Refuge by Tara Brach, I was struck by one passage where she talks about seeing a video that zooms out from the planet and gives us an infinity-eye view of the universe. Planet Earth, suddenly becoming nothing more than a speck. The Milky Way Galaxy, likewise disappearing. An imagined video that takes us all the way out to the bounds of the observable universe—and then back, back, back all the way to Earth, to one person on the grass, to that person’s inner cells, to the vastness of space that lies waiting in between the molecules that make all of us who we are.
Atomic emptiness, the video says. We think we are solid and the world is filled with things we can touch and see and hear and understand when in fact we are all just collections of molecules buzzing about, themselves collections of electrons and protons pulled to each other by gravity and magnetic forces. The table I am typing at might look solid, but so much of it—as with us, as with the sweet potato above—is actually empty space.
Maybe, I found myself thinking, the distance from one molecule of that sweet potato to the next is as enormous as the distance from our planet to the stars.
Then I did some digging, and found out that even that idea of atomic emptiness was wrong.
Turns out, molecules are not 99.9999% empty space, despite how many popular science publications (and cool videos on YouTube) would have us—me—believe it. Turns out that as far as we can know, the vast inner spaces that exist inside of us are mostly electron clouds.
Electron cloud is a term that refers, essentially, to the way that electrons do not exist at fixed points in space. A previous model of the electron posited by phyisicst Niels Bohr said that electrons orbited the nucleus of an atom, similar to the way that planets orbit stars. But subsequent developments in physics began to show a different picture, namely that there was no way to predict when and where an electron might be in relation to the nucleus. We can deduce that they exist—we can see and observe them through a series of experiments. But each of those experiments only shows us an electron as it is in that fixed moment of time, that sliver of an instant in which the experiment takes place. What we see when we observe the “empty space” of a molecule is actually a whole bunch of possibilities all at once—electrons fizzing about and expanding over the entire atom or molecule itself.
I am, as is probably painfully obvious by now, not a science writer. So I’ve doubtless gotten much of the above paragraph wrong. But everything that I’ve been reading keeps whispering back to another thing I read not too long a while ago, about empty space and all that we expect of it.
We call it the Void not because we know it is empty but because we do not yet know what it is full of.
Lately this little Substack slice of the universe seems to be a-flurry with so many of us wondering and worrying about monetization. How do we write and make money off of it. How do we survive and find ways to do this thing we love. How. How. How.
I look around my house and at my computer and at this tiny little newsletter going out into the vastness of the reading public, the few souls it meets like an ember flinging itself out from a larger flame, hoping to ignite. I look up at the sky and I find myself thinking about grief and wondering the same thing. How. How. How.
How do we survive? How do we keep going?
What is an electron?
That’s probably the wrong way to ask the question.
What I think I want to know is: why is an electron?
In the months after Jess’s death I kept walking dully through the world and asking myself these same questions. How? How? How?
Why?
Why?
Why?
I am never going to know why an electron is. Even if the world someday discovers exactly this. My brain is too small and the world too large.
And I will never understand grief, even as it continues to meander its way through my neurons. Even as it continues to exist inside of who I am. All I can do is make space for it. But even more than this: all I can do is allow my body, my heart, to make space for it.
Because here’s the magic: somehow my life has expanded to grow around the grief, to meet it in ways I would have thought inconceivable five years ago. I don’t understand it, and yet there it is.
I didn’t really understand the magic of meeting Jess all those years ago in our university dorm room, either. All I knew was that it was there, this indisputable, instant love. Like we’d known each other already in some unfathomable way.
You were soulmates in a past life, a friend of mine said a year or so ago. It surprised me to hear him say this, and with such certainty, because I hadn’t pegged him for someone who believed in that sort of thing. Once upon a time I hadn’t believed in that sort of thing either.
But who was going to deny that lightning bolt of recognition when it came? You, I thought to myself, delightedly, as I stood in the hallway of our St. Andress flat and held the door open to Jess with her suitcase. Of course it’s you. It was always meant to be you.
Sometimes I wonder what might happen if we get all of this—or more of it, anyway—figured out a few centuries from now. How do you suppose the world might change if we discover, en masse, that past lives are real? How would it change the fabric of the way you move through the world to know that you’re in a cosmic dance with people you’ve loved for so many thousands of years, that we are all here to learn lessons and grow even through—perhaps especially through—our most difficult, terrible moments?
