TRANSCRIPT: Notes From Dunfanaghy 3: The Black Hole Perspective
Hi, it’s Megan. This is the third Notes from Dunfanaghy voice note, where I am unpacking my many tangential thoughts as I’m thinking about and preparing for the Dunfanaghy retreat that’s happening at the end of September. Greetings from South London Park. I hope it’s not too noisy. Let’s see how we go.
So today, since I’m strolling around in the sun, I am thinking about the black hole perspective, which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot for the past nine months or so.
So I was obsessed with black holes as a kid. When I was five, six, seven, very, very interested in black holes. And my understanding of them at that point, I think, was that they were stars that were dying, or stars that were dead, and that they didn’t emit any light. And that was just fascinating to me.
And so when I think about the black hole perspective, I’m actually thinking about what black holes really are. My understanding as an adult is that they’re a place in space where the gravitational field, the gravitational pull, is so strong that nothing can escape — not even light can escape. So it’s not that — I think when I was a kid, I kind of thought of black holes as, like, empty spaces of nothing, but actually black holes are packed so tightly with matter and stuff — that’s why the gravitational pull is so strong. It’s because there is so much in them, there is so much there, that’s why they have such gravity.
And so the more I’ve been thinking about black holes in the last nine months or so, the more I’ve been thinking, well, that sounds like my work. That sounds like my experience of my work. There is so much here in this thing that I am drawn to over and over again, that I am pulled towards against my will, sometimes it feels like. There’s just so much there to unpack. There is so much stuff in it. And I think I’m not alone in that. I think that that is the experience most of us have with our real work, the work that only we can do.
Not only is it the work that only we can do, for most people it’s the work that we can’t not do. It really doesn’t feel like a choice. It doesn’t feel optional whether we move in the direction of our work or not. It’s like we’re pulled towards this thing before we even really understand what it is. And there is just so much in it for us to explore and for us to unpack.
And so the reason I’ve been thinking about black holes for the past nine months is — I’m working on, I don’t like to say it out loud because it makes it feel too real, but I’m working on a book project. Feels easier to say book project rather than book. It is a book. I’m working on a book. Which is kind of like — I’m not going to try to describe it. It’s memoir. It’s exploring my story. It’s one of the reasons why I’m going back to Dunfanaghy. And it’s hard to know what came first — the reignited obsession with the landscape, or the book project. It’s very much a chicken and egg kind of thing.
But in the process of that, I’ve been kind of returning to the ideas around black holes. Like, they’ve just — the idea has been coming up again and again. Black holes have been popping up in unexpected places.
And so last year, whenever I was doing a little bit of research, I came across an article — someone sent me an article about black holes and a recent discovery that they have quantum properties. So scientists have found that black holes can be both big and small at the same time, both heavy and light at the same time, both dead and alive at the same time. And that makes so much sense to me, that black holes are quantum.
I talk a lot in my work about how — the art paradigm, if we’re going to take an artistic approach to our work and operate out of the art paradigm rather than the traditional business paradigm, which is also the productivity paradigm, the hustle paradigm — it’s the paradigm that most of us have been kind of raised with. The art paradigm, which says that we can do our work, which says that we are guided by our own artistic impulses and our own artistic desires. And it’s not about looking outside of ourselves and saying, oh, well, what does the world need, what does the market need, how can I fill the holes there. It’s about inquiring into ourselves to discover what is our work, what is the thing that we are drawn to, and beginning there, and allowing ourselves to serve the work. And then we build some kind of business around that if we want to, rather than building a business that we then show up to serve.
But anyway, I digress. In the art paradigm, it so often comes back to paradox. Like, paradox is a sign of truth. When you find yourself in a place of paradox, then you probably are most in touch with reality. You’ve probably stumbled upon the truth.
You know, to make money from your own work, you have to, at least initially, completely ignore questions about income and give the work what it wants, give the work what it needs. And somewhere along the way it turns out that that is also the best path to making money from the work that only you can do. But you have to completely let go of it, you have to completely surrender. Or, if you want to create work that is of highest service to other people, then what you have to do is completely focus on responding to your own needs and desires and scratching your own itch.
So, you know, this kind of — we find ourselves having the whole detention of these kinds of paradoxes across the board in the art paradigm.
So it makes sense to me that if our real work is a black hole, and black holes are quantum, that makes sense, because our real work is quantum in that sense. It is — it’s both/and. Like, the traditional business paradigm is so much about either/or and black and white and all of that. The art paradigm is both/and. Our real work is born out of this both/and place, which is a quantum place.
