journal

The Atomic Position

I keep noticing a pattern.

A quiet and useful repeated sighting.

It appeared to me first through writing.

The thing is, we call it writing and the written word, and ourselves writers. So sadly, for most people, that’s where it ends. With carefree, messy, drunk, abundant copy, where all ideas are good ideas.

But there’s a second spirit that good writing needs.

The editor.

A structured, sober, restrictive kind of person who defaults to deletion.

Easier when they’re separated into two humans. Harder but more common when they live within a single mind.

F. Scott Fitzgerald crystallised it:

The author has to hold in mind what both the writer and the editor desire, and at the same time retain the ability to function. That is to say, the words must still tumble from the mind and the darlings must still be murdered.

This idea of one shell with two opposing forces, where that opposition is vital and not neutral, has sewn itself deep into the soil of my soul.

Into every atom, where I see its echo. The atom, with its positive proton and negative electron. The atom, which inspires all life.

To write well I decided it was better not to think of myself as the writer, but as the Atomic Author with dual, and opposing personalities. I would divide myself. After all, in the words of Dr. Jekyll:

The pattern visited me many times.

I saw the battery with its plus and minus, empowering. I saw growth in muscle when I both pushed it to failure and rested it completely.

Even a plus is two minuses.

But nowhere has this duality mattered more to me than in my own mind.

Dr. Paul Conti defines mental health through the lens of gratitude and agency.

For me, gratitude is born of the past. I am grateful for what has brought me to where I am. Agency looks to the future. I am not done yet. Peace lives in the vibrant oscillations of the middle, the present.

I must at once be thankful for what has passed and still yearn to progress because to favour one without the other results in either apathy, because nothing matters, or concern, because everything matters.

Belief in only one is paralysing. Belief in both and acting regardless, is freedom.

This pattern in time is mirrored in space.

I am both me-in-the-moment, and me-watching-from-afar.

I can’t trust me-in-the-moment. He’s too much orchestrated by the monkey brain. The fast, fearful, primal brain. I have to escape my body and watch the situation from afar placing it into galactic perspective.

Only with this high contrast, can I clearly see the monkey holding the baton, orchestrating my reactions from some 3.5 billion years ago.

Only then will I clearly see the other eight billion monkeys on the same rock as me, each the centre of their own world. That world, one of ten trillion planets in one of two trillion galaxies, and when I die I will be forgotten.

But at the same time I must remain me-in-the-moment paying equal attention to whether careful or prudent is the word I’m looking for. Or whether the pause in my sentence is worth a comma or a full stop.

I am both a speck and its orbit.

Like the atom’s positive core and its negative halo.

Vibrantly held.

Peacefully unleashed.