Dear friends,
This week:
A diary entry called: “The Mission and the Breath”
A podcast ruminating on the Big Bang
A video on writing lyrics
Have a great weekend,
Love Jim
The Mission and The Breath
The flamingo pink tussles of the umbrella bob in the wind, offset by the azure blue sky behind.
Sun streaks through the trees, collecting shadows and casting them upon the time-worn cobbled streets.
A yellow bus tickles by.
And then a woman, turbo-waddling towards the S-Bahn, late for work.
It’s a glorious morning.
Cold enough for little smoke puffs when you breathe but warm enough for spring’s first buds to peep out.
What’s this?
New life!
I will not forget to notice things.
That is my vow.
Or to exercise my worn brain by describing them.
A worthy practice.
What deepens you?
Your heart vamps to an unwritten soliloquy.
It was formed in a dungeon.
But broke out.
You are no longer locked where you once were.
What will you do with the miracle?
It’s 8 am on a Monday morning, and I’m drinking an Americano at my favourite coffee shop in Berlin, Geschwishter Nothaft.
I like to get here early before the maniac typists arrive, digitalising the present for a potential future.
I’m never happier than in this nook of time before the world begins busying itself with what it might be.
I visited my friend Will in Lisbon last year, and we’d share this holy hour, sipping a coffee, either chatting or silent in the way that only old friends can be.
One day I was speaking about how I treated each day as a creative mission, moving towards one specific short-term goal or outcome.
He was silent awhile, then leaned in and peered into me -
“Yes, Jim, but life is the breath.”
It burrowed into me as only genuine insight can do.
Since returning from filming my documentary “The Isolation Diaries”, I’ve entered a time of activation - partly triggered by this thought from my sister-in-law’s father.
“A man’s 40’s are the engine room of his life…”
During my time in the mountains, I fell so deeply within time that it took on an entirely different complexion.
“The breath”, as described by Will, is about being within time.
And time, as it turns out, is far more pliable than our modern rush would have us believe.
When you go back far enough, we come from a place where time itself didn’t even exist. 13.8 billion years ago, we arrive at a time where our understanding of physics breaks down entirely. If time and space were created from that primordial cry at the beginning of things, then what preceded it?
Yes, you are within time, but the timeless exists in you, too.
This is your parent, where the godhead meets the godhead.
We are so afraid of un-being, yet Un-being is our deepest home.
You are ascendent of nothingness.
What a wonder. To be composed of nothingness.
So when we take it right back, we are made even before the breath.
And perhaps, in the context of the Big Bang, it is helpful to think of this breath.
Because before the breath is the inhale.
As the air is drawn inward, it reaches a point of singularity.
A point where it can’t help but release itself.
And one theory of the Big Bang goes that the great explosion at the beginning of time occurred at a point of peak inhale, where there was nothing left to do but explode into the exhale.
So as all things converge in upon themselves, they reach a critical infinite mass where there is nothing left to do but to be. And so it follows that if you were to consider the universe as a lung, we are eternally expanding and contracting.
Seen this way, the Big Bang and the subsequent known universe are just one breath among many. It makes one wonder how many Big Bangs there have really been, and for that matter, how fortunate we are to exist in this, the 13.8 billionth year in this boisterous cycle of eternal creation and destruction.
Yet, though I am allowing my mind to wander a little, there is a point to my rumination.
Because when I consider our capacity as modern humans to be within time, it occurs to me that we’ve lost touch with what time itself might be.
When I was in the mountains, my life was momentarily unattached from either the past or the future. Rather than being fastened to either, it anchored itself instead to the timeless.
The paradox is that when we have these experiences, they are almost impossible to describe in terms outside time, except perhaps through prayer.
It’s why perhaps, when we reach our innermost depth, we discover a sense of acquiescence, a radiant humility that fills us with such a sense of awe that there is no longer a feeling of good or bad, of terror or joy, of brokeness or completion.
It’s in these moments when I’ve been most vanquished by life that I’ve felt closest to its meaning as if it were painted upon my spirit in the code of an ancient soliloquy.
It is perhaps for this reason that our reformation always happens at the point of our breaking. That is the singularity, the point of inception in a human being.
For all I know in this life, I would offer this - that if you are feeling at the point of deepest pain, have faith in the pain itself. I don’t know why, but the pain is a gateway, a threshold. And beyond it, is the unwritten you, always potential, always available.
Who are you to say what life has in store for you? When I feel some of this modern cynicism creep in, I think back to the loneliness that preceded the Big Bang. At its point of greatest constriction, when all there was was nothingness unfolded upon the nothingness, life just wanted to be.
That is where the eureka scream comes from, the broken hallelujah, the ageless longing. The beat, potential even before the song starts.
