when reality gets thin, and people seem fragile

Today I am being reminded of just how fragile we little humans are, and how ephemeral are our imagined worlds. I'll confess - I've been very leaky about the eyeballs. Seeing how quickly a person who seems happy and functional and even exceptional can abruptly end or fall to pieces makes everything else seem less solid.

I find myself thinking about the way our minds work, and how much of what we perceive as reality is just stuff our brains made up.

Take, for instance, this Radiolab episode on Memory and Forgetting (it's one of my favorites). I'll go ahead and spoil it for you - the punchline is that every time we recall a memory, we take it out, look at it, and modify it a bit before we put it away again. The more we think about something, the less we remember about the thing we are thinking about. It's like the middle of writing a research paper, after the caffeine wears off and long before it's done, when I start thinking I might get thrown out of grad school for being unable to complete a relatively simple writing assignment - I don't know what the hell I originally meant to say.

And from what (relatively small amount) I know about quantum physics, it appears increasingly likely that our physical reality is mostly empty space, both on the micro and macro levels, and it is our brains that are "connecting the dots" and creating the sensory input we receive. An instructor in one of my classes shared this fascinating article from the New Yorker about how the brain's role becomes apparent when the perceptions and the sensory input don't match up.

Most of the time I find these explorations of the human mind delightful and interesting - they make my own analytical brain kick into gear and I get excited about this strange world we live in. Sometimes, though, I am also reminded of how just a little shift in chemistry can take a balanced brain and completely transform it. And if most of our realities are made up by these terribly susceptible organic components, suddenly everything feels so precarious.

So today I am leaky, and I am reaching out to touch your hands, look in your eyes, and try to find some promise (denial though it may be) that we are solid beings, that our knowing and loving of each other is a real and permanent thing. And I am also smiling and shaking my head, knowing (believing) that nothing is permanent except the matter we are composed of, and perhaps the spirits that run through us, and finding a strange comfort in that as well.