Hanging on a Moment
The following was written in the early days of my diagnosis. A gray Michigan provided a fitting backdrop to the post-diagnosis haze that surrounded me during the winter months of 2023/2024. It was a dark time in what is likely to be a series of challenging times. It was also a time of great reflection as I grappled with acceptance and hope, peace and resistance. I often think about the picture that numbers weave about infinity, particularly when I am pondering my own death, and it's something that I wanted to share with my then two-year-old daughter when she was old enough. And so I decided to get it down on paper.
Imagine a number line. It probably has a zero in the middle, extending to the right with a one, a two, and a three and the same negative sequence to the left. Arrows at either end indicate that there is no termination, a neverending extension to outerspace that includes numbers so big, like 3.25 x 10^100, that it is more than double the number of atoms in the universe. Some numbers can be described in physical analogies. For example, 7,500,000,000,000,000,000 is the number of grains of sand on earth. There are 200 billion trillion stars in the universe. But as the numbers start to get much bigger, we run out of comprehensible comparisons. Many of the numbers that can be written on just one line of paper are so large that their monstrous size is meaningless to our human experience. I like to imagine all of those numbers floating out there, existing, just waiting to be named.
During the last year of my bachelor’s in Mathematics, I took a class that would now be called An Introduction to Real Analysis. It delved into the infinite world of numbers, this time exploring the vast inner space. For example, we looked at all of the numbers between zero and one—not just 0.5, 0.25 or 0.1 but numbers like 0.32279814… and 0.32279815…. There are so many numbers in the space between zero and one that if you were to make up one that had, say, 20 or more digits past the decimal, there is a chance that no one else in history has ever considered that particular number before. It always existed, but you might quite possibly be the very first person to ever hold that unique number in your gaze. If you visualize the numbers between zero and one, lined up in order, about a third of the way between them would fall 0.32279814…, and next to it 0.32279815…. But not right next to it because a whole infinite universe of numbers exists between those two numbers, and if you pick any two numbers from that universe, there would be a whole universe between them as well, and so on.
Spending hours and hours thinking about this bounded yet infinite world ignited something in me. A constrained space holding depth beyond imagination seemed like magic. I visualized two moments in time, fixed on a timeline. Land on either one of them and we would be frozen, stuck in a moment. But somehow, incomprehensibly, we are able to jump from one moment to the next, traversing through an infinite field of moments and milli-moments that pass between them, one at a time, and in a certain order. How could we possibly cross through a universe from one moment to the next? Experiencing the infinity of infinitesimal moments, one by one, felt like the essence of life.
In the dark matter of infinity between moments in time I imagined space for all of the things that make us feel alive: the welling of emotion from an interaction with a loved one, art, or nature, peace, satisfaction, grief, hope and loss. As I write this, my small daughter sits on my lap. Her little voice chatting to me, her warm soft skin on my legs, her sweet fingers touching my face are all feelings that seem neverending. This idea gives me comfort: the depth of our season here still exists, even when our moment has passed. Our lives are bound by a very small interval of time, yet hold an infinity of infinities, too numerous and too deep to fully comprehend but magically existing within us nonetheless.
