The Invisible Threads
A Meditation on Connection
Welcome back to our sacred corner. I’ve prepared something different—a pot of jasmine tea that seems to hold the afternoon light in its amber depths. As I pour your cup, I’m struck by how this simple act—one person offering warmth to another—mirrors something profound happening across every scale of existence, from the quantum dance of particles to the neural networks of our brains to the social webs that sustain our spirits.
We often think of connection as something we create, something we work to build or maintain. But what if this assumption has it backwards? What if connection isn’t something we construct, but rather the fundamental fabric from which everything else emerges?
After David’s passing, I found myself living inside this paradox: how could someone so physically absent feel so eternally present? This sensation led me on an unexpected adventure through quantum physics, systems theory, cellular biology, and psychology. What I discovered is a startling possibility now held by most scientists in all these disciplines - that what we call “separateness” might be an illusion, while interconnection might be the underlying truth. How weird!
Quantum Intimacy
At the smallest scale of reality, particles become so intimately connected that they function as a single system, regardless of the distance between them. Physicists call this quantum entanglement. Even across broad expanses of space, research experiments at CERN show that subatomic entities are instantaneously affected by each other - what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.”
But here lies the wilder observation. Researchers at Shanghai University have discovered that myelin sheaths emit cascade radiation, resulting in the generation of biphotons—pairs of entangled photons that might create quantum communication pathways within our own brains. The same force that connects particles across cosmic distances could be connecting thoughts across the neural networks of our minds.
This revelation dissolves the boundary between the quantum and the personal in ways that would have astonished Einstein. Perhaps consciousness itself emerges from patterns of connection that transcend our everyday understanding of individuality.
The Dance of Emergence
Systems theory shifts the connection perspective from the quantum to the organizational level. Such thinkers describe complex systems as consisting of components and also as patterns of connection between them.
Consider your smartphone – it becomes “intelligent” not through any single part, but through the intricate dance of relationships between the processor, memory, sensors, and vast networks beyond itself. At a higher level, research shows that the value or utility a user derives from a good or service depends on the number of users of compatible products, creating what economists call positive feedback systems where connection generates exponential rather than linear growth.
Emergent Properties of Relationship
Systems research identifies what they call “memory effects” in complex networks, where past interactions influence future behaviors across the entire system. This explains why our family developed its quirky rituals and rhythms, why each of the communities you feel part of possesses a distinct culture, and why some relationships seem to have an almost telepathic quality.
After forty years together, David and I could finish each other’s sentences—not because we were similar people, but because we had become a system with emergent properties that existed only in our connection.
Consider yourself not as a single node in a social network but instead as a temporary link to the ideas and behaviors of others. You are not a separate being who happens to connect, you exist as a pattern of connections that temporarily appears as you as an individual.
This understanding transformed my experience of David’s loss. I now experience him as the tropical garden we planted during his dying days and that his ashes now nourish. I feel him in Bach’s chaconne, the classic he most loved. I feel him when I share memories with my children. It was if dropping my idea of his individual identity allowed him to participate more fully in my larger pattern of being.
The Living Truth of Embodied Connection
Biology, too, gets in on the connection game. At the cellular level our bodies are so attuned to the fundamental human need for connection that having solid relationships is linked to better emotional regulation, compassion, sense of well-being, and sense of prosperity.
Specifically, research reveals that strong social connections – not just walking with the walking group but making trusted friends that show their interest and caring for you as you walk - lead to a 50% increased chance of longevity as well as enhanced immune function. Being connected can improve stress responses and minimize the negative health effects of stress. Among older adults, connection can increase the risk of developing dementia by approximately 50%.
True connections take work
Let me be clear here. Maintaining the health of a committed relationship takes work. True connection requires dropping defenses that protect your illusion of separateness – your stories about yourself. If when you disagree you are insistent on your own perspective, you might as well hang it up now. Only with a willingness to see and act on the fact that the other person has a valuable truth can a deep connection survive.
I learned this when I had a bruising fight with my son some years ago. I decided to stop, listen, consider his point of view as if it were mine, and prioritize our connection over “being right”. We’ve not had a tussle like that since.
Research shows social connectedness is waning at an alarming rate with over 25% of Americans saying that they have no one to confide in”. Personally, I attribute part of the problem to the modern propensity to substitute social media for the deeper interactions that occur face-to-face. Social media rewards distraction. How often have I gone to a restaurant and seen people being “together apart” – so involved in their mobile devices, they aren’t making eye contact. Authentic connection requires ongoing presence and attention. I’m an old dog so I won’t talk to a dinner partner until they put down their phone.
The Dynamic Dance of Quanta
In the Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra explains how physicists join this game. Modern physics has shown that everything is connected and everything is in constant motion. Reality isn’t made of separate static things – it’s a dance of patterns and relationships. The electrons that make up the atoms that make up the structure of your body are orbiting their atomic nucleus, whirling around in mostly empty space. If you think that just because you looked about the same in the mirror this morning as you did yesterday that your form is fixed, you are so wrong.
