What you seek is seeking you.
- Rumi
I woke up this morning to a tweet sent to me by a beloved sister-friend, who knows of my penchant for things weird science.
I also woke up this morning in a lull, contemplating on how I was going to start the day with energy that I was not yet feeling. I thought of how, I’d switched off my alarm—exactly 53 minutes ago—thus, annulling my recent resolution to be up by 7.00, ready to start my day with meditation, writing, and a keen determination to brighten up myself from within the midst of my plenty, plenty, plenty dark thoughts.
Instead, I’d succumbed (again) to the need to keep my eyes closed, my body asleep, and me far away from what feels like the harsh reality of 'a cruel world'—for as much time as is humanely possible.
And so, this is the dull mood in which I decided to reach for my phone, as a form of distraction from yet another day in this Accra reality, which I’ve been resisting at many levels.
It’s a reality that feels all sorts of wrong, considering how much I want something else—somewhere else.
It’s a reality that I’ve turned into some kind of suffering, due to my own mind playing tricks on me, with incessant chatter about an autonomous—and it feels unreachable—future out there travelling in the wonderous wide world.
And yet it is an Accra reality that I’ve also chosen. One that in no doubt actually has nothing much wrong with it—besides my persistent negation of it.
But then I digress, from the moment in which I reached for my phone—within my dark cloud of reluctant living.
I went for my phone because it was easier than to enforce my commitment to daily “Rise and Shine”: this would be when I choose to start my day by rubbing my hands together and placing them on my eyes to awaken. Then, I would open my eyes, sit up with a smile formed from (at least) one grateful thought; before, a focused 10-minute meditation, perched up on my bed. Because basically, this is all I can muster at this nascent stage of my spiritual development.
So, of course, I thought of how, yet again, I’d failed to do the above. I also mused on how I’d derailed my own intent to lightly leap out of bed, swiftly shower and dress up, and gladly grab me a pot of delicious Cupper Liquorice and Spearmint Infusion (a gift from another dear sister-friend), so I could then sit to start the day writing.
All of this, was to be a part of my (very recent) bid to break the habit of being myself. And I was failing miserably!
My phone was also failing miserably to serve as a proper distraction from these heavy thoughts. But still I went for it—force of habit, I suppose.
I signed in, and was immediately drawn into Twitter, by the notification from my sister-friend. It led me straight into the weird science of quantum physics via a fascinating post by Bryan Nelson.
Nelson’s post was on parallel universes. In it he spoke of the “many interacting worlds” (MIW) hypothesis, a new theory that suggests we live in one of many spaces within a multifaceted, multidimensional multiverse.
Our universe—on which many of us blindly inhabit the mundane—is not alone. It is instead only one unique and extended space-time that is also entangled with other parallel universes, which are interacting with us in imperceptible ways on a quantum level.
Within this already mind-boggling idea was another neat possibility. That we may also be unwitting actors in multiple but separate lives, spent in all these worlds simultaneously—simply as a consequence of the decisions we make in each particular life.
In other words, we each have several permutations of existence drifting out there in wave formation until such time we are able to fix one small part of that amorphous reality into some kind of tangible material now. Otherwise, those myriad sliding doors to other world selves are totally lost to us, in our very singular forms of existence.
At the end of his curious post, Nelson asks the question: What might your life look like if you made different choices? And this is a question that begs for great pause, even on a written page such as this.
…
It is here, in silence, that I realize: I no longer need to doubt my ability to change reality, even as I succumb to its overwhelming weight.
Instead, I must continue to find ways to daily choose to live happily within a sort of in-between existence of both acceptance and denial of what is.
This means, I must consistently live in a borderland mindset and space, which is also time spent within a delicate balance of always pushing forward with small actions rooted in (and routed out from) my intentions to shift my reality—while simultaneously sitting still, waiting—without expectation—in the silence of a gap that is comprised of me as no-one nowhere with absolutely no-thing.
And yes, I feel as confused as you might be reading all this certain ambiguity.
Still, it is how I must be present, content and yet waiting for the possibility that I seek to also come toward me.
Because as Rumi rightly reminds us, what we seek is also always seeking us out.
And now science, through the weird evidence of quantum mechanics, is making it easier for us to sense the proof of such an unknown eventuality—especially those of us who are reluctant to take leaps of faith first thing in the morning, or at any other time for that matter.