Real Life Matters

“A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.” — Albert Einstein

Every six months I visit my neurologist. I am always a little surprised during these visits, hearing myself say things out loud that I am often reluctant to acknowledge. During my most recent visit, we discussed my life’s pace, which has slowed dramatically since I stopped working in 2019. On one level, this is discouraging. As each month passes, however, I have grown to get used to moving through each day at a slower, more measured pace. If I breathe deeply and pay attention, I can experience things that would otherwise be out of reach, like the joy of watching a Sanderling running up and down the beach on Lake Michigan at sunset in late September.

The Sanderling starts life in the high arctic tundra, and migrates south in the fall. Exactly how this tiny creature finds its way from the arctic to the south across thousands of miles, and back again, is a mystery:

It now appears that birds may visualize the earth’s magnetic field through a form of quantum entanglement, which is just as bizarre as it sounds. Quantum mechanics dictates that two particles, created at the same instant, are linked at the most profound level—that they are, in essence, one thing, and remain “entangled” with each other so that regardless of distance, what affects one instantly affects the other. No wonder the technical term in physics for this effect is “spooky action.” Even Einstein was unsettled by the implications. Theoretically, entanglement occurs even across millions of light-years of space, but what happens within the much smaller scale of a bird’s eye may produce that mysterious ability to use the planetary magnetic field. Scientists now believe that wavelengths of blue light strike a migratory bird’s eye, exciting the entangled electrons in a chemical called cryptochrome. The energy from an incoming photon splits an entangled pair of electrons, knocking one into an adjacent cryptochrome molecule—yet the two particles remain entangled. However minute, the distance between them means the electrons react to the planet’s magnetic field in subtly different ways, creating slightly different chemical reactions in the molecules. Microsecond by microsecond, this palette of varying chemical signals, spread across countless entangled pairs of electrons, apparently builds a map in the bird’s eye of the geomagnetic fields through which it is traveling.^[1]Weidensaul, Scott. A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds (pp. 8-9). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Navigating thousands of miles from the arctic each fall is just the beginning of the mystery surrounding migratory birds:

Researchers have found that in advance of their flights, migrant birds can bulk up with new muscle mass without really exercising, something humans would love to copy. Because a bird’s muscle tissue is all but identical to a human’s, the trigger must be biochemical, but remains a tantalizing mystery. They also put on so much fat (in many cases more than doubling their weight in a few weeks) that they are, by any measure, grossly obese, and their blood chemistry at such times resembles that of diabetics and coronary patients—except that they suffer no harm. Nor do birds flying nonstop for days suffer from the effects of sleep deprivation; they can shut down one hemisphere of the brain (along with that side’s eye) for a second or two at a time, switching back and forth as they fly through the night; during the day, they take thousands of little micronaps lasting just a few seconds. Researchers have found dozens of similarly extraordinary ways in which a bird’s body copes with and overcomes the stress of long-distance travel.^[2]Weidensaul, Scott. A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds (p. 9). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Each of us is on a unique migration through life. Like everyone else, my own migration is shrouded in mystery. How quickly will my Parkinson’s disease progress? What treatments for Parkinson’s are on the horizon? Will these treatments be available to me? When will a cure be discovered? If a cure is found, will I even be able to take advantage of it?

These questions are profound, and, most of the time, too much for me to handle. So instead of dwelling on the overwhelming, I break up my flight on most days into small, manageable bites. Completing a daily journal checklist, I am prompted each morning to set a single priority at the beginning of each day.^[3]One thing each day does not seem to be a lot until you factor in that there are 365 days in a year, which translates to an impressive list. Thanks for the inspiration, MacSparky!

I pick a priority each the morning and write it down. Today, my priority was to finish this blog post.

I stretch my wings and join the Sanderling in flight over the horizon and into the unknown.