Small things

Feb 10, 2023

A friend of mine died last night. She was going to the bank, and someone stole her purse. She tried to hang onto it, and was dragged behind the car. She was in a coma for a few days before she passed away.

The world sometimes seems uncaring and arbitrary, but that’s only because it is. I don’t believe in god, or a higher power. I spent almost 15 years studying physics, and the inescapable conclusion, to me, was that everything is explainable, if you observe it for long enough and think hard enough about it. To be supernatural is to be unexplainable by science, and I don’t see any evidence for there being things that can never be explained.

So I have a conundrum. I am a nihilist, in that I don’t believe in a higher order, or a moral code imposed by anything other than our evolved instincts for cooperation. But, I love my fellow humans, because I am evolved to do so. E.O. Wilson speculates, in The Social Conquest of Earth, that this is actually the scientific root of the inexplicable human condition: we are evolved both to be selfish, and put our own interests first, and also to be caring, and to help our community. And this tension is the root of our perpetual state of confusion as a species.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

If I am only for myself, what am I?

And if not now, when?

— Hillel

So I feel responsible for my family, and my friends, and my community, and my city. But, also, I don’t see any logical reason that the lives of people who live on the other side of the planet are worth any less than those of the people I see around town. So, I am driven to think big, and zoom out, and keep doing so, until I find the thing I can do that can help the largest number of people. And, for me, in this moment, it feels like working on climate change, the most important problem of our generation, is that thing. I feel like, if I can just push a little bit, just a tiny bit on this huge problem, I will have at least tried to do my part. Jen cared about big things, about the injustice the world heaped on black and brown people, and the way our justice system often made peoples’ lives worse, not better, on balance. Her friends and family have asked for restorative justice for the people who killed her. So, maybe thinking about big things is the right way to remember Jen.

But then I am back here, at my kitchen table. My wife is scared. My friends are devastated. In this moment, this one person means so much more than the billions I’ve never met. It’s not logical, it’s just how I feel. She was a baker. She baked the most wonderful cakes. She baked cakes for my kids’ birthdays. She planned and executed the most spectacular events, for her friends, out of love.

My wife is a psychologist. She is one of the most brilliant observers of humankind that I have ever met. And while I sit and write, or struggle to make sense of a scientific paper, or tweak the line spacing in yet another in what seems like an endless stream of PowerPoints, she sees clients, one at a time, 50 minutes a week. And in that time, she can radically improves peoples’ lives. She can teach people skills to overcome anxiety, compulsion, or insomnia. She can help people find the strength to work on themselves and become better people, who live more authentically. She can help people learn acceptance, to learn how to face the hardest things in. And, for those people, she will do more than I can ever hope to achieve in a lifetime of Sisyphean PowerPointing.

And it makes me realize, there is a reason we are meant for each other. I think about the big things, and she thinks about one person at a time. And seeing the way she cares about our friends, and family and community, I understand that the only true kindness we can carry with us into this world is the kindness we pay to the person who is standing in front of us right now.

For Jen Angel, who was kind, and made people happy with her cakes.

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