One of my undergrad profs once shared an idea from contemporary
physics. This was a humanities prof and I was doodling, so forgive the unscientific details: The idea was that the universe stretched out in many different layers and
everything was likely, but each time we made a choice, we reached in and wrested
it from the multiplicity of possibilities, which were smashed, and a new tangle
of possibilities stretched out from our winning choice. I remember that phrase,
smashed possibilities. I think it paralyzed me. My writer’s block built up around me not long after that, and stretched up, up, up for ten years. I still worry about it. Any time I bend my head down over a new sentence, I have taken one idea,
just a glimmer, and I’m oblivious to a hundred more. Things happen around me
that I’ll never see, things that might change me.
But it’s better to catch even one thought than none, and seizing
one possibility out of many is better than a web of possibilities, densely tangled,
ever growing. A few weeks ago I sat in the Orpheum Theatre, high up in the
cheap seats, taking in the muralled ceiling, the crystal chandelier, the velvet curtain, the
rush, the beauty, the art, and everything seemed to swell up like a bubble. I thought a
familiar thought, that this is too huge to capture. It’s like swimming against
a rip tide.
