I'm Suffused

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the Higgs Boson, which is great, because then I don’t waste my time thinking about less important things. Like electronic medical records. And how everyone is angry at work because of the implementation thereof. Or how I’m an hour late going home because I’m on the committee for said medical record.  And there is lightning and I’m on my bike.

According to Time magazine, which may or may not be an authority on quantum physics, the universe is a field of energy suffused with Higgs bosons, which allow the greater energy particles to turn into the mass form of energy.

I don’t know what “suffused” means, but it reminds me of when they sell olive oil that has a certain flavor to it.

Also I thought particles by definition already had mass, but I could be confusing them with Doritos.

So all we are is energy, bundled up and stored, with lots of empty space between. Somehow that energy stays in a constant form, a constancy of being, of life. But life is ever changing. Cells constantly remodeling, dying, dividing. Pieces used up by another process. Waste recycled. Air and water exchanged. Where do I end and the world begin? Or you?

My legs connect to the bicycle which grounds to the street. I’m here and moving and the trees are whirring and it could be all in my mind or I could be everything.

As I ride my bike up the last hill home I have that euphoric sensation that I’m peeking through a tiny window into the mind of the universe. My own mind is splitting open and I could almost, maybe, barely grasp the meaning. And know, by virtue of being that energy itself, hurtling down the last corner on a bike, pure kinetic and potential and mass times the speed of light squared. Barely held together at any moment by bosons.

And then I passed a mailbox. And I thought, that mailbox, too, is pure energy.

Huh.