The most difficult and beautiful moments in Life, are those just before opening the Box – where the cat, due to the principle of superposition, is simultaneously alive and dead.
As in life – the most wonderful thing is the dopamine rush just before the culmination of something glorious. The moment when you buckle your seatbelt just before flying off to live the Lakota People for three months. The first sip of your morning coffee in the forst. The third sentence of a book that will change your life. A few words exchanged with an old high school acquaintance that makes your aching heart rise from the gutter. The moment when, duly buoyed, you sit down to Christmas Eve dinner. The second sip of a cool IPA by a campfire in the woods. The spark and pure happiness in the eyes of someone who has finally Found you. Seconds just before orgasm. The first falling star on the Perseid night in August.
The second quantum concept that won my humanistic heart is the String Theory – the science of parallel universes.
We make countless choices betwen entering one universe or other every day. Snooze or get up? Jailhouse axe coffee or latte? Brazilian wax or full bush? Barchans or thongs? Work or the third episode of „Vikings”? Belgian ale or prosecco? DAESH or ISIS? Laila Shukri or Tolstoy? Kiss or slap from a frying pan? Istanbul or Ocypel? Play on or checkmate?
Then there are the tetchy existential choices – where there are lots of unknowns, conflicting signals, mutually exclusive needs. The black abyss of consequences. Where it seems to us that both one and the other, as well as the third option will kill us, that we can’t stand the pain, that we need everything, that we want neither plan A nor B nor D…. Where we pray that what we didn’t choose will sail away like a ghost ship while we calmly and with a sense of rightness wave it off the shore, as the one and only Cheryl Strayed wisely advises in „The Ghost Ship that did not carry us.”
Often that’s not what happens, and the demons of what we’ve given up haunt us „Exorcist” style in many guises: the world’s most epically screwed-up tattoo, the midlife crisis, the illusion that things were better under communism, the illusion of the wonderful relationship that might have been but for some vague reasons we had to give up.
And this is absolutely normal. This hunger for Light, the call of the Wanderer and Seeker, nostalgia for the unreal – they are healthy and necessary. They adorn Reality with gold dust of metaphysics, magic and infinite potential. One can do fantastically constructive things with this wonderful energy.
I am never afraid of those Choices. I get my heart and ass together, I do everything in my power be True and Brave. I risk my heart, even if I am scared shitlessly of the pain that might follow.
Why?
Because Nature and Fate always find their way, that’s why.
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
And although my little heart breaks every now and then, I have to lick deep wounds for months, and there so many scars on body that map all of them, I never feel sorry for what I did not choose, what did not happen. I know that this abandoned orphan alternative, according to the Multiverse theory, is blooming beautifully somewhere. Spontaneously and as needed. It has chosen the best path for itself, to which I did not have to laboriously weave for this event. It exists, lives its life, and I respectfully and happily cheer it on from my world. The real one. For that one also being only a phantom.
Of course, the quantum physics community is divided over whether parallel universes exist. And the humanist community is divided as to whether these physicists exist at all 😉
Therefore, don’t be afraid of grave decisions and loss. Be Brave, be Wise, be Kind, be the Warrior of Love and Truth. Love your thousand unlived lives. They are doing just fine without you and are waving to You friendly from the shore.
Matka Polka Extra Motzna 