Читать книгу What We Talk About When We Talk About God - Rob Bell - Страница 6
ОглавлениеOne time I was asked to speak to a group of atheists and I went and I had a blast. Afterward they invited me out for drinks, and we were laughing and telling stories and having all sorts of interesting conversation when a woman pulled me aside to ask me a question. She had a concerned look on her face and her brow was slightly furrowed as she looked me in the eyes and said, “You don’t believe in miracles, do you?”
As I listened, I couldn’t help but smile, because not long before that evening I’d been approached by a churchgoing, highly devout Christian woman who’d asked me, with the exact same concerned look on her face, complete with furrowed brow, “You believe in miracles, don’t you?”
It’s as if the one woman was concerned that I had lost my mind, while the other woman was concerned that I had lost my faith.
There’s a giant either/or embedded in their questions, an either/or that reflects some of the great questions of our era:
Faith or intellect?
Belief or reason?
Miracles or logic?
God or science?
Can a person believe in things that violate all the laws of reason and logic and then claim to be reasonable and logical?
I point this either/or out because how we think about God is directly connected with how we think about the world we’re living in.
When someone dismisses the supernatural and miraculous by saying, “Those things don’t happen,” and when someone else believes in something he can’t prove and has no evidence for, those beliefs are both rooted in particular ways of understanding what kind of world we’re living in and how we know what we know.
Often in these either/or discussions, people on both sides assume they’re just being reasonable or logical or rational or something else intelligent-sounding, without realizing that the modern world has shaped and molded and formed how we think about the world, which leads to how we think about God, in a number of ways that are relatively new in human history and have a number of significant limits.
So before we talk about the God who is with us and for us and ahead of us, we’ll talk about the kind of world we’re living in and how that shapes how we know what we know.
First, we’ll talk about the bigness of the universe,
then
the smallness of the universe,
then
we’ll talk about you and what it is that makes you you,
and then
we’ll talk about how all this affects how we understand and talk about God.
This will take a while—so stay with me—because the universe is way weirder than any of us ever imagined . . .
I. Welcome to the Red Shift
The universe,
it turns out,
is expanding.
Restaurant chains expand, waistbands expand, so do balloons and those little foam animal toys that come in pill-shaped capsules—but universes?
Or more precisely, the universe?
It’s expanding?
Now the edge of the universe is roughly ninety billion trillion miles away (roughly being the word you use when your estimate could be off by A MILLION MILES), the visible universe is a million million million million miles across, and all of the galaxies in the universe are moving away from all of the other galaxies in the universe at the same time.
This is called galactic dispersal, and it may explain why some children have a hard time sitting still.
The solar system that we live in, which fills less than a trillionth of available space, is moving at 558 thousand miles per hour. It’s part of the Milky Way galaxy, and it takes our solar system between 200 and 250 million years to orbit the Milky Way once. The Milky Way contains a number of smaller galaxies, including
the Fornax Dwarf,
the Canis Major,
the Ursa Minor,
the Draco,
the Leo I and the not-to-be-forgotten Leo II,
the Sculptor, and
the Sextans.
It’s part of a group of fifty-four galaxies creatively called the Local Group, which is a member of an even larger group called the Virgo Supercluster (which had a number of hit singles in the early eighties).
And happens to be traveling at 666 thousand miles an hour.
(So be careful out there, and look both ways before you cross the supernova.)
Back to our original question:
Expanding?
Around a hundred years ago, several astronomers, among them Edwin Hubble, he of telescope fame, and Vesto Slipher, he of awesome name fame, observed distant galaxies giving off red light. Red is the color galaxies emit when they’re moving away from you, blue when they’re moving toward you—hence the term “red shift.”
Fast-forward to 1964, to two physicists working for the Bell Telephone Company, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. These men were unable to locate the source of strange radio waves they were continually picking up with their highly sensitive equipment. As they searched for the source of these waves, cleaned the bird droppings (which Penzias called “white dielectric material”) off their instruments, and shared their findings with other scientists, they realized that they were picking up background radiation from a massive explosion.