And so the other thing that I think about whenever I use this term, the black hole perspective — it’s a conversation that I had with a friend of mine earlier this year. So he is a theoretical physicist, and we were having a conversation about aging. We were actually at a wedding. It was a friend’s wedding. We were talking about how long we’d all known each other for. We went to university together. We were talking about aging. And he dropped in this line, and I made him stop and repeat it so I could get my phone out and write it down.
But so he said, you know, on Earth we can move around in space as much as we like, but we’re always moving forwards in time. We’re always aging. We’re always moving forwards in time. But when you cross the threshold into a black hole, space and time switch in that respect. And so inside a black hole, you can move around in time, but you’re always moving towards the center of the black hole.
I wrote that down, and I didn’t know exactly what it meant to me, but I knew that it felt very significant for me. And I’ve been thinking about it probably daily since I had that conversation with him. It feels so true to me whenever I think about my work and our real work in general.
Like, in our work, if we are doing the work that only we can do, the work that we can’t not do — we’re having this experience of being pulled towards the center of a black hole. We have no choice. We are being pulled in the direction of this work. We’re being pulled in the direction of this thing. And I am kind of having the experience of physically being pulled to particular parts of the landscape as well.
But at the same time, in this whole process of doing our real work, we kind of get to move around in time.
And these really are on-the-fly voice notes, so I don’t know how much sense all of this will make, but here’s how I think about it. Like, when we do our own work, we do move around in time. We explore the past, we make sense of the past, maybe we resolve the past in some way — our own past, but also I think that extends before us. You know, the families and communities and cultures that we’re born out of, and we’re an extension of that past. And, you know, I talked a couple of days ago about the idea of the geological present, and so, like, what even is the past if we’re thinking on a geological time scale.
And also, when we do our work, we change the trajectory of the future. So I don’t know if this is helpful to anybody else but me, but I find this black hole perspective so helpful to think — like, okay, I’m being pulled towards the center of this black hole that is my work, but also I’m moving around in time. I just find it, it shakes so many things loose for me.
And it also reminds me of the reality that work is not — it’s not this thing that we do for money. Like, yeah, that ends up being part of it, but work’s not about money. And it’s not even about impact or legacy or any of that stuff — we connect to it, and, you know, all of it is part of the picture, yes, but it’s not really about any of that. It is our real work. It’s like a biological process, it’s a natural process, it is something that we do with our bodies and souls, and it is more layered and nuanced than we could ever wrap our tiny little minds around. It’s quantum. I think it is quantum.
And the purpose of it is not even for us to figure any of this out. The purpose of it is just to be in the process of it. That’s our only job — to be in the process of our real work. I think doing your real work and fully being a human being and expressing yourself and experiencing yourself as a human being — I don’t think those are two distinct things. I think those are all part of the same natural process.
One other thing that I’ll throw in that I’ve been thinking about today is — I read this in Carlo Rovelli, he’s a physicist, I think, he’s written a lot of books. But he has one about quantum gravity, which is called Reality Is Not What It Seems, I think. And in that, here’s a bit where he talks about black holes, and he talks about the fact that quantum gravity predicts that black holes can explode, and also that they can kind of evaporate — in air quotes, like, they emit heat. But the line that stuck with me is he said that essentially, in the end, a black hole is basically a shortcut to the distant future.
And so in my analogy, where we’re thinking of our work as a black hole and a shortcut to the distant future — that hurts my head in a way that is good and productive for me and my work. I hope that you might have a similar experience of it. I don’t know.
And then the other thing that I only realised today, and in all of the reading that I’ve done, I’ve never seen this put in clear, simple terms — I just saw there was, like, a new article about some discovery related to a black hole, some black hole fairly near to us emitted a flash of light. But it said, at the opening of the article, it said, like most galaxies, the Milky Way has a supermassive black hole at its core. I didn’t realise that pretty much every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its core. And that makes sense to me as well. We live in a fractal world. And so if a galaxy has a black hole at its core, then the galaxy of our work probably also has a black hole at its core in some sense or another.
And so does this make sense to anyone? I have no idea. But this makes a lot of sense to me. It feels right in my body. And it makes me think about my work in a totally different timescale, which completely changes the perspective. It makes me feel more grounded in my work whenever I connect to these kind of larger timescales, and it helps me connect to the inevitability of my work, which always feels like the antidote to just all of the noise and nonsense, and the sicknesses that we have kind of created in the way that we think about work and moving through the world.
So I hope that you find something of interest or use in all of this too. What we will talk about in Dunfanaghy at the retreat at the end of September will be sometimes more concrete than this, and also there will be plenty of room for all kinds of existential chats and questions as we roam through the landscape and through the dunes and along clifftops and after dinner and along the beach and all of that.
So if you’re interested in the Dunfanaghy retreat, I’d love to have you. You can find the details on my website, or shoot me an email. There’s links everywhere.
All right, I’ll see you tomorrow. Thanks for listening.