The Big Bang

Everything is coming apart.

1. Once upon a time about 13.7 billion years ago, all energy - everything in the entire universe - was jammed inside this very tiny point. It was infinitesimally small, condensed to an infinite degree. And it just floated there, tiny and dense and hot, unto itself. 

There wasn’t anything else. 

There were no: 

planets, stars, trees, funerals, borders, amoeba, popsicles, scraped knees. No marriages, moons, billboards, caves, knitting needles, fish, leggings, McDonald’s. There were no: dogs, castles, cyber trucks, streams, billionaires, guillotines, jello molds, fields of wheat, popes, priests, assault weapons, pyramids, rope swings or quills. There were no fucking bombs, no weeping willows, no children starving, no gods, no languages, no countries, no hangovers, no houses, no prayers. There was no hate, makeup, rain, love, botox, internet, reality tv, bigotry, grass, basketball, hockey, ozempic, or Picasso.

There were no children suffering and dying all over the world. 

Then in one moment, this tiny point of the densest possible energy exploded and expanded and kept on expanding and is still expanding even as I type, and will expand forever and ever and ever and ever ad infinitum. Either that, or it will expand so rapidly it tears itself apart, continuing to expand and cool off until it reverses course, collapsing in on itself. It all depends on the balance of dark matter, dark energy, and regular matter and energy in space…according to Carl Sagan.

Or: once upon a time about 13.7 billion years ago, all of energy - everything in the entire universe - was jammed inside this tiny point. The point belonged to an entity that had a plan. The plan was to see what would happen if everything that could ever be, everything within this entity’s power to imagine - exploded and expanded, and kept on expanding forever and ever and ever, or until it tore itself apart and eventually collapsed. And the entity watched it all, keeping tabs on its ever-expanding experiment, or simply allowing everything to expand as it would, or - alternatively, creating two particular spaces in an ever-expanding universe where all future creatures would go based on whether they were “good” or “bad” - but this doesn’t make sense because “good” and “bad” are concepts created by humans, and humans didn’t exist yet. Unless the entity had human traits, and why would it? In a vast, ever-expanding universe with a low guess of 10 to the 24th power solar systems with planets - that’s a trillion trillion if you’re counting - why would we assume the creative energy behind it all had human traits? Why would we imagine human beings are the masterpiece of the unknown universe?

Let’s go back to a point of the densest energy, floating unto itself, building heat until it exploded. We now find ourselves on the third rock from the sun, which is 94.3 million miles away from us. Most of the elements in our bodies were formed in stars over the course of billions of years. We cannot even accurately predict the weather in our very own weather systems more than three days out. 

2. Sally and John walk down the street. They’ve just left a bar where they drank with friends, loudly sang Landslide when it came on, and laughed for hours with people they’ve known since college. They are good friends. They hooked up once, years ago back in school, but they make better friends than lovers. Suddenly, a wiry man darts out from an alley, grabs Sally’s clutch which had been dangling from her hand, and takes off.

“Hey!” Sally yells. John goes into action. He tackles the guy quickly, easily. John is a big guy. He got a full ride to college on a football scholarship, but he’s also brilliant. Off-the-charts brilliant - he would have gotten merit scholarships based on his high school GPA, even though his family didn’t need financial aid. John also has a temper. Could be genetic, his dad was a violent man. John is beating the guy, Sally’s clutch is on the ground a few feet away. She grabs it, pulls out her iPhone and calls 911. Asks for help. Blood is flying now, it’s possible a tooth just went skittering across the sidewalk. John has the guy pinned, and he is begging John to stop. It’s hard to understand him because John just keeps swinging, and it looks like the guy’s nose is broken, and maybe his jaw, too. 

Sally loves John, they’ve been friends a long time, but if John keeps beating this guy, he’s going to kill him. Two questions: Can Sally love John, understand why he’s upset, and also tell him he needs to stop? And - does the man’s story matter, his life, what led him to this moment on the street, or are his life and his story irrelevant?

a) A teenage girl who wanted nothing more than to go to a music festival is brutally attacked and assaulted in the worst possible ways. She cries for her mother, for her father, for her brother, but no one can save her. She begs for mercy, she begs for her life, but it doesn’t matter. She did nothing wrong. She loved her family, she went to school, she was a good friend. Her last moments will be violent. Her last word will be Mom.

Question: does it matter where she is?

Photo by Isaac Quesada on Unsplash

b) A baby cries, she can’t be more than two. She is walking barefoot on a dirt road, rubble all around her. The sun is beating down, and she doesn’t know where she’s going. Her face is streaked with dirt and tears and she cries for her mother, even though her mother lies twisted in the place that used to be called “home” and the baby saw this. She sat next to her mother, pulling at her hands, and then her chest. It was the first time she cried and her mother didn’t comfort her, didn’t sweep her up and hold her, and bury her face in her daughter’s neck, making her laugh. After a while, the baby gave up. She’s hungry and scared, and maybe her mother was asleep back there and will appear somehow in the road in front of her.

Question: does it matter where she is?

3. There is a planet called earth that is the third rock from the sun. There are human beings on the planet, all made of the same star-stuff. Some of them have more melanin, some less, depending on how far from the equator they’re born, their genes, and who their ancestors are - but they’re the same. Every human being alive has a common ancestor from 200,000 years ago, an ancestor who lived in the heart of Africa. Each one of them has no more and no less right to exist than anyone else. The question of “the right to exist” is a strange one. Who is granting these rights? Who is pondering such misguided questions? We are born here on the planet, therefore we have a right to exist. The planet is not our creation, it doesn’t belong to us, we belong to it - for a brief moment in time, for as long as our star-stuff lasts or is snuffed out. We are the expendable ones - the trees, rivers, oceans, mountains - everything will outlive us. People say their neighbor’s tree is encroaching on their property. They spend money and exchange pieces of paper and say this land is mine, my property line ends here - but this is all garbage. Money is paper and you can hand paper back and forth, but the planet is not yours to own. 

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

Genuine empathy flows in all directions. You see something that insults your heart and every sense you have about right and wrong - and you feel devastated. That is the best in us, the ability to see ourselves in other people, to imagine how we would feel if we were them, and to allow those feelings to move us. If we are all made of the same stuff, then we are all capable of the same things. So much is dependent upon both nurture and nature. If we are taught to hate or fear other people - maybe people who don’t look like us, speak like us, pray like us, love like us, or think like us, eventually we are going to have to unlearn that, or lose the ability to expand. If we are made of the same stuff as the universe, then we, too, are meant to expand for as long as we’re alive. If you live long enough, you’ll realize so much of life is about opening and letting go. The first things to release are hatred and fear because they isolate you. That’s the dark energy of the soul, collapsing in on itself. That’s the feeling of tearing yourself apart, but on the inside. Empathy sees clearly - you are one human being, seeing the suffering of another, and you imagine that is you or someone you love, and you want it to end. There are no sides.

Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another. Carl Sagan

If you’d like to meet me in real time to talk about empathy, I’ll be here 5/31/24 at 11:15am PST, or you can wait for the Come As You Are podcast version. Thank you so much for being here.