An explosion, it’s commonly believed, that happened a number of years ago—13.7 billion, to be more exact.
Apparently, before everything was anything, there was a point, called a singularity, and then there was a bang involving inconceivably high temperatures, loaded with enough energy and potential and possibility to eventually create what you and I know to be life, the universe, and everything in it.
The background radiation from this explosion, by the way, is still around in small amounts as the static on your television. (And you thought it was your cable company.)
Now when we get into sizes and distances and speeds this big and far and galactic and massive, things don’t function in ways we’re familiar with. For example, gravity. Jump off the roof of your house, drop a plate on the floor in the kitchen, launch a paper airplane and you see gravity at work, pulling things toward our planet in fairly consistent and predictable ways. But in other places in the universe, gravity isn’t so reliable. There are celestial bodies called neutron stars that have such strong gravity at work within them that they collapse in on themselves. These stars can weigh more than two hundred billion tons—more than all of the continents on Earth put together . . .
and fit in a teaspoon.
And then there’s all that we don’t know. A staggering 96 percent of the universe is made up of black holes, dark matter, and dark energy. These mysterious, hard to see, and even harder to understand phenomena are a major engine of life in the universe, leaving us with 4 percent of the universe that is actually knowable.
Which leads us to a corner of this 96 percent unknowable universe, to the outer edge of an average galaxy, to a planet called Earth. Our home.
Earth weighs about six billion trillion tons, is moving around the sun at roughly sixty-six thousand miles an hour, and is doing this while rotating at the equator at a little over a thousand miles an hour. So when you feel like your head is spinning, it is. Paris is, after all, going six hundred miles an hour.
Earth’s surface is made up of about ten big plates and twenty smaller ones that never stop slipping and sliding, like Greenland, which moves half an inch a year. The general estimate is that this current configuration of continents that we know to be Africa, Asia, Europe, etc. has been like this about a tenth of 1 percent of history. The world, as we know it, is a relatively new arrangement.
Every day there are on average two earthquakes somewhere in the world that measure 2 or greater on the Richter scale, every second about one hundred lightning bolts hit the ground, and every nineteen seconds someone sitting in a restaurant somewhere hears Lionel Richie’s song “Dancing on the Ceiling” one. more. Time.
Speaking of time, here on Earth we travel around the sun every 365 days, which we call a year, and we spin once around every twenty-four hours, which we call a day. Our concepts of time, then, are shaped by large, physical, planetary objects moving around each other while turning themselves. Time is determined by physical space.
No planets, which are things,
no time.
We have calendars that divide time up into predictable, segmented, uniform units—hours and days and months and years. This organization into regular, sequential intervals that unfold with precise predictability has deeply shaped our thinking about time. These constructs are good and helpful in many ways—they help us get to our dentist appointments and remember each other’s birthdays, but they also protect us from how elastic and stretchy time actually is.
If you place a clock on the ground and then you place a second clock on a tower, the hands of the clock on the tower will move faster than on the clock on the ground, because closer to the ground gravity is stronger, slowing down the hands of the clock.
If you stand outside on a starry night, the light you see from the stars is the stars as they were when the light left them. You are not seeing how those stars are now; you in the present are seeing how those stars were years and years and years in the past.
If you stand outside on a sunny day, you are enjoying the sun as it was eight minutes ago.
If you found yourself riding on a train that was traveling at the speed of light and you looked out the window, you would not see things ahead, things beside you, and things you had just passed. You would see everything all at once. You would lose your sense of past, present, and future because linear, sequential time would collapse into one giant NOW.
Time is not consistent:
it bends and warps and curves;
it speeds up and slows down;
it shifts and changes.
Time is relative, its consistency a persistent illusion.
It’s an expanding,
shifting,
spinning,
turning,
rotating,
slipping and sliding universe we’re living in.
