Quantum Physics Notes and the Meaning of Life

Last month, my sister and I went shopping together, just the two of us. This is rare. She has two daughters in their teens and I have a 12 year old daughter and an 8 year old son. We live 150 miles apart. Our lives are so busy, we rarely see each other, much less find time to get away alone, so this was a treat. We went to one of our favorite spots, a second hand store called Savers here in the Twin Cities. Both of us love bargain hunting and this place almost always holds a treasure or two. As we were cruising the aisles, we came across a bunch of binders. All of them were devoid of words except one, a blue one, with a title written on its spine that gave us a chuckle. It said, “Quantum Physics Notes.” We stood there in the aisle like a couple of goons, pointing and laughing. An ordinary looking binder containing notes on quantum physics seemed to strike our funny bones with an odd resonance. That simple blue binder couldn’t possible contain something so lofty, could it?
After our laugh, we moved on down the aisle and I forgot all about it, until today. Just going about my daily chores, that binder came back to mind. I thought to myself, “Why didn’t we pick that up and open it?” It would have been so easy. Who knows, that binder may have still had the notes in it? The secrets of life, or at least time travel, may have been revealed in that unassuming binder. We could be traveling all over the fourth dimension today!
The fact that we didn’t pick it up says a lot about people. Many times we look at the surface of something, get a laugh, a smile, even a tear out of it, but we don’t dig any further. We move on in our lives and forget all about it. It’s easy to understand why we might do this with a binder on a shelf full of binders, in a second hand store, but why is it so easy to do with the big things too: people, tidal waves, hurricanes and bridge collapses for instance. Do we move on because we have to, for our own mental health, or because we have very small time windows in our busy lives in which to remember? Is this self preservation or just a form of selfish isolation? How many of us can remember the date of Katrina? I do not mean to demean the contributions of the thousands of people who gave of their time and money to help in any of the disasters I mentioned, but how many of us have since moved on, giving little to no thought to these and many other events, people and places that shape our lives. Just a thought, next time you see something that is just slightly odd, funny, sad, or uneven, experience it. Then share it, because I believe that it is the sharing that keeps us remembering. Anne