What was the first truly unsettling thing you learned in school? Other than how babies are made and enter the world. For me, it was being told that the sky isn't really blue and the grass isn't really green. Nothing is actually a color. It's all in our minds.
Say what?
That striped dress burning up the internet recently? Gold and white. No, black and blue. No, bronze and white. Actually, nothing. I think that factoid freaked me out more than anything else in my early education. And then along came the philosophers with their distinction between primary qualities that are inherent in things and secondary qualities like color that aren't.
Imagine how blown my mind was when I started reading physics and even some of the most solid primary qualities like extension seemed evanescent. If you don't already know about stuff like entanglement and superposition, and you Google it, you end up going "What?"
We ordinarily think we have a lock on what the world is all about, and how to navigate through it. But with a little meditation on the true strangeness of it all, I open up in new ways. We're surrounded by mystery and uncertainty. And I think that makes two things important. First, humility. Second, boldness. As Socrates insisted long ago, we don't know as much as we think we do. Humility is appropriate to our condition. But equipped with minds and bodies as we are, we must be here to do stuff. And: Since we dance in the great unknown, we might as well be bold.
Create freely. Do well. And why not bring love into the material world like it really matters? In a cosmic existential reality where the physical environment around us looks less solid all along, love just might be the most solid thing around. Amen?