There is no universal up;
there is no ultimate down;
there is no objective, stationary, unmoving place of rest where you can observe all that ceaseless movement.
Sitting still, after all, is no different than maintaining a uniform approximate constant state of motion.
There is no absolute viewpoint; there are only views from a point.
Bendy, curvy, relative—the past, present, and future are illusions as space-time warps and distorts in a stunning variety of ways, leading us to another matter: matter.
The sun is both a star that we orbit,
and our primary source of energy.
It is a physical object,
and it is the engine of life for our planet.
The sun is made of matter,
and the sun is energy.
At the same time.
Albert Einstein was the first to name this, showing that matter is actually locked-up energy. And energy is liberated matter.
Perhaps you’ve seen posters of the Swiss patent clerk sticking his tongue out, with the wild hair and the rumors of how he was supposedly such a genius that he would forget to put his pants on in the morning. And then there’s his famous E = mc2 formula, which many of us could confidently write out on a chalkboard even if we couldn’t begin to explain it.
Beyond all that, though, what exactly was it that he did?
What Einstein did, through his theories of general and special relativity, was show that the universe is way, way weirder than anyone had thought. I realize that weirder isn’t the most scientific of terms, but Einstein’s work took him from the bigness of the universe to the smallness of the universe, and that’s when a string of truly stunning discoveries were made, discoveries that challenge our most basic ideas about the world we’re living in.
II. Who Ordered That?
For thousands of years people have wondered what the universe is made of, assuming that there must be some kind of building block, a particle, a basic element, a cosmic Lego of sorts—something really small and stable that makes up everything we know to be everything. The possibilities are fascinating, because if you could discover this primal building material, you could answer countless questions about how we got here and what we’re made of and where it’s all headed . . .
You could, ideally, make sense of things.
Greek philosophers—among them Democritus, who lived twenty-five hundred years ago—speculated about this elemental building block, using a particular word for it. The Greeks had a word tomos, which referred to cutting or dividing something. Out of this they developed the concept of something that was a-tomos, something “indivisible, uncuttable,” something that everything else was made of. Something really small, of which there is nothing smaller. Something atomos, from which we get the word atom.
Imagine what we’d learn if we could actually discover one of these atoms! That was the quest that compelled scientists and philosophers and thinkers for thousands of years until the late 1800s, when atoms were eventually discovered.
Atoms, it turns out, are small.
About one million atoms lined up side by side are as thick as a human hair.
A single grain of sand contains 22 quintillion atoms (that’s 22 with 18 zeroes).
An atom is in size to a golf ball as a golf ball is in size to Earth.
That small.
But atoms, it was discovered, are made up of even smaller parts called protons, neutrons, and electrons. The protons and neutrons are in the center of the atom, called the nucleus, which is one-millionth of a billionth of the volume of the atom.
If an atom were blown up to the size of a stadium, the nucleus would be the size of a grain of rice, but it would weigh more than the stadium.
The discoveries continued as technology was developed to split those particles, which led to the discovery that those particles are actually made up of even smaller particles. And then technology was developed to split those particles and it was discovered that those particles are actually made up of even smaller particles. And then technology was developed to split those particles . . .
Down and down it went,
smaller and smaller,
further and further into the subatomic world.
The British physicist J. J. Thomson discovered the electron in 1897, which led to the discovery of an astonishing number of new particles over the next few
years, from
bosons and
hadrons and
baryons and
neutrinos
to
mesons and
leptons and
pions and
hyperons and
taus.
Gluons were discovered, which hold particles together, along with quarks, which come in a variety of types—
there are up quarks
and down quarks
and top quarks
and bottom quarks
and charmed quarks
and, of course,
strange quarks.
When an inconceivably small particle called a muon was identified, the legendary physicist Isaac Rabi is known for saying, “Who ordered that?”