And so, what the hell happened?
It’s worth considering because whatever you or I think is potential in a second can only ever be conceived in terms of what is really possible in a second.
Simply put, that is, well, all things.
The beginning is the primal eruption.
And then follows the great inflation, in which the universe designs itself.
So how long exactly is this process, between the Big Bang and the formation of the known universe?
A gazillionth of a Zeptosecond.
A Zeptosecond, what the hell’s a Zeptosecond?
A billion Zeptoseconds, or one picosecond, is just a tiny fraction of a second.
What, all things formed in this unimaginably small time fragment?
I ruminate for a while on this.
The first second of all existence is itself an epoch.
When all things were born into being.
How can you describe it in a way that can be fathomed to a human mind?
Well, imagine if a second were a whole day.
Now, a picosecond would be much less than a second of that whole day, a mere blink of an eye.
In fact, it’s so quick that if you blink, you miss billions of these moments.
Funny, isn’t it?
That in a breath, all the universe can be created. That in a breath, all things are potential. That in a breath, there is the seed to transform everything.
Seen this way, every moment is imbued with the fabric of cosmic revolution itself.
When we get down on ourselves, we disassociate from the miracle of every second. Dam, you get to live 1 sextillion zeptoseconds per second, man!
What are you going to do with them?
And just as importantly, how are you going to be in them?
Frankl said that the last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance, to choose one’s way. I would add, it is also the first of the freedoms.
How absurdly magnificent is it that no matter your circumstances, your life is as yet unwritten?
And that today, you get to both be in it and to determine it at the same time.
To continue Frankl’s extraordinary words, reflecting how he kept alive and mentally healthy in the unspeakable circumstances of concentration camps:
“There were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you become the plaything to circumstance…”
And so, I arrive at the heart of this.
Because next week 25% of this year will have passed, falling neatly on my birthday.
Dam, don’t those zeptoseconds keep wracking up!
Our time is passing, but we get to choose how it passes. This year is perhaps the first of my life where I am treading a fine balance between the mission and the breath, the being and the doing.
I am living with a degree of urgency because, at my luckiest, I have arrived at the halfway point in my life.
The inflection point.
The singularity.
Young enough to feel energised, old enough to know a thing or two.
I want to live as richly as I can in the time left available to me. I understand, more than ever, that I want to make use of my time, but that to make use of it is pointless if you are divorced from the noticing of it.
We have a tendency nowadays, whether we’re starting a business or trying to express our deepest creative self, to want to rush forward.
And sometimes, we rush so forward that we trip up upon ourselves like drunk men.
You need to remember that you can’t do it all at once, and you don’t need to.
Even in creating a universe, for instance, the Big Bang was just getting started.
Though it composed its cosmic ballet in a mere zeptosecond, it was but the prelude to an aeon-spanning symphony. It took another ten billion years to score the first notes of life and many more for that cadence to swell into the creative absurdity of human consciousness.
You overestimate what you can do in a zeptosecond but underestimate what you can do in the course of an eternity.
So be in the process itself. It is in the process where the mission and the breath move in synergy, like two in the tango.
Too many of us live foreshadowed by the sense that it is too late for us. Don’t you understand that there are galaxies before you and worlds within you? And I don’t mean it as hocus-pocus.
You were conceived by the Big Bang man, and you are expressive of an unbroken lineage of life that goes back four billion years.
Yes, composed of fire, the firefly flashes.
Yes, crushed beyond its breaking, the diamond forms.
Yes, beyond your knowing, tomorrow awaits you.
Are you so arrogant as to predict life?
Are you so knowledgeable as to base your future on your burdensome past?
If you’re down, then maybe the way out of Hades isn’t to climb upwards. But to dig down through the basement and dive into the river of life itself.
Yes dear friends, we are building our futures, but it is in the present we must live.
Have the courage, for a moment, to be in it.
If all of the universe was created in a zeptosecond, then you are an ageless being.
Human life, our very own eternity, expressive of the miracle itself.
You are the mission.
You are the breath.
I know it's only a side note in this – but what you said about spring and not failing to notice things resonated so much with me! we've been putting a lot of work and effort into creating our perfect garden, have been planting and sowing and landscaping and researching and this year, i started a gardening journal where i write down every little detail about the garden. every single day, we take a little walk through the garden to see if anything's changed, if all our plants are happy, if there's any improvements to be made, if things are working for us and the ecosystem as they should. it's making me notice everything so much more, i appreciate every new leaf that is starting to come up so much, and documenting it all gives me so much joy (and hopefully, it will lead to good observations for taking care of the garden and getting good harvests, haha). anyway. i'm rambling. i just really appreciated that small side note of yours.