Tag Archives: identify

The view from here

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I’ve been geeking out a bit, looking into quantum mechanics, space, and time. Admittedly, I don’t have a very strong physics background and so my understanding is limited. That said, there are a few somewhat related ideas I’m bouncing around:

1. We never actually touch anything. Even the densest materials are inevitably made up of empty space at the sub atomic level.

2. Everything is a wave.

3. Time slows as we approach the speed of light, and light itself does not experience time.

4. We live in a 3-Dimensional world, which is what we can observe in a universe that likely has more dimensions that we can’t experience.

As I sit here trying to make sense of this, I’m essentially a collection of space dust, that’s comprised mostly of empty space… which happens to be a self-conscious collection of waves, with limited senses… which can only sense things in 3-Dimensional space. All while travelling at a speed that is relative to where I decide to measure it, be that the speed I’m moving on earth, the speed that the earth is travelling around the sun, the speed that the sun rotates around the galaxy, or the speed that the galaxy is moving around the universe.

And when I look out at the stars at night I see light that has travelled millions of years to get to me. I’m seeing that star as it was millions of years ago, and right now that star might have gone supernova and no longer exists. Yet the light that travelled all the way from that star to my eye did not experience any time at all from the moment it left the star until it reached me.

But I got to observe it. There is a view from right here of this amazing universe, a universe I get to observe and experience in a way that no other entity ever will. I’m insignificant and yet I can find meaning… Me… a collection of stardust that understands what it means to exist, and interact with the universe even if I’m just a pattern of waves that never actually touches anything. And so while I’m insignificant, thinking of my place in the universe might be one of the most significant things this universe has to offer. 

Walking in one vs two worlds

I have shared that I’ve been blind to my own privilege. In the post I described how, “Despite my 1/2 Chinese father and my predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish roots, I have a look that Italians mistake for Greek, and Greeks mistake for Italian. I am neither. I’m used to not fitting into any box. In fact, whenever I have to fill out a survey that asked my race, I never check ‘white’. I always choose ‘Other’.“

But I am privileged. I pass as a white person even if I don’t identify as one. I am an immigrant, but that’s not something anyone assumes of me… meanwhile there are many second, third, fourth generation Canadians that might be thought of or assumed to be immigrants because of their appearance. I don’t have to live in 2 worlds. I don’t have to think about how others will perceive me. I don’t have to think about biases that people will judge me on based on my appearance.

This is why privileged people don’t notice their own privilege. When you live in just one world, you don’t know that you are missing another world that others have to deal with. The absence of something you’ve never had to deal with is not something that you know you are missing.

If you have never been hungry because you can’t afford food, you don’t really understand hunger. If your whole life you’ve seen a full spectrum of colours, you don’t know what it’s like to be colourblind. If you don’t have a learning disability, it’s hard to understand why someone with one can’t learn the same way as you.

Now flip it around, if you have gone really hungry, actually starving, and you’ve also seen people not ever face this, you understand there are two worlds. If you are colourblind and you are around people identifying things by colours you can’t see, you know that you are missing out, and likely always will. If you have a learning disability you get to watch others not struggle learning a relatively simple concept, while you do.

When you live in two worlds and you are disadvantaged in some way, it’s easy to see the privilege of not having to live in both worlds. When you live in just one, it’s harder to see the absence of the second world as being privileged. But it is.