Measurement

I slept from 10 p.m. last night until 8:27 this morning. Ten hours and twenty-seven minutes. Yesterday I drove 328 miles to visit my sister in Princeton, N.J. the home of Albert Einstein who captured energy, mass and the speed of light in an elegant equation that every student learns.

Look at us: we quantify everything we can in this complex and astonishing world, from nanoseconds to eons from millimeters to miles from basis points to billions.

But no one can measure the velocity of hope, the way hope hatches fully fledged—in fact, already flying— between one word and the next between one breath and the next.

Neither can we calculate the stain of fear, the way it infects a childhood and spreads to a lifetime.

And we can only try to imagine the circumference of compassion the way it shows us the shape of love embracing, expanding, factoring in forgiveness it invents its own quantum leap, its own speed of light.