By now somewhere around 150 subatomic particles have been identified, with new technology and research constantly emerging, the most impressive example of this happening at a facility known by the acronym CERN, which is near the Swiss–French border. Workers at CERN, an international collaboration of almost eight thousand scientists and several thousand employees, have built a sixteen-mile circular tunnel one hundred meters below earth’s surface called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). At the LHC they fire two beams at each other, each with 3.5 trillion volts, hoping that in the ensuing collision particles will emerge that haven’t been studied yet.
Physicists have talked with straight faces for years about how with this unprecedented level of energy and equipment and billions of dollars and the brightest scientific minds in the world working together they might be able to finally discover that incredibly important, terribly elusive particle called the . . .
Higgs Boson.
(Which they did. Go ahead, Google it. It’s incredible. Even if it sounds like the name of a southern politician.)
Now, the staggeringly tiny size of atoms and subatomic particles is hard to get one’s mind around, but it’s what these particles do that forces us to confront our most basic assumptions about the universe.
Many popular images of an atom lead us to think that it’s like a solar system, with the protons and neutrons in the center like the sun and the electrons orbiting in a path around the center as our planet orbits the sun.
But those early pioneering scientists learned that this is not how things actually are. What they learned is that electrons don’t orbit the nucleus in a continuous and consistent manner; what they do is
disappear in one place and then appear in another place without traveling the distance in between.
Particles vanish and then show up somewhere else, leaping from one location to another, with no way to predict when or where they will come or go.
Niels Bohr was one of the first to come to terms with this strange new world that was being uncovered, calling these movements quantum leaps. Pioneering quantum physicists realized that particles are constantly in motion, exploring all of the possible paths from point A to point B at the same time. They’re simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.
A given electron not only travels all of the possible routes from A to B, but it reveals which path it took only when it’s observed. Electrons exist in what are called ghost states, exploring all of the possible routes they could take, until they are observed, at which point all of those possibilities collapse into the one they actually take.
Ever stood on a sidewalk in front of a store window and seen your reflection in the glass? You could see the items in the display window, but you could also see yourself, as if in a fuzzy mirror. Some of the light particles from the sun (called photons) went through the glass, illuminating whatever it was that caught your eye. Some of the particles from the sun didn’t pass through the glass but essentially bounced off it, allowing you to see your reflection. Why did a certain particle go through the glass, and a certain other particle not?
It can’t be predicted.
Some particles pass through the glass;
Some don’t.
You can determine possibilities,
you can list all kinds of potential outcomes,
but in the end, that’s the best that can be done.
The physicist Werner Heisenberg was the first to name this disturbing truth about the quantum world: you can measure a particle’s location, or you can measure its speed, but you can’t measure both. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, along with breakthroughs from Max Planck and many others, raised countless questions about the unpredictability of the universe on a small scale.
As more and more physicists spent more and more time observing the universe on this incredibly small scale, more truths began to emerge that we simply don’t have categories for, an excellent example of this being the nature of light.
Light is the only constant, unchanging reality—all that curving and bending and shifting happens in contrast to light, which keeps its unflappable, steady course regardless of the conditions. But that doesn’t mean it’s free from some truly mind-bending behavior. Because things in nature are either waves or particles. There are dust particles and sound waves, waves in the ocean and particles of food caught in your friend’s beard. That’s been conventional wisdom for a number of years.
Particles and waves.
One or the other.
Particles are like bullets;
waves are spread out.
Particles can be only in specific locations;
waves can be everywhere.
Particles can’t be divided; waves can.
But then there’s light.
Light is made up of particles.
Light is a wave.
If you Ask light a wave question, it responds as a wave. ask light a particle question, and it reveals itself to be particles.
Two mutually exclusive things, things that have always been understood to be either/or,
turned
out
to
be
both.
At the same time.
Niels Bohr was the first to name this, in 1926, calling it complementarity.
Complementarity, the truth that something can be two different things at the same time, leads us to another phenomenon, one far more bizarre, called entanglement.
