what is hateful to you . . .

I’m reading a book called The Edge of Space-Time by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. Admittedly, it is not everyone’s cup of tea. Non-fiction, for one. I like that but most of the friends in my book club prefer fiction. Science-y, for another. Again, lots of my contemporaries and many others put stuff like this behind them as soon as they finish school. And, honestly, my work and my practices lean strongly toward the social and sociological. But the ideas in science, especially physics and quantum mechanics, just pluck all the heartstrings of songs we sing of ourselves. Apologies to Whitman, there, but even in 1892, long before Einstein and Planck, he wrote, “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Walt got it.

One of the things that sparked a connection for me was an example of Newton’s first law (also postulated by MoZi in the mid 400s BCE). Imagine you’re a passenger in a car when the driver suddenly turns hard. You feel pushed against the side away from the turn. Why? Because you were just going along, minding your own business, when suddenly someone changed direction. The law of inertia says you want to keep going the way you were going. That change in direction forced you to feel pushed, feel discomfort, feel like something else has taken control of your motion.

I immediately thought about social media. You’re just living your life, having your opinions but go online and suddenly you are being swung all over the place, being pulled left, being pulled right. It does not feel good. In fact, it can be a little nauseating. See?! An actual scientific fact having a clear, social corollary.

You can go even deeper into the quantum level, where things get really weird, and Prescod-Weinstein says, “Somehow the world emerges from abstraction into reality.” Are you an energy worker? You get it. Have you heard of the butterfly effect? Yeah, that’s what this is.

As Whitman implied, we are all part of the same energy, the same world, the same field. It literally manifests as the golden rule which Hillel put this way (the version I prefer because I think it brings it into sharper focus): What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.

Take care of each other. Thereby, you take care of yourself.  

© 2026 www.megreilly360.com

7/20/2026