What I was doing in the USA: Thinking.
There are days when the world feels like it’s spinning faster than my thoughts can catch it.Quantum chips, multiverses, encryption, wars, politics, cruelty, compassion - all of it swirling like a murmuration of starlings, trying to decide which way to turn and where to land. And somewhere in the middle of it, there’s me: a poet in superposition.
Not choosing yet. Not collapsing the wave. Just holding the possibilities lightly in my hands.
On Qubits and the Power of “Both/And”
I’ve been reading about qubits - those strange little quantum creatures that can be 0, 1, or both at once. A classical bit is Adam or Eve. A qubit is Adam and Eve, shimmering together until the cosmos demands a decision. It struck me that this is how many of us live now: in the in-between, in the not-yet, in the place where ideas swim around without settling.
Superposition isn’t confusion. It’s the fertile pause before clarity.
The Pebble and the Pond
I joked that poets should be central to government decision-making. Imagine it - Cabinet meetings beginning with a stanza, budgets footnoted with compassion, policies written with margins wide enough for metaphor. Idropped that thought like a pebble into the pond, and in one universe - if you like that way of thinking - the ripples reached the right ears and it became real.
There’s something hopeful in that. Not scientific hope, but human hope.
The World as It Is
And yet, we live in a world where choice has teeth. People believe what they like and get away with it. Sometimes that belief births abolition,sanctuary, soup kitchens. Sometimes it births fear, cruelty, pointless wars, and the rise of those
who thrive on division.
The suffering is real.
The wounds are real.
The chaos is real.
But so is the capacity for goodness.
The World as It Could Be
Many years ago, I realised something simple and terrifying: humans shape reality.
Every act of kindness, every refusal to hate, every moment of restraint - these are the quiet decisions that build a better branch of the universe. You might call it the Kingdom of God, were you so minded. You don’t need a multiverse for that. You just need a heart that refuses to go numb.
The Awakened Heart
And this is where I land, again and again:
“I will not betray my awakened heart.”
Because Love exists. Somewhere, sometime, it will be perfect. Not perfect in the sense of tidy. Not perfect in the sense of painless. But perfect in the sense of whole - the way a seed is perfect before it breaks open. Love is the final truth of things. Even when the world forgets it, I won’t.
A Closing Thought
Perhaps this is the real superposition: the world as it is, the world as it could be, and the fragile luminous space between them.We live in that space. We choose in that space. And every choice is a ripple.
Somewhere, in some branch of possibility, humanity gets it right.
My task - our task - is to make this branch resemble the perfect as closely as we can.
