Let’s call it “Experiential Quantum Superposition”.

I hypothesize that the truest stories have no endings.  These stories fizzle messily into the unknown, forcing us to accept all the many layers of complex and sometimes conflicting truth in one big chaotic soup. These loose ends make us uncomfortable, take away clear targets for assigning blame, and leave us scratching our heads.

Endings cheat us

We crave endings.  We don’t like books or movies that leave us with all the questions unanswered – and we expect life to provide us the same luxury.

But the cost of comfortable, clean, tidy endings is much too high.

Day to day, we trudge along through the profound and ambiguous project of being human with other humans, leaving ourselves as open as we can muster for the purpose of minimizing missed opportunity.  But once we hit our risk threshold and we know we have to move on, it is tempting to simply close up and collapse all the nuance of how we got there into a quickly described picture we can store away, accept, and make a part of the worldview we take forward.

“Why did you get divorced?”  “Oh he had an affair.”

“Where’s your friend Bob?”  “Turns out he was kind of a dick.  Who needs him.”

“You’ve been looking for a job for a while.”  “Yeah, the market is tough right now.”

It’s that moment of collapsing the story that creates the reality that becomes our history.  And that means once it happens, whatever ending, explanation, or outcome we take forward is our own fiction, much more about our internal fears and limitations than about the experience itself, which was inherently much richer.

And if it is an experience that hurt or made us afraid (as most endings do), we’ll be writing our own history from vantage points of anger and pain (with anger being a convenient and righteous-feeling alternative to pain), over and over again, putting these tainted and false histories onto the people who were our friends, colleagues, and loves, kind enough to walk with us for some chapter of life.

Don’t be a pussy

Let’s talk about Schrodinger’s Cat.  Maybe you remember this from your freshman year of college.  Maybe not.

In 1935, the Austrian physicist, Erwin Schrodinger, put forth a thought experiment to add a little color to the day’s interpretations of quantum mechanics.  Here’s how it goes:

There’s stuff in a box.  The box stuff includes: a flask of poison, a hammer, a radioactive substance, a Geiger counter, and a cat.

The intent is to extend (to absurdity) the somewhat upsetting concept of quantum superposition, which describes the state of a subatomic particle, like an atom or a photon, which can be measurably and observably shown to exist in two states at the same time.

So in this case, if one atom of the radioactive substance in the box goes into a state of decay, it registers on the Geiger counter, which triggers the hammer to smash the poison and kill the cat. But, the atom may be in two states at once – it doesn’t only exist in its decayed state.  So if the triggering subatomic event can stay suspended in two opposite states of reality at the same time, can the same be true of the cat?

As long as the box is closed and the activity in the box unmonitored, there are two possible realities, both existing concurrently, just like the state of the triggering particle.  And they only collapse into one “truth” when someone opens the box and holds a mirror up to the cat’s nose.

It’s the point of observation that decides on the outcome of the story.  And until the point of observation, the system exists in a state of superposition.  The cat is both alive and dead.  In that way, it could be argued that it isn’t the particle or the hammer that determines whether the cat lives or dies.  It is the act of observation which collapses the possibilities into one absolute truth.  Sorry kitty.

If you kill it, you eat it

So now you’ve got blood on your hands, kitty killer.  And where I grew up, you kill it you eat it.  But what about another option?  Sounding good right about now?

I propose that stories worth saving are worth holding open without endings – that we owe it to the kitties of our experiences to not rush into opening the box and collapsing their fate into one simple truth.  It is harder and more uncomfortable, but we can let our stories continue to breathe from their place in the past, evolve, dissipate, grow, and not make decisions about what happened and why.

This changes the nature of our personal foundation, beliefs, and self-definition to make it all malleable and alive.  We aren’t the static sum total of our pasts.  Our pasts aren’t even the static sum totals of our pasts.  Our pasts, like us, are living and growing, rich and layered, deserving of more than a hasty ending for our comfort.  Suddenly, our ability to change extends beyond today and tomorrow and reaches right back into yesterday.  Now that is some powerful flexibility.

Good kitty.

Thoughts?  Please leave ideas, comments, rants of your own below…