Feel

“Baby, I’m hot just like an oven. I need some lovin’,” I sang as I sat in my car, taking my lunch break. “And, Baby, I can’t hold it much longer. It’s getting stronger inside of me.”

These words filled the cabin of my late-model Volvo until they poured like water from the open windows into the cold air of the parking lot in which I sat. A woman, older than I and presumably more cautious, judging by the look on her face as she witnessed my full-bore outburst of song, shook her head at me and frowned. It was a strange reaction now that I think back on it and it brings out such gravity and interior motivation that I am called to follow it.

I am a strange person. I do strange things: I dance around the house, radio on, trying to move every muscle in my body to different beats within a song while I cook French toast; I stretch, doing toe-touches randomly in groups of people; and I am occasionally gripped by the urge to break into spontaneous and dramatic singing of soul songs by Marvin Gaye or Al Green.


It was after one of these bouts of song that I sat down to read a primer on the works of Neils Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics.

According to general theories of quantum mechanics, the universe is a single, unified field of subatomic particles and immense chaotic, yet ordered activity. Within the reader of these words beat the same atoms of hydrogen and oxygen that pulse through the writer. The reader and the writer, with perhaps thousands of miles and years of time between them, has electrons in those atoms that feel the effects of each other’s smallest of movements, the most insignificant of actions.

It is with that knowledge that I am driven to write these words today. I say that I am strange only because people often tell me so. Though I don’t do anything that would be considered insane by a certified professional, my behavior is definitely outside the traditional normal spectrum of human activity. I sometimes cry when the sunrise shines on distant mountains while my Beethoven CD plays in the car stereo as I drive to work. I get quiet and reserved when people bother me and I feel like I have to retreat into my own little shell for peace. I am not bi-polar, but I am sincere and allow my emotions to manifest.

“You’re crazy,” is a phrase I am quite used to hearing. Along with, “What’s wrong with you?”

I don’t think that people say it in a negative way, but rather I think my behavior amuses them. I think that the natural movement of spirit within me brings humor to others. I welcome the words and often shrug it off with a laugh. But I try now to answer the latter question candidly.

Now, dear reader, take a deep breath. No, really; take a deep breath. Now take another. Keep doing that as you read. Feel how your heart slows its rapid beat. Feel your mind become still. Feel the life inside you. When you feel it, place your mind upon this thought:


One day, I will die. One day, this heart will no longer beat, this brain will no longer pulse with electricity and these lungs will no longer carry my breath.

It’s a difficult thought to be sure, but one that deserves true contemplation. One day, you and I will die. Your friends will die and the ones you love will die. Their bodies will cease to exist in the way that you and I know them and they will become nothing more than carbon and minerals and nutrients for other things to eat. Does that make your heart beat faster again? Good.

We, as human beings, spend a lot of time avoiding thoughts like this, especially as the years roll by and we see things turn out in ways that we hadn’t expected. But it doesn’t hide the fact that we will one day cease to exist as we know it.

Now, you may say, “I believe in God. I have faith that there is life after death.”

Even so, whether your faith is justified by truth or not; all that you know right now will one day disappear completely. No more traffic, no more pain, no more sorrow, no more grief, no more disease, no more kissing, no more hugging, no more making love, no more trees, no more children and no more walking slowly through the park in autumn when the air is crisp and the leaves fall with each passing breeze, making you wonder if this could just…be…heaven. No more.

Now take another deep breath, just in case you didn’t take my advice the first time. Let the weight of these thoughts drain through your body like water, or like song lyrics pouring through the open windows of a late-model Volvo.

It is here, in this absence of life and death that you have found Love