My Atoms And I

So lately I’ve been thinking about atoms. My atoms, to be precise.

This is not really an exercise in science; more like an exercise of fantasies.

I can’t begin to comprehend just how many atoms have got together to form me. So I don’t even try. I leave it at a few billions. Which means I am a billion things while I am me.

That is something worth thinking about.

The funny thing about this is to accept that even while they form me, my atoms don’t really know I exist. This is fascinating. It makes me feel like I am some sort of a greater entity the way we study societies but in a more noticeable, study-able scale. As when people come together and form a society or a community and the society is an abstract thing but the people think of it as real. Like Durkheim might say, it is real because it is general, external and coercive. I become that. I make my atoms do a lot of things – both consciously and subconsciously. I think about where I want to go, what I want to eat, what I want to read... and they comply. I am a society.

King David of Israel in Bible days wrote: I am fearfully and wonderfully made. I doubt if he knew about atoms but he was not wrong.

Which is crazy because even right now as I am musing on them and writing about them, they are all doing it with me. And yet they don’t know they are doing My Will. In fact, they don’t care all that much about me. They are the people that make up the Society Me. On a very tiny scale. They’re not even particularly loyal creatures. One day they’ll just disintegrate and go on to form someone else! Very sobering thought.

I suppose there’s no point being too full of myself.

If I am asked what I like best about them, I’d probably say the fact that they can teleport. Well, leap. Quantum leap. I guess. That is lovely. Us people will never teleport but the atom people (the non-alive people that form us) can. And do. Well, not atoms as a whole. Electrons, I suppose. Still, that is something else. And I am a grand society that is formed by tiny things that teleport! Inside me. That really is something else.

And to think, considering how much of me is water, I could have been a cloud.