The Mystery of Individuality

In the car in Sydney traffic just after December solstice, the longest day of the year.

Carrie Fisher has just passed. Princess Leia now only lives as picture on a screen.

“How strange that so many artists die so young,” says my beloved driving through a city where a forest of giant steel grasshoppers announce to the world that this town is growing like oil spreading on water.

“It’s the Achilles choice,” I reply. “Die young in the wild exuberance of glory instead of old in the stable longevity of family and ordinary social fabric.”

“I wonder what I chose,” she wonders as she cleverly maneuvers the left hand traffic.

“There’s more than just two choices,” I respond. She grins in that way I can’t resist.

We’re silent as the traffic passes by and an angry motorist yells within his glass and steel cocoon at someone I don’t see who has pissed him off.

“I think we both chose love over everything else, at every turn of the way. I’ll never be wealthy or powerful. All my choices are about love; and some of them were really bad. But here we are,” I conclude delighted by her presence.

She nods and as I look at her my heart skips and gallops.

At night I wake in jet lag. She lies sprawled all over the bed. Soft skin.

I move to a living room chair onto the memory foam pillow I carry everywhere together with my inflatable blue back cushion to trick my body into believing I’m always on the same seat, whether in the air or anywhere on land. I hear my Alexander Technique training tell me that my neck be free, my head forward and up and my back longer and wider as I tuck my tailbone under to lengthen my hip flexors. Then I wait.

There is a cosmos out there. What it is I do not know. Just that it is. I’m no Buddhist. There’s something out there beyond Consciousness. And for a brief impasse, a mote of a moment, I whirl around with it, part of it; yet here I am, a person with a private history loving those I do. ‘It is not about you,’ the Marvel wise woman says to Dr. Strange. But yet it is about me! It is as if I matter profoundly while existing in this mini mote of time, being both an indistinguishable part of it all and a quark of private meaning. What greater mystery is there than individuality?

It is too easy to say that there only is the Indistinguishable on the one hand and Achilles’ heroic spasm of individuality on the other. I experience the wave of love like billions of humans have done before me — yet here I love this particular unique woman. The wave/particle duality is everywhere in this entangled quantum world! No wonder we encounter it in physics as but the latest manifestation of the mystery of having been born a unique individual at a particular location with a specific momentum, just like everyone else, indistinguishable in the naked fact of our uniqueness.

So here I sit upright and un-confused by what I cannot fathom, both particular and a wave of time.

Then there is just gratitude.