The Worlds Within Our Minds
Cub Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park
I saw a meme the other day of a picture of outer space speckled with countless stars. It said each one of those points of light was a star then the next picture pulled out and those stars were inside a bubble, and each one of those bubbles was a galaxy and then pulled out farther to more bubbles and each bubble was a universe. It was trying to capture the scope and size of existence. Which is really incomprehensible but striving to understand it is interesting to me.
I have a friend who doesn’t like those kinds of thoughts or conversations. We were hiking and any time I would bring up ideas about the nature of existence he would get quiet and disengage. Eventually he told me it freaked him out to think about the meaning of life. I was caught off guard by it but it was important for me to hear him say it because I have a tendency to forget that people aren't as interested or excited about the things that I am at times. And to be fair it's “heavy” as Marty McFly likes to say.
I’ll get really amped about going on an adventure or a new band that I really like or some kick that I’m on and will talk about it passionately and in depth. I naturally assume that other people are going to like it or be interested in it as well. I live inside my own world.
I end up having these existential crises sometimes though because I think about consciousness, life and my existence too often. Since I'm not able to grasp it I swing like a pendulum from intrigue and a desire to know more and explore the answers on one side. Like my friend I then swing to the other side where I feel like I’m never going to figure it out and what if there is no meaning in life and we all are just here. It’s a topic that can drive you mad.
The meme that I saw the other day however, reflected a part of the overarching conversation in my head about what is real and what matters if the scale of the universe is as big as it is. Going back to my earliest education about our origins and it went like this: Earth, Solar System, The Milky Way galaxy, other galaxies, the universe. I never really thought about what if you keep scaling back and find that there are multiple universes? What is the space that those universes take up? What is larger than a universe?
I’m proud to say that I’ve been meditating consistently and it's really helped me reflect on these thoughts in a non terrifying way. I use an app called Waking Up and I do 20 minutes every morning. One of the parts of my practice is about asking the question of where do thoughts come from? Where do they live and who or what is generating them? You have a thought about something so where did it start? Did you choose that thought? No, it just appeared.
We live within our thoughts all day long. So it's important, at least to me, to be able to step outside of those and see them from a different perspective. Think of thoughts that run through your mind like you're watching TV. When your thoughts become problematic or become a burden, change the channel in your mind. Go to the park and just observe people. Each person is having some sort of conversation in their head about something. Where are those thoughts coming from. When they move to the next one where did the previous thought go?
Even as I write this I get mentally exhausted trying to understand it. One of the ideas that continually comes to mind for me however, is about these worlds. The worlds that we live in. You go through your day and people come in and out and what I think happens is we look for people who want to spend time in our world and we want to spend time in theirs. Have you ever met up with a friend you haven’t seen in a while and as you catch up with them you realize they’ve been up to so much and seem to live a different life than the one you once knew of them?
These worlds are not just limited to us, there are worlds happening all around us. Just the structure of life within a tree for instance. The cells, the rings forming over decades and years, the cycle of dying and rebirth; the expanse of the world inside one evergreen is endless and there is forest after forest of them.
When I step back and recognize that there are all these worlds around me it gives me the power to decide which world I want to enter. Like the entrance to Christmas Town in the Nightmare Before Christmas but if you want to choose another door you can.
What is difficult is when you have to say goodbye to a world that you’ve spent a lot of time in. Maybe you get a new job and now you have to leave a world behind for a new one. A relationship ends and the time you spent with that person was a world within itself. You joined their world and they joined yours. In time you created a world for the two of you. When its over it is difficult to know that you may never see that place again. Rather you’ll never feel that place again. After all of these worlds are not physical, they are places you go in your mind.
Being a parent is a world. As a single parent I oscillate between two worlds. One with my daughters and one without them. Sometimes I feel like I have two lives because I fill my time without them with things I can’t do with them. But the world with them is better and it's difficult to leave that world and come back to it each week. It is even harder for them and it's the only world they know. I’m lucky though that even though my girls live in two worlds, both of those worlds are full of love.
That's what we all are striving for after all right? We want to be loved and we want to give love. So as you get up from reading this and move on with your day, ask yourself what world am I going to next?
