I can’t explain anything. Let’s just start right there. I do remember many many laps of the sun ago being taught how to work with quantum mechanics to set up the equations necessary to determine the electron orbitals of the hydrogen atom. Just stay with me here. I know that I plugged through many pages of work and solved the equations and found what we experimentally know to be true. I (we) could explain the values measured for these tiny little orbitals. They are not really orbitals of course, but that is beside the point, or maybe it is the point. But what I am trying to say is that I knew that. I could explain that. But really I know much deeper that I cannot explain anything. And a single hydrogen atom certainly is contained in the “anything” of the universe, isn’t it?
I can’t explain why I used to have dozens of these “lessons” as I call them all written out, waiting for the second and fourth Fridays of the future to publish them. They are lessons for me to learn much more than for anyone else. I can’t explain why I now scramble each week to write one because the pool of finished pieces is essentially gone. I’m thankfully able to find this one floating around my head this chilly Saturday morning. I will publish it later today, maybe between world cup matches, with the usual “happy belated second Friday of the month”.
I can’t explain why I love radiohead so much. I can’t explain how emotional I get listening to them or to “A night like this” or the anything from the Sound of Music. I can’t explain why live music and hiking feel like the only real things in my life at times, the only things that I feel truly alive and purposeful and joyous in. I also have no idea why this is not universal. We are all part of one interconnected web of life, part of a grand wave-function or God’s children if you will. Why are we different? Why did I wake up this morning with such fear? Where did it go? Why do I feel confident in this moment that I can and will live a meaningful, honorable, necessary life whereas I didn’t only moments ago? Why do people love beets or lima beans? Why do some lovely humans detest olives? Why can I not write or paint or create some days yet am unable to not stop these things from pouring out of me other times?
We can’t explain anything. All we can really do is relate one thing to another. All we can do is fall back time and again to the dreaded cop-out of faith and three lined equal signs (triple-bars) and other fudge-factors. But, and this is a giant but, this is wonderful. There is such freedom in simply letting go. Letting go of measurement and causality and prediction and the heavy burden of knowing. Is the illusion of certainty the greatest trap of all?