Communication as we understand it always involves a signal of some sort—your voice, a telephone, a wire, a radio wave, a frequency, a pulse—something to transmit whatever it is from one place to another. Not so in the subatomic realm, where particles consistently show that they’re communicating with one another with no signal involved. Wolfgang Pauli identified this truly surreal property of subatomic particles in 1925 with his exclusion principle. Pairs of quantum particles, it was discovered, demonstrate an awareness of what the other is doing after they’ve been separated. Without any kind of signal.
The universe in its smallness presents us with a reality we simply don’t have any frame of reference for:
A single electron can do forty-seven thousand laps around a four-mile tunnel—in one second.
Protons live ten thousand billion billion billion years, while muons generally live about two microseconds—and then they’re gone.
If you’re sitting in a chair that spins and I turn you around, I have to turn you 360 degrees to get you facing the same direction again. Electrons have been discovered that don’t return to the front after being spun 360 degrees once; for that to happen you have to spin them twice.
Imagine playing tennis and discovering that sometimes you were able to hit the ball with your racquet, and other times the ball went through your racquet as if there were no webbing. You would immediately assume that there was some reason for this unexpected behavior of the ball and the racquet, and so you would work to figure out why this was happening. You’d take into account speed and force and the characteristics of the various materials: plastic and rubber and metal. All under the assumption that there was an explanation for the ball’s action. You’d apply basic laws of physics and motion, and you’d think about similar circumstances involving similar speeds and sizes and shapes.
You’d be doing what scientists have been doing for a long time: operating under the assumption that the universe functions according to particular laws of motion that can be known.
But in the subatomic world,
things come and go,
disappear and appear,
spin and leap and communicate and demonstrate awareness of each other,
all without appearing to pay any attention to how the world is supposed to work.
Niels Bohr said that anyone who wasn’t outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn’t understand what was being said.
It’s important to pause here and make it clear that quantum theory is responsible for everything from X-rays and MRI machines and superconducting magnets, to lasers and fiber optics and the transistors that are the backbone of electronics, to computers. It’s staggering just how many features of the modern world as we know it come from the contributions of quantum theory. The Nobel Laureate physicist Leon Lederman and the theoretical physicist Christopher hill of Fermilab believe that quantum theory is arguably the most successful theory in the history of science.
Which is all rather interesting, of course, but I’m assuming by now that you have a question, something along the lines of
What does any of this have to do with what we talk about when we talk about God?
Excellent question.
Three responses, then,
beginning with
energy,
and then moving to
involvement,
and then a bit about
surprise.
Energy,
involvement,
surprise.
Let’s begin with your chair, because odds are that you’re sitting in a chair while you read or listen to this book. It’s probably made of metal or wood, foam, cloth, maybe leather. A few nuts and bolts, a screw or two, some paint, perhaps some nylon or plastic as well. If we were to take that wood or steel or cloth and put it under a high-powered microscope, we would see the basic elements and molecules and compounds that comprise those materials. And if we kept going, farther and farther into those basic materials, we would eventually be at the subatomic level, where we’d discover that the chair, like everything else in the universe, is made of atoms.
And atoms,
it turns out,
are 99.9 percent empty space.
If all of the empty space was taken out of all of the atoms in the universe, the universe would fit in a sugar cube.
An atom, in the end, is a thing. But a thing that is made up mostly of empty space, which is commonly believed to not be a thing. So what exactly are you sitting on?
A chair—a tangible, material, physical object—is made up of particles in motion, bouncing off each other, crashing into each other, coming in and out of existence billions of times in billionths of a second, existing in ghost states and then choosing particular paths for no particular, predictable reason.
Your chair appears to be solid,
but that solidity is a bit of an illusion.
It has weight and mass and shape and texture, and if you don’t see it in the dark and stub your toe on it, that chair will cause your toe great pain, and yet your chair is ultimately
a relationship of energy—
atoms bonded to each other in a particular way that allows you to sit on that chair and be supported. Things like chairs and tables and parking lots and planets may appear to be solid, but they are at their core endless frenetic movements of energy.
