Welcome! I’m glad you’ve decided to take a look. You’ll find out pretty quickly that I am fascinated with things that are just beyond our sight. We rely so heavily on what our eyes show us. We can’t imagine (unless we have lost our vision) what it would be like to navigate life without the signals that our eyes feed us.
Sometimes we make the mistake of thinking that, if something is invisible, it must therefore be insubstantial. We get this idea because there are some cases where that is true. The fog on a misty morning is hard to focus on, translucent, easy to look right through — and it is also ephemeral, weak, ready to blow away, easy to walk through.
But invisible doesn’t mean insubstantial. Just because our eyes lack the receptors to observe something doesn’t mean that the thing is “barely there”. Think: Physics tells us that our bodies are bombarded every minute of every day by subatomic particles named muons. We cannot see them, but they can have a huge role in genetic mutations. Viruses are so small as to be virtually invisible, but they certainly have an impact!
Stay with me, here: the human soul is like that. (Oh, let’s not be picky. Most of us believe in the soul, however we explain it, unless we are hidebound materialists — and most of them act like they believe in a soul.) The invisible part of you, the part that you can’t find by dissecting your brain, the part that is your self: that’s incredibly substantial, deeply consequential. We would be mere animals without it, unreflective, uncreative, uncaring. Our eyes can’t see the soul — but we can see what a soul does.
This week, be amazed at all that you cannot see: billions of subatomic particles, viruses, and personalities. Muons last 2 microseconds, viruses a handful of days. Us? Longer.