Birthday reality check

Reflection in SkyTrain car partition

Today is the 69th anniversary of the day of my birth in my personal year zero. I am now in my 70th year of travel through space-time. I am billions of kilometres distant from the point in space where my mother was when she sent me forth into my own existence. My position in spacetime is always in motion.

Lately, I've been thinking of my life as a streak through spacetime, a short trace with a beginning and an end. This is probably because I recently read Existential Physics by Sabine Hossenfelder. It gave me a lot of things to think about with regard to my place in the universe, ie, reality.

The streak, of colour perhaps, is my physical existence in spacetime, everything I learned, the mistakes I made, the times I triumphed, the small daily hits and misses, the connections to people and animals and plants and mycorrhizae, the things I've created, all the ways in which I made my minuscule impression on the four-dimensional fabric of reality.

I have a gravitational field. So do you. So does everything that has mass. My gravitational field is infinitesimal compared to that of the moon or the earth or any other large mass in the universe. Nonetheless, like everything with mass, I warp the spacetime around me. The effect is tiny, but it's real. I don't even have to have done anything. I affect the universe just by existing.

The space-timeline of the enormous and still expanding universe is 13.7 billion years and counting. My four-dimensional swoosh is a wart on a quark in a drop in the ocean. But it's not nothing. It counts. It has an effect. Many effects.

While I exist, one of my jobs is to make those effects beneficial and to minimize harmful effects. That's basically how I think of good and evil — that which helps, that which harms. Another is to try for a steady flow of beneficial effects. All of reality is just a little too big for my effects, so I hope they operate in spacetime closer to me.

In the concluding third series of His Dark Materials, which I recently watched, the dead are imprisoned in a perpetual, joyless, grey existence until the heroine Lyra frees them to rejoin the universe (or multiverse, as Philip Pullman put it). The shadows were overjoyed to be able to return to their home at last. That's how I feel about my death. I will be going back to the universe whence I came. It has always been my home. It gave me life, it will be my spacetime of eternal rest.

When my body ceases functioning, my consciousness will vanish and my streak in space-time will conclude but won't go away. It will always exist. It can't be undone. The universe is stuck with me for as long as its own timeline lasts.