my life as a quantum particle
Saturday night, while doing the bulk of my food prep for the week, I was listening to the Moody Blues classic Days of Future Passed, thinking about my life as well. I was looking over the facts and circumstances of my life, and was not altogether pleased with what I was seeing. Though I don’t remember the thought that sparked a particular train of thought, it’s has huge ramifications for the rest of my life.
In the past, I’ve tended to think of the various parts of my life as puzzle pieces. When things went well, I thought the pieces were falling in place, and when they didn’t go well, that they were falling apart. Somewhere along the way Saturday night, my train of thought jumped the tracks. I started noticing that the things in my life were more like a picture - the picture was good or bad, depending on how I decided to look at it. I could even rearrange things in the picture to make it look better or worse. That’s when I really started to understand in my bones that good and bad are just labels I stick on things, and that I can always change the orientation of the picture to make it look much better. And that’s where it really started to change.
I started evaluating where I was heading in my life. With the puzzle piece metaphor, everything combined to make a greater whole, but sometimes I felt like I was trying to jam things in, to make them fit where they wouldn’t. With the picture metaphor, I started to see that how I looked at the picture determined what direction I was heading towards in that area of my life. Even with the picture though, I couldn’t always connect where I was heading with the various facts and circumstances of my life. Then I started to get quantum with it.
By way of background, in quantum physics, sub-atomic particles have two distinct types of information - the particle’s state, e.g. location and speed, and direction of movement. But there is an unusualness to the information - you can only have information about one or the other at any given time. If you have it’s location, you can’t tell where it’s going. If you know it’s direction, you can’t know where it is. You get one or the other, but not both.
So to bring that back in, I began to realize my life was like that - I can look at the various facts and circumstances of my life, but they can’t tell me where I’m going. Two people may have similar facts and circumstances and yet be headed in completely different directions. So while it’s good to look at the things currently in my life, they don’t necessarily determine where I’m headed, and they all influence each other. A life can only move one direction, as can one particle, but that direction is determined by all the different influences and it’s current motion.
When all is said and done, the facts and circumstances of my life matter to me, temporary though they may be. The direction I’m headed in matters to me as well. It’s learning to balance the two, seeing where I want to go and where I am, and applying the corrections to my course that matters.
I know this may not seem to be that big of a deal to you, but trust me - seeing my life differently is a huge deal to me. I’ll never look at my life the same way again.