I talk about all of this red shifting and dark matter and uncertainty and particle movement because most of us were taught in science class that ours is a hard, stable, tangible world that we can study and analyze because it’s there, right in front of us, and we can prove it in a lab.
Which is true.
But often another perspective came along as well, the one that declared that there is a clear distinction between the material world and the immaterial world, between the physical world and the spiritual world.
What we’re learning from science, however, is that that distinction isn’t so clear after all.
In other words, the line between
matter
and
spirit
may not be a line at all.
In an article about physicists searching for the Higgs Boson, Jeffrey Kluger writes in TIME magazine that they’re “grappling with something bigger than mere physics, something that defies the mathematical and brushes up—at least fleetingly—against the spiritual.”
Now obviously there are scientists who would bristle at any suggestion that this field of study has anything to do with the spiritual, pointing out that it’s not mystical at all but very straightforward science, but for others, brushing up against the spiritual is a great way to put it because the primary essence of reality is energy flow. Things, no matter how great their mass is or how hard or solid or apparent their thingness is, are ultimately relationships of living energy.
This energy isn’t destroyed or created—it simply changes form as it’s conserved. If you’re reading this book in printed form on paper and you were to burn it, the sum total of the book’s energy would not change; it would simply go off and be other things than this book.
The amount of actual energy in the universe would stay the same.
And you wouldn’t find out how the book ends.
Now, from energy,
let’s move to involvement.
In the common view of the world most of us grew up with, there was a clear division between the subject and the object. Think of the stereotype of the objective scientist, standing cool and detached behind a glass wall, jotting observations onto a clipboard about whatever it is being studied. There is nothing wrong with this image; in fact, we owe this kind of thinking and practice a huge debt for the stunning array of technologies and inventions and luxuries we benefit from every day.
Somebody figured out how to fit a thousand songs in our pocket. Well done there.
But this image of detachment,
standing back at a distance,
watching and examining and analyzing things from a perceived place of noninvolvement, lives on in a number of ways that aren’t true.
At the quantum level, to observe the atom is to affect it. The particle is a cloud of possibilities until it’s observed, and then it chooses a particular path. The question you ask light determines whether it will answer as a wave or a particle.
In the view many have been taught,
the world is out there,
stationary and unmoved,
unaffected by us.
But in the quantum world,
observing changes things.
Matter is ultimately energy, and our interactions with energy alter reality because we’re involved, our world an interconnected web of relationships with nothing isolated, alone, or unaffected.
Even when there is an actual glass wall—
as helpful and accurate as traditional scientific
understandings are—
there is no glass wall in the end.
Central to the isolated, detached, common modern worldview is the assumption that things exist in empty space. Us outside, looking in. Studying, analyzing, standing at a distance—observing the world that is out there in empty space.
But the quantum world teaches us that space is—what’s the best word here?—alive. Particles can be found in what appears to be empty space. The invisible substance between us and the things and people around us actually contains something.
We are enmeshed in the world around us, not outside looking in, but inside looking . . . inside.
It’s all energy,
and we’re all involved.
These two truths,
the one about energy and the one about involvement, lead us to a third truth, this one about surprise.
Your toaster doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. Seriously.
As things heat up, they register different colors, each new color representing an increase in temperature. And so, according to the standard assumptions about heat and corresponding color, your toaster should glow blue.
But it doesn’t;
it glows red.
Why?
No one knows.
Which particle will pass through the glass in the shop window,
and which will reflect back? Where will that electron disappear, and when will it reappear—and where?
We can predict,
and we can identify patterns,
but at the most basic level,
we don’t know.
The world surprises us.
And it surprises scientists too,
on a regular basis.
Energy,
involvement,
and
surprise.
I talk about all of this because when people object to the idea of God, to the idea that there is more beyond our tangible, provable-with-hard-evidence observations and experiences of the world, they aren’t taking the entire world into account. A brief reading of modern science quite quickly takes us into all sorts of interesting and compelling places where the most intelligent, up-to-date, and informed scientists are constantly surprised by just how much more there is to the universe.
