Today during my meditation, I burst into tears. This is actually really common for me. When I sit down, and get quiet, and let whatever feelings arise that are there to feel, I’m usually overwhelmed emotionally in some way. Big feelings. Love for my cat. Gratitude for the kindness of a friend who wants to help my career. Grateful to be alive in the vast inky universe. All kinds of things. It’s not a bad thing, and only slightly embarrassing. Crying during meditation is a pretty regular thing for me.

But today it gripped me in an unexpected way, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Here’s what I was thinking about: I was in my peaceful room, with the clock quietly and steadily ticking. The cat fountain was gently burbling. These sounds are regular touchstones in my practice, and they mean peace and appreciation for a quiet moment. 

And then I realized that we are actually hurtling through space. The earth is spinning at a thousand miles an hour. We’re whipping around the Sun at 67,000 miles per hour. The Milky Way is spiraling at 1.3 million miles per hour. The feeling of support under my body, the sturdy house below me, the earth we all rest on – it feels stable. The experience I’m having is security and safety, and actually we’re on a universe-wide thrill ride of speed.

So why did this realization provoke an outburst of emotion? That’s weird, right? The meditation teachers say when you have a feeling, you can investigate the feeling. I would say I usually hardly understand what that means. But today seemed like a pretty rich vein of exploration, so I tried to investigate. You got it, emotions, let’s see what’s up with this. 

What immediately came to mind was a feeling…I have to call it betrayal. I thought things were one way, and it’s a way I’m familiar with and I love very much. And realizing that all of that experience of stability is a lie, that we’re actually racing through the void at breakneck speed, well, that seemed like I couldn’t understand anything that was going on. And there was part of me that was angry about it. Angry that the planet is moving. Hey, I don’t ask for these emotions, I’m just trying to report here. 

This was interesting, so I kept going. If we could be hurtling through space and I didn’t even realize it, if my perceptions were so confused that what I thought was quiet and peaceful is constantly a galactic juggernaut, what else seems one way to me, and is 100% something else? I felt totally undermined in my ability to understand what is happening around me. And in peeked a tiny bit of insight: No, I can’t trust my emotions, perceptions, experiences to reveal the truth fully. The experience of quiet in my room is only a tiny fragment of what there is to perceive, and there are countervailing experiences all over the planet, and even all over the universe. I was overwhelmed by the sheer unknowability of it all.

So I had to reconcile. I am sitting quietly, mindfully breathing, experiencing one of my very favorite moments. Everything seems peaceful and solid. At the very same time, people are being bombed, elephants are being shot, the oceans are dissolving CO2 into acid, and, yes, the earth is rotating, and spinning, and spiraling. All of those things are true at the same time. It’s not a lie that I have peace. It’s a tiny little experience. It’s not a betrayal that the peace is only contained by me. It’s the nature of awareness that there are a billion things you could be paying attention to now. If I get better at this, maybe in my quiet moments I could hold all the contradictions: Yes, the earth is solid. Yes, the earth is on the move.

I wonder if the physicists would like that, who have worked so hard for centuries to convince us that what we perceive as sturdy is actually a lot more interesting than that. I wonder what other contradictions I need to hold, accept, and embrace as being true in spite of the fact that it seems like they can’t possibly coexist. In the meantime, I’m a little smug about having investigated a surprising emotional response and finding a little insight and a little peace and, at the same time, a big disruption. Those things are also all true at the same time.