Things We Cannot See
(A deleted chapter from my memoir Get It While You Can I just found on my computer.)
1. We can’t see gravity, yet it has a profound effect on our lives. It is so profound that we don’t ever really think about it. It gives us a down and an up. It orients us in our environment. It gives us the opportunity to plant things in the ground. It makes all the floating and flying objects appear divine. Even a balloon can capture our joy because it rises effortlessly. Birds are considered free because they can escape gravity. It gives us something to push against. It gives us the bottom, a place where we can’t fall any farther.
2. We can’t see magnetism, a force that can invisibly bring two metal objects together. I don’t really know what is different between a magnetized metal and a non-magnetized one. I don’t really know why some materials are not magnetic. I don’t. But I’ve seen it happen.
3. We can’t see love. It is a force that changes our lives. We can see the effects of love. We can see the particulars of it: the presents, the touch, the actions. However we cannot see the actual thing referred to as love. It is invisible. And yet babies understand it. They need it to live. We all do. Without it we shrivel up and become useless, but it is still not a thing that we can put in a drawer and save for later.
4. We can’t see the past, yet it is something that dominates our lives. We are often living in the past, though we still can’t see it. We are rearranging the words we used, trying to find a better way to express what we wanted to say. We are wishing that events had happened differently, imagining a separate world where consequences pivoted on a single action being different. We are clutching to moments in the past where all our friends were in place, laughter flowed easily, before the darker times. We are convinced that the past is a place that you could visit only if you could invent the right machine. A place like Iowa. And there is a route you could take to get there.
5. We can’t see the future, yet it is something for which we are always rehearsing. It is something we are constantly stepping into, even as it disappears. Like when you walk towards the ocean as the waves recede, and you keep not being in the water, and you walk further along and you’re still not in the water. We plan for the future. We save for the future. We know that it will come. But it never really does.
6. We can’t see time, even though we count it. We are terrified of it going too fast, of it moving at all. We wish we could stop it, though what that would mean is inherently problematic. We wish we could use it better, but it’s hard to manage something that you can’t see. Even the cynical people know that time stands still when you are frightened, because our brain takes in all these data points and what time really is is us collecting data points, so if there are more of them then time lasts longer, and if we are relaxed and happy and not analyzing everything then time goes by faster. Still we let the machines do the counting of time, because they won’t be swayed by silly things like fun.
7. We can’t see radio waves. We can’t see sound waves. We can’t see ultraviolet waves. We can’t see so many vibrations on the spectrum. We can’t see the wireless signals that carry the information for the internet or the voices for phone calls.
8. We can’t see God, though many of us are committed to his existence. We are willing to forsake the feelings in our gut to answer to God. We are willing to hurt people, make choices that would otherwise seem insane in order to honor God. We are willing to deprive ourselves of things that would make us happy in order to please God and to better ourselves.
9. We can’t see the whole universe. We know that we are small in it. We know that we don’t matter in a significant way. We know that there is so much out there that we don’t understand, probably reams and reams of life, intelligence and culture that would blow our minds. Even when a species on our own planet under the same conditions as us evolves intelligence, it does it in a way that is different than ours. Who knows what it would mean to be intelligent on a planet a thousand light years away, with a different preponderance of chemicals and different environmental conditions. Still, we cannot see this. All we see is blackness with a few specks of light. We know that what we see is just empty space. There is not even oxygen or atmosphere. It is just nothing. That is what we can see.
10. We can’t see thoughts. They are the substance that dominates our days. They are the constant rumble in our brains as we navigate the world on our own, but we cannot make them manifest. The best attempts at this are writing or communication, but no one would say that a book is a perfect representation of someone’s thoughts. No one would say that a conversation ever really expresses all the thoughts in your head. Thoughts are often between words, otherwise how would we think up new words? Thoughts are unwanted and dirty. Thoughts are evil and haunting. If we could see them maybe we could group them by type. Maybe we could corral them and make them more useful to us, but we can’t see them.
The third edition of my memoir Get It While You Can is available directly from me. You’ll receive a signed copy, a bookmark, and maybe something else.