Or maybe some of the magic goes if we know all of this beyond a doubt. Maybe the point is always to forget at the point of re-entering the world so that the lessons we learn in this lifetime are truly ours to claim, and to carry forward into our next iteration.
Another thing I came across recently, in listening to yet another fabulous episode of the We Can Do Hard Things podcast: the concept of the selah, the sacred pause.
The Collins Online Dictionary defines a selah as “a Hebrew word of unknown meaning at the end of verses in the Psalms: perhaps a musical direction, but traditionally interpreted as a blessing meaning “ forever”.
The generally understood meaning of the term in everyday usage is as a moment to pause and listen—to take in what the world has given you and allow yourself time to rest and reflect. I am halfway through a year of what has felt like an extended selah, a time to rest and think about the so-called empty spaces that exist between the things we know and understand.
Planet, star, asteroid belt. Person, best friend, grief and joy. Atomic emptiness.
Things that seem empty, but are anything but.
Buddhists like to say that nothing is empty and yet everything is empty at the same time. Nothing is empty because even our so-called voids contain things—air, gas, light. (What about black holes, you might say, and I would nod and agree that that is the perfect question, one that physicists are trying to answer even now because as it turns out, maybe black holes can contain informaton—which is to say, maybe they can contain traces of matter that allow us to reconstruct what happened to make them black holes in the first place—after all.)
Yet even though nothing is empty, everything is also still empty of a separate self—we are only here because of so many other factors. I am part of my mother and my father, and also part of the orange and the avocado and the eggs that I had for breakfast this morning. I wouldn’t be who I am without the love of my family and friends, without the love of my dog. I do not exist independently of any of these things.
I do not exist independently of my friendship with Jess, even though she is gone from here, off into a somewhere else that none of us can see. And so grief has not, as it turns out, been a process of learning to be without her—even though it is—so much as it has been a process of coming to understand what I am looking at when it looks like I’m looking at nothing.
Atomic emptiness is just the reality of electrons and protons by another name.
She’s still here, in everything that I do and am.
I should be writing more, but instead I have been listening. I have been writing, yes, but so much of it has been on other projects—last fall and winter it was the new novel, and for most of this still-new year it’s been this newsletter. I’ve been listening to That Thing inside of you that whispers from time to time. That voice. Wait, it says about my Jess book. Just listen, and wait.
And so I’ve been listening and waiting and reading and watching good TV. Waiting for my foot to heal and taking the dog on slow, short walks and then gradually on longer, faster walks as that foot does its own thing. Electrons and protons in molecules reaching out to other molecules and knitting themselves back together.
Wait, the voice has been saying.
Last week I bought Sarah J. Maas’s latest novel (ACOTAR fans, raise your hands!) and for all of Friday and Saturday I did little else apart from read and walk the dog. It was so wonderful—the experience, and the book—I hardly have words to describe it.
Then, when I was finished reading it, that little voice inside my head said, okay. Now it’s time to get going. As though the time between my Scotland trip and now has been filled with its own kind of atomic emptiness. Emptiness-that-isn’t. Emptiness that is filled with so many other things that I can’t see. As though I’ve been journeying through another few of the light-years between one stage of grief to the next.
They aren’t linear, the stages. They exist on no timeline, no prescribed pattern. In the same way that electrons and protons occupy no defined space around that nucleus.
They are everywhere, and nowhere, all at once.
Currently Reading: How To Be an Adult In Love, by David Richo
Currently Watching: Season Three of For All Mankind. Joel Kinnaman is phenomenal. And I’m #TeamGordoAndTracy forever.
Currently Eating: The second half of the perfectly ripe avocado I opened this morning. Is there anything more perfect than a perfectly ripe avocado?
Currently Substacking: We Can Fix It, by Professor Kim Nicholas. Are you, like me, orbiting the constant grief of climate change? Read Kim’s newsletter. I promise it will help.
Google the Japanesee concept of Ma.
The Japanese concept of Ma is something that relates to all aspects of life. It has been described as a pause in time, an interval or emptiness in space. Ma is the fundamental time and space from which life needs to grow.
It popped up a few times for me lately and your post tinded me of it.