Subatomic particles aren’t really particles at all. They are probabilities or potentials - temporary crystallizations of energy that appear and disappear in ceaseless transformation. What we call a “thing” is, in fact, a momentary convergence of relationships.
What we call “empty space” isn’t empty at all—it seethes with potential, constantly birthing and absorbing particles in a quantum foam of creative activity. The vacuum isn’t absence; it’s infinite possibility. The universe doesn’t contain dancers; the universe is the dance.
Buddhism: The creative void
Eastern mystics understood all of this two and a half millennia before we had particle accelerators. The Void, Sunyata, or the Tao are names Eastern religions put to the emptiness that they consider the source of all forms. Buddhists say that nothingness gives birth to everything. Said another way, freedom from fixed form allows openness to infinite possibility.
David’s absence allows past memories that I know are not “real” in any invariable sense but are my story of our life together. His absence allows my future to be shaped by his influence. His love of classical music that we shared while curled tightly together on our leather couch is now the genesis of my delight in seeking out and listening to numerous classical concerts all over the city.
The Void isn’t a dead end—it’s a womb of perpetual creation.
The Buddhist Understanding that Nothing Stands Alone
Buddhism takes the idea of connection even further with a teaching called pratityasamutpada—dependent origination. This ancient wisdom declares that nothing whatsoever exists independently. Everything arises only in dependence on everything else.
Think about the cup of tea I gave you. The cup only exists because of clay, potter, kiln, minerals in the earth, rain that fed the crops that fed the potter, the culture that invented pottery, the hands that crafted it, the economic system that brought it to you, and countless other factors stretching back to the beginning of time. Remove any link in this infinite web, and the cup as you know it couldn’t exist.
But here’s the radical part: this isn’t just true of cups. It’s true of you. Your sense of being a separate self—that feeling of “me” inside looking out at a world of “not-me”—is, according to Buddhism, the fundamental illusion that causes suffering.
Modern Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh coined the term “interbeing” to capture this truth. You don’t just exist with other things. You “inter-are” with them. Your existence is woven from sunshine and rain, from your ancestors’ choices, from the food you ate yesterday, from every person who has ever spoken a word to you. Pull out any thread, and the entire tapestry of “you” would unravel.
When David was dying, a Buddhist friend told me something that seemed like gobbledygook. “He’s not going anywhere. He’s just returning to where he’s always been—everywhere.” Now I understand.
The Illusion of Separateness
The Buddhist teaching of anatta—often translated as “no-self”— was one of the hardest concepts for me to get my arms around. Eventually, I understood that Buddhism isn’t denying that you experience selfhood. It’s saying that this experience, powerful as it is, mistakes a process for a thing. What you call “self” is a continuous flow of changing physical and mental phenomena, none of which has any permanent, independent essence.
Think of the Mississippi River. It is not a single, enduring thing. Water molecules do not stay in the river—they cycle into the atmosphere and become moving clouds from which rain soaks the city of Chicago.
You are like that river. What you call “you” is a pattern of relationships in constant flux. Your cells replace themselves every seven years. Your thoughts arise and pass away moment by moment.
This teaching transforms grief. David’s death was not my loss of a separate, bounded entity. David was right that his personhood was always a pattern of relationships, always woven into the infinite web. His death was not destruction, only transformation. Because of his connection to me and our children, he exists. He is as he was - never permanent nor independent.
Complementarity and the Limits of Concepts
Both quantum physics and Buddhism recognize that reality transcends our conceptual frameworks. Physicists discovered that light behaves as both wave and particle, depending on how you observe it. Einstein understood that light is both a particle and a wave. This is not paradox. It is complementarity.
Buddhism makes the same point through its doctrine of emptiness. As I explained above, emptiness is full. Labels like “self” and “other,” “life” and “death,” “together” and “separate”—these are convenient designations, not ultimate truths.
Bottom line: words fail when we try to describe our deepest connections. I cannot express in words the meaning for me of grief. I can only say that you understand it when you’ve also experienced it. Sometimes my grief hits me when I hear hauntingly beautiful music or see the depiction of death in a dance or gaze on the sadness in my children’s eyes. Words are simply too crude. Life and death are simply too profound – and too weird.
TAKE-HOMES:
Rather than reiterating my (obvious) fascination with the existential, I’ll stick here to the impact of all of this on you.
Connection comes first: Identity is in the mind of the beholder. It emerges from relational patterns rather than existing independently. Connection appears to be a fundamental property of reality itself, not something we add to existence but something we recognize as already present.
Quality Transcends Quantity: Meaningful interpersonal connection requires a sense of being seen, being loved. To be authentically maintained, relationships require the courage to drop our protective separateness.
Embodied Truth: Our bodies respond to connection as a physical necessity just like calories and sunlight. Having healthy relationships improves mental and physical health.
A shift in thinking about death: When bodies die and decay the loved one is not lost – simply transformed. They were always non-self – never separate nor inert and in death they remain non-self.
Join the conversation—I’m deeply curious about your own experiences of connection across these different scales. Please share your reflections
And don’t forget to visit Fully Informed Conversations (https://www.fullyinformedconversations.org/).
With infinite connection,
Mom
(Roberta Ness, MD, MPH)