To This Line From The Physicist Richard Feynman: “We Don’t Know What’s True, We’re Trying to Find Out and Everything is Possibly Wrong.”

Today is Sunday. Clouds crowd above us as we do the April yard work of cleaning the flower beds of dead leaves that we couldn’t get before the first big snow. I have two daffodils worth of spring in my yard. All afternoon, I consider my son, who is 15 and eager to get on with his life. Every time he says it, people ask him, “What’s the rush? Why grow up so quickly?” As if they never felt this way, as if there’s something wrong with wanting to get to the next point in life, feeling like you’ve seen enough of the adolescent landscape and like you’re ready to get back in the car and drive on.

 But we don’t know what true is, which is not to say we don’t know what is true, but rather, how to define true. We ask what God is, what love is, what real is. We ask what true is  The clouds are true, but only today. And if they are not true tomorrow are they true at all? Does truth have to be forever? The daffodils look true, so does spring. My son has faith that whatever the future is, it’s better.  He is untying the knot of his life and the truth is, it’s tight and he wants to pull hard.

  

We are trying to find out. When my son was 2, I pulled the chair up to the sink and let him play in the running water. He filled cup and after cup and then emptied it down the sink. Filled and emptied. He was trying to figure it out the problem, not how to solve the problem, but what the problem even was. The cup is full; I have the water and then I don’t. And then the cup is full again. I bury the daffodils and only some come up.  Was the winter too cold? Are they just late? Have they died? Why can’t we just move this all a little faster?

Everything is possibly wrong. I’ve never seen a word work harder than “possibly” in this sentence. It saves us. We don’t know it’s wrong; it’s not been proven to be wrong, but we have to be open to the possibility that everything, everything is wrong. The clouds are wrong. The spring is wrong. The daffodils are all wrong. And you, my son? Your future? It’s possibly wrong.  Can I convince you to stop rushing towards it? But maybe, maybe we are wrong.