Shades of Gray

There are times in life where in an insane moment you get all turned upside down. You are aboard your boat, following a compass heading, looking at charts, no need to time any knots on the dead reckoning line, the GPS is giving you every second of latitude and longitude. The sails are full and tuned. The wind is agreeable. The seas are fair, vast and fresh.

Suddenly a squall kicks up and you are thrown around. You react hard and instinctive, pull on some lines and let loose some sheets, fight the tiller, the boat heels over and tumbles around and by the time you are righted, you have banged your head and are bleeding from the corner of your eyebrow. You are shaky and disoriented; you don’t know who and where you are for a moment. After you stop trembling and gather yourself together, you check your charts and heading to find yourself a thousand miles away from where you were. You are dumbfounded, pressing your fingers onto your forehead in disbelief! Were the charts wrong? Were the instruments lying? Were you always there and didn’t know it? Which reality is right? “What the $#@*& happened to my reality?” You shout at blues of the ocean. “Was everything that I ever knew unreal?”

You check and find that you are at your final destination, without having traveled. You had not planned for such an abrupt end to your journey. You had counted on many stops along the way, anchoring in faraway bays, strolling on wayward islands, tied up to moorings in tropical lands. But you see the large land mass and the final dockage in sight. You have provisions unconsumed, lists unchecked, plans unachieved. The squall has taken them all away.

You have arrived. But oh, what you wouldn’t do to turn back the clock, to do things differently, to enjoy the journey more, to steer away from the storms, to remain at sea a bit longer. What you wouldn’t do? But if you were lucky enough to know that there are squalls at sea that can whisk you away in an insane moment, would you have enjoyed the journey more or less? Is not ignorance bliss?

 

Is anything that we know true? Is truth absolute or relative? Not in black and white, rather a tapestry of impressions that lies across the continuum of time and space, lies in endless shades of gray. At any given moment there is a likelihood that you are where you think are with a certain degree of grayness. Yet there is another likelihood that you are not. This tapestry is the fabric of the being human.

Note for further reading: Readers interested in a more pompous explanation of the above may look up “Quantum Mechanics Probability Wave Function” and “Quantum Non-Locality Phenomenon,”  a bigger mouthful than Shades of Gray!

Schrödinger's cat