The Feeling & the Logic
January 27, 2022Grandma turned to me and said, Make sure you take a formal logic class. It was the most important class I ever took.
But I never did. I read Wittgenstein and Heidegger, but I never needed anyone to tell me that A+B=C means that C-B=A. I’d been studying logic my entire life—at the dining room table, in math class, and in late night conversations with friends. (None of whom believed in God.)
I studied logic some more in the lab—where I spent my afternoons grinding ancient teeth against just-rough-enough stone. Grinding them until they were thin enough to see through with a microscope.
And then, I studied it some more at the legal center, editing Supreme Court briefs with my eagle-eye. (That’s what my boss called it, for I was known for catching every typo on the page.)
Logic? I asked Grandma, Okay, I told her, but I never once signed up for the class. Not even to later drop it in the two week grace period. Instead, I sat on the basement floor of the library—The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution in my lap—memorizing the names of every known hominid to date.
I learned that Australopithecus afarensis was one of the first to walk upright.
I learned that Homo erectus was the first to make fire.
And I learned that Homo neanderthalensis actually had a larger brain than ours, and its name wasn’t pronounced th like three but ta like tall—from the German for valley—but still, almost everyone pronounced it the wrong way: Ne-ander-th-al.
But I made sure to say it right. I always cared about getting it right.
And there, in the library basement—The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution in my lap—I saw a sprawling world of history, of beings crawling and moving and changing through time. Their bodies and minds. Their activities and creations. We are constantly changing in a state of constant creation, I realized.
And whenever people would say—as for some reason they seemed to do again and again—that there has always been war and that humans are innately violent, I felt a resounding refusal arise inside me for no other reason than I felt it. I hadn’t read about it in the big book. I hadn’t read much about it anywhere. In fact, the one book I’d read on the subject (my freshman year) put forth a compelling argument that humans are in fact biologically wired for violence, and while I was momentarily enamored with the argument, the feeling that it wasn’t right kept punching through the lines of logic the authors had drawn, but since I knew that feeling was never really enough, I decided to learn more, to check and see if maybe my feeling was correct.
I scoured the records for evidence and theories on the origins of human violence, and what I found was that people believe all sorts of things that aren’t founded. If people hear a story enough—perhaps in a simple, oft-repeated phrase like “there’s always been war”—then they will believe it. That must have been what was happening - people just believing what they’d been told, never digging deep enough to truly understand. As I scoured the records, what I learned (based on the evidence available then) was that for the most part, we were peaceful beings, and all organized violence seemed to evolve as population increased.
I had logic to thank for my ability to read and decipher the records and to cogently present their evidence. Logic, I learned, was the great equalizer between the founded and the supposed, between fact and fiction.
But still, it was feeling that drove me to ask the questions. It was feeling that compelled me to stay seated on the floor, flipping through that book when really I was supposed to be researching cinema vérité or something like that. It was feeling that inspired me to write on topics never assigned and to conduct my own research when I couldn’t find it anywhere else. The feeling was curiosity, but it was more. It was something greater.
Flash forward twelve years.
I’m lying in bed. It’s five in the morning. The sun has yet to rise, and my bed is empty. My husband’s in New York, and my cat is in some other room, and I’m lying there, wrestling with the incessant paradox inside me: the feeling and the logic.
I see them both so clearly—
The feeling that tells me, I believe it all.
God, magic, every message, every piece of evidence I’ve tracked about my intuition over nearly a decade now—the evidence that all points to something very real and reliable happening and the feeling that tells me to keep honoring it with every step. Your curiosity is a whisper. Your wonder is a gift.
And I see the logic that tells me, The jury’s still out.
Except, I also see that I’m not really wrestling with any of this. There’s enough space in me for all the faith and all the skepticism in the world.
And in that moment, in the dark, I flash back to words shared with me in a tarot reading three years earlier: "I wonder if you fear if people really knew the vast oceans of space you have within to hold their emotions they would flood you.” And then—suddenly—in my mind’s eye, I see my body as a lake.
My body hasn’t become a lake, but rather, the lake is inside me, and it’s deep, and it goes on and on, and as I see this in my mind, I feel this intense heat at the back of my arms, and I feel a vastness so great that at first, it terrifies me.
There is enough space—so much space—for all the science and all the God and all the feelings and all the thoughts and all the uncertainty and paradox to comfortably coexist.
Twelve hours later.
I cried for an hour straight. I cried on the couch, and I cried while doing the dishes, and at some point, I dropped the sponge, and I knelt on the kitchen floor—my fingers curled around the edges of the granite counters—and through my tears I spoke out loud. I spoke to God, and I said: I do believe in you. I do. You know I do. And even as I said it, I thought: But of course, I’m open to being wrong, and of course, a whole world of unfathomable possibilities are possible. And then, for a moment, I felt a tinge of envy for everyone in this world who seems to so comfortably believe in things. Everyone who seems unburdened by the desire to get it right, or simply, everyone living with the confidence to believe that they are right.
I will never tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt what is true and what is false.
I am not a believer.
In fact, logic tells me that it’s actually completely illogical to firmly believe in anything.
What I have is this - my stories (those I’ve lived and those I’ve been taught) and the humility to know in each and every moment that there is more.
Now.
I close my eyes and enter the deep lake inside my body, and here, I feel complete peace in the uncertainty. Utter bliss. This is everything, I think. This is actually everything.
