Something has to change.
There are some small relational things that shrink my world to fit them. My perception is distorted and suddenly these minor things become the most urgent and important things in my world.
Considering that this often involves colleagues/acquaintances, let’s just say that these relationships are certainly not the be and end all of my existence.
Yet somehow, in those moments, it can feel like they are. And those moments happen on a weekly basis. Far too much time and energy to be taken up by nothing.
Now I have just turned 40 (did I mention that I’ve just turned 40?) (how long can I continue to say I have just turned 40?) and feeling really good, I do not want these minor relational things to continue to perturb me as I come to the end of my Christmas break.
A helpful move will likely be away from the over-focus on the reasons for turbulence in my inner world, instead to focus on the surface waves of overthinking. Overthinking is a protective mechanism, and goodness knows I’ve explored enough what I am protecting against. Overthinking continues to propogate whatever has come from below and spills out into everthing. Time to focus on the spill and how to keep it contained/ignore it altogether.
So, what to do?
Continue the basics of good diet, regular exercise, and sleep of course, as well as small things like stopping nail biting and skin picking – all things that continue to signal to my brain that I am not worthy of care and there is something wrong. (Must read the book Atomic Habits by James Clear.)
Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Get busy with life’s purpose, toss aside empty hopes, get active in your own rescue – if you care for yourself at all – and do it while you can”. (Meditations, 3.14).
Being up and about early and engaging in this writing is my getting busy with purpose and being active in my own rescue. My aim for the year is to spend more time creating, even if I can only manage 30 mins in a day. This is better than nothing and will give me those good feelings of accomplishment that keep my mind outside.
Given that I have ‘just’ turned 40, the DO IT WHILE YOU CAN has more urgency. I am very fortunate to be of generally good health, but I know this shouldn’t be taken for granted. Work, marriage, frienships, families, home, hobbies, work-life balance – these are all in good health also, so there will likely be no better time to do it.
DO IT WHILE YOU CAN is going to be my mantra for this year.
It seems to me that a way to counteract the sweating of the small stuff requires a move to BIG topics, to keep my thoughts OUT THERE, and not IN HERE (IN HERE being the overthinking – have I upset them? What if they hate me? Why didn’t they say good morning, blah blah). Being OUT THERE is a letting go of control and stepping out of my comfort zone.
A BIG TOPIC that I’ve always wondered about is – why is there something rather than nothing? I’ve made a GIANT LEAP out of my comfort zone and began with this topic. I’ll record what I’ve learned here so far, to test whether I have understood anything at all.
I went straight in with the book ‘A Universe from Nothing’ by Laurence M. Krauss – which is both a blessing and a curse, a sentiment with which the book itself and the afterword by Richard Dawkins agree. It’s fortuitous we are here now, when the universe is ‘close enough’ and ‘young enough’ to observe and give a full picture of its origins, but beyond this there is little comfort about the book if one is looking for a sense of meaning (the answer to the WHY rather than the HOW). Fascinating, but bleak. And perhaps now I have dived straight into the physics of the whole thing, I am wondering whether I can step aside, as was the intention, to a more philosophical look at things. Some kind of deflating feeling, a ‘what’s the point? There is no why!’
Ok, that’s a bit dramatic. I concede I can find plenty of solace in science. A lot of the physics in this book is either completely unfamiliar to me, or I have encountered before but understood so little that it feels like encountereing for the first time!
A Universe from Nothing – Laurence M. Krauss
Here’s what I have learned from this book:
From nothing, there is energy from quantum fluctuations and negative pressure acting on empty space as the universe expands, means that a small area of space can grow very large and with a lot of stuff in it. And everything we have observed (flat universe, Newtonian gravitational energy of galaxies being zero etc) is consistent with a universe that arose out of nothing.
It took my hours to come up with that summary.
You’re welcome.
Quantum fluctuations in empty space involving virtual particles and phase transitions providing energy, led to gravitational collapse into the galaxies, stars, planets and people that we see today. This could provide a mechanism for us and everything we see to originate from empty space.
When the universe was about half its present size, it would have been decelerating, due to matter being dominant over empty space at that point. A gravitational force would have been acting against expansion. In classical mechanics, a “jerk” is the point when a system changes its acceleration.
As the universe cooled with expansion, areas of it would have undergone a kind of phase transition, during which energy can be released because the lowest energy state in one phase can have lower energy than the lowest energy state in the other phase (latent heat). If this happened in the expanding universe this could have affected the rate of expansion of the unverse. Energy stored before the phase transition completed (the latent heat) would have acted like energy in empty space. This could have caused faster expansion than expected. This inflationary period could have allowed quantum fluctuations to occur.
Quantum fluctuations are the occurence of virtual particlea and fields, which can lead to small regions of space ending their period of expansion while others are still expanding. As differtent regions stop inflating at different rates on microscopic scales, the density of matter and radiation that results would have varied. This helps explain why there are hot and cold spots in the cosmic microwave background. Quantum processes may have led to a small asymmetry, witha slight excess of matter over antimatter, after which not all matter can be annihilated as there is not enough antimatter to do so. This equals left matter, which means us!
We may come from a momentary and accidental moment of asymmetry.
The implication is that it is quantum fluctuations are responsible for everything we see. With the scale of the universe, it eventually would happen that there would be something.
Or something like that.
The above can arrive from empty space (with that space not being truly ‘nothing’ as it’s got radiation and quantum stuff going on). I THINK (my understanding gets a bit fuzzy here) that the book implies that this can explain how something can arise from nothing (no space-time, no container as such. This latter kind of nothing is considered an unstable physical state devoid of matter and radiation, with only potential energy and the physical laws applicable.
Who came up with the laws? Why is there any quantum to fluctuate? One of my questions coming into this book was – why is there space at all? Why is there a container at all? I realised when reading this book that I should be asking ‘how’ rather than ‘why’ as this is the focus on Krauss’ book. I can’t quite let go of the ‘why’.
There is a chapter towards the end that goes a bit more into philosophical and theological arguments for a First Cause of creation, who came up with the rules that governed the universe?I found myself surprised at the strength of my feelings that there must be a something to start everything off. This is in part due to my limited understanding, but also the many questions that remain in quantum physics stuff.
This is probably as good a summary as I can make, aware as I am that I have very limited understanding quantum mechanics ‘n’ stuff.
The book goes into A LOT about the universe – the history of our observations that validate the Big Bang (Hubble expansion, Cosmic Microwave Background (CMBG), and the observed agreement bwtween the abudnance of light elements measured in the universe with the amounts predicted to have been produced in the first few minutes in the history of the universe). It explains how the mass of the universe is calculated, what we know (and don’t know) about dark matter and dark energy.
What I’ve come away with is that there are some verifiable processes in which nothing can produce something. The book has advanced my understanding a lot.
Perhaps I can think of my mind as creating quantum fluctuations that produce the thoughts that bother me. I can remind myself to be an observer of such galaxies of thought and perhaps try and see them with a bit more wonder, and solace in the meaninglessness of it all. Perhaps I can consider everything as potential and my brain just happens to be creating the conditions that create ME, and that doesn’t have to have any more meaning than that, just something to work with.
“Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake. We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game simply by taking sides.” – Jacob Bronowski.
Taking sides is definitely something I’ve been doing, in many ways!
