7.7 Kilometers

I enjoy studying human beings because it is interesting to explore my own experience and improve our understanding of each other. One of the things about humans is our interesting relationship to consciousness and spacetime. Maybe one day I will communicate with my cat and we will discover we both understand and discuss relativity, but until then I will focus on the human psychology piece. 

It seems that human beings have always understood on some level, relativity. The complex relationship we have with our sense of time and place to then warp that experience via conscious perception. A drive of 340 miles on 3 hours of sleep is easily passed when discussing the concepts of free will with an excited partner. A drive of 10 minutes becomes a slog you can barely make it through in your distraction. Human relativity was discussed by Teta’s doing laundry far before Einstein was ever conceived. 

Despite our powers to pass through life deeply impacted by our perception and consciousness, we are also deeply limited. Conceptualization of numbers larger than 150 start to rapidly lose meaning. {41,800 Palestinian’s have been killed in Israels genocide} {How many is the total if 10 Palestinian children a day lose a limb over a year?} {What happens if 343 million dollars of funding is cut from UNRWA?} {How far is Khan Younis from Jabalia?}

I am co-ruminating with my cousin on 7.7 kilometers currently. The distance between our direct family members and the bomb that has killed 18 people in Zhgarta Lebanon. There are 5712.56 miles between Beit Beirut and the Buffalo NY AKG Art Museum. I can’t conceive of the relative length of time it might have taken my cousin to go from one to the other, but I suspect it is measured in eons of heartbreak. It has been 4 days since I spoke to my sister on the phone, but it feels like yesterday as her heart beat alongside mine. “I wanted to check on you now.” 

The scope of everything is zooming in and out in infinite succession. The opioid epidemic in my county, the bombing of Yemen, the student crying in my office about finances, the conference presentation with little participation, how to spend a grant budget, the student I give an extension due to the lack of power from the hurricane, a man burning alive in protest, a man burning alive with an IV attached to him. Eating dinner amongst friends and no one wants to ask me how my family are for the 13th time. I dont want to ask myself for the millionth time afraid of the answer I might get. 

There are no degrees of freedom, but we keep pretending we can grasp its scope.  {What does 12 days without food feel like?} A student asks me how I cope as she cries about the Palestinian girl she talks to and worries about regularly. I talk about how holding this is like holding a broken piece of glass. Sometimes your grip helps to remind you through the pain that this is where your focus needs to be, that this is what is important. Sometimes its a good reminder that cutting yourself doesnt help anyone else in their suffering. Either way you can’t drop it because its glass and that requires us to take responsibility for our part to clean up and not allow everyone and especially not our children walk all over it because we couldn’t bear it. 

7.7 Kilometers is approximately a 10 minute drive. That is nearly double my drive to work. I want that drive to last hours and days and infinity. I want my power of consciousness to span beyond myself and change the scope of the world. Where power becomes meaningless to determining who lives and who dies on the press of a button and the distance between my loved ones and human made danger spans forever. 

We shouldnt live in a world where dying from cancer is somehow more benign than the way that so many are dying now, 7.7 kilometers from where she lived. I still believe we are better than the horrors, even while we commit them, because it is all I have. And if that is my perception, perhaps one day our collective conscious will mean it, when we say “never again,” again.