III. You Dirty Star, You
Which leads us to you,
right there in the middle of it all.
Actually, we are in the middle of it all, with a human being (roughly a meter tall on average, kids included) halfway between the largest size we can comprehend, the width of the known universe, and the smallest size discovered thus far in the universe.
And you,
you are fascinating.
You lose fifty to a hundred and fifty strands of hair a day, you shed ten billion flakes of skin a day,
every twenty-eight days you get completely new skin, and every nine years your entire body is renewed.
(This dead skin we shed makes up 90 percent of household dust. So feel free to vacuum more.)
And yet your body, in the midst of this relentless shedding and dying and changing and renewing,
continues to remember to be you,
strand by strand,
flake by flake,
atom by atom.
Your body is made up of around seventy-five trillion cells, every one of those cells containing hundreds of thousands of molecules with six feet of DNA in every cell containing over three billion letters of coding. These cells are a potent blend of matter and memory—bones and hair and blood and teeth and at the same time personality and essence and predispositions and habits.
You are an exotic combination of matter and memory, with a fine line in between.
Millions of cells, drifting through the universe, assembled and configured and finely tuned at this second to be you, but inevitably moving on in the next seconds to be other things and other people.
The atoms that make you you in this very second may have earlier been part of a stork,
or Mars,
or a mushroom,
or a squid,
or a coconut,
or Ohio,
or Buddha,
or Cher.
Imagine that your uncle died and in his will he left you his beloved old wooden boat. You love your uncle and out of respect for him you decide that you’re going to fix up his old boat, making it good as new. And so you start with the hull, replacing the old boards with new ones. But as you work rebuilding the hull, you realize that the deck needs replacing as well. And so the next year, you remove all of the boards on the deck and replace them with new ones, plank by plank, until the boat has an entirely new deck. But spending all that time working on the deck convinces you that the hardware isn’t reliable; you’re not sure which pieces would work if you were to actually launch the boat, and which would snap with the slightest strain. And so you set out to replace all of the hardware. . . . If you keep this up, at some point you will have replaced the entire boat, and yet when you take your friends out for a ride, you will tell them that this is the boat your uncle left you in his will.
The enduring reality of the boat, then, is in the pattern, not the planks.
The planks come and go, but the pattern remains. You are a pattern, moving through time, constantly changing and yet precisely consistent. Some have said we’re like “light at the end of a spinning stick.”
The basic elements of life are actually quite common—hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and a few others. The dirt below us, the sky above us, the sun, moon, and stars, we’re all made of the same stuff.
You share over 60 percent of your genes with fruit flies, you share over 90 percent of your genes with mice, and you share 96 percent of your DNA with the large apes.
So when you read about aging singers or actors or politicians who used to be stars—well yes, of course they were . . . we all used to be stars.
One of my sons recently had a loose tooth that was driving him crazy. He’d sit at the table while we ate dinner, hand in his mouth, moving the tooth back and forth, trying to loosen it enough for it to come out. Day after day, talking about it and fussing with it and telling us just how badly he wanted it to come out. And then it came out—while we were at the beach. He started jumping up and down in the sand, celebrating, doing one of those dances that only an eleven-year-old boy can do, hoisting his now-removed tooth above his head, victorious.
He then turned to me and asked: If he threw it in the ocean, would he still get something from the tooth fairy? I said yes, feeling free to speak on behalf of the tooth fairy, who happened to be sitting next to me in a swimsuit.
And so he ran up to the waterline,
cocked his arm back,
and threw his tooth into the ocean.
I tell you this story because at some point today you will eat. You will eat for several reasons, chief among them being survival. If you don’t eat, you die, because your body needs food. And food comes from the Earth. It’s planted, watered, cultivated, exposed to the sun, and then harvested, transported, prepared, and placed on your plate. Between the sun and the rain and the nutrients in the soil, that food received what it needed to keep you alive.
