Ground State

I stood in the boarding line for the Acela to Boston, departing Moynihan Train Hall in Penn Station at 8am. It was like standing in a beehive, a persistent buzz in the room as thousands zipped around the terminal with backpacks, duffles, and roller suitcases in tow. The train hall is lofty. The vaulted glass ceiling and metal support beams appear weightless, and the sun streams in, illuminating the room with a warm glow. The hall is filled with people who have just arrived to New York for their big adventure and others ready to leave the city for a needed respite or business meeting. Either way, they transmit a unique sort of energy.

The train pulled out of the station and snaked its way under Manhattan until it emerged on the Queens side of the East River. With every mile the train went out from the city, I could feel its kinetic field dissipating. My own electrons seemed to mellow from their excited state. By the time we reached Boston, my atoms felt steady.

Boston was just an overnight stop. The next morning I walked over to the harbor to board the fast ferry to Provincetown. There I waited on the dock in the open air. A hundred people queued to board the noon ferry. The Provincetown IV arrived and my queue traded places with the passengers coming off, back from their own week in Ptown. I made my way to the front and stowed my luggage in the cabin. The ferry started chugging into the Massachusetts Bay and the Gulf of Maine and soon the Boston skyline disappeared in the distance. All around us open water. I sat on the front deck. I let the wind hit my face with salty air. My hair whipped around until it was tousled into a shape Einstein would be proud of. I sat there for most of the ride my eyes ahead. I had binoculars in hand and scanned the distance for whales. I could see far off light houses and New England summer homes to the south as bits of the Cape came into view as we entered Cape Cod Bay. The sun, the water, the wind on my body, I felt a calm I hadn’t allowed for months. Stress drained from my body.

For ninety minutes I sat with nothing to do. No posts or code to write. No essays or images to edit. Ninety minutes stripped of demands. I listened to the boat skim across the waves and let thoughts drift through my consciousness. There was no performance; no requirements; no obligations. No letting anyone down. On the water, between real life and vacation, I felt grounded. 

I often draw inspiration from the language of quantum mechanics to help me make sense of the world and the way I move through it. I’ve used vocabulary like superposition, uncertainty principle, and the wave-particle paradox to help me describe my emotional, intellectual, or spiritual state. On that boat, heading toward Ptown, the concept that kept returning to me was “Ground State.”

Here’s how Merriam-Webster defines ground state: “the state of a physical system (as of an atomic nucleus or an atom) having the least energy of all the possible states.”

One thing about ground state that I find interesting is that it is unique to each system because being in ground state doesn’t equate to emptiness or complete stillness. It just means the lowest-energy state available to a system under its present conditions.

That is how I felt on the front deck of the fast ferry. That I had discarded all the performance, all the obligation and stress. I was locked into my personal ground state. I could feel my beating heart in my chest, but it wasn’t an over-excited thumping. I could hear my breath go in and out with a steady inhale and exhale. My pulse wasn’t racing and nor were my thoughts. They just flowed around me, my consciousness like a fin moving through a sea of thoughts. The only thing I held onto was the visual of the sun glistening off the waves as we jetted across the bay. 

Essential. That is how I read the ground state. In that space between Boston and Provincetown, with no distraction or obligation or performance, I was at my most essential. Not vacant. Not devoid. Just quiet. Thoughts still move, my blood still flows, but I could feel who I am in a completely different way. In my ground state I understood that I am enough. I felt no lack or scarcity. In my ground state I felt my body doing exactly what it needed to do. No need to measure itself against internalized, unattainable standards. In my ground state I was free to follow the paths forward, peer through the open doors, and imagine the infinite possibilities.

My mind did wander back to “the real world.” Finding my ground state in the middle of Massachusetts Bay is well and good but finding space for those moments on shore is a different proposition. In “the real world” deep contemplation and sparks of transcendence are interrupted by frustration with the jackhammer operating at all hours of night. Anxiety when my phone pings or my watch dings throughout the day. All around me there are people with needs, requirements, and expectations. The obligation to produce and perform serves as a constant photon storm exciting my electrons, a wall of static between me and my ground state.

I suppose it isn’t always a barrage. I find those moments of quiet even amidst the chaos and kinetic energy that surrounds me in Midtown Manhattan. I have been able to push the noise out of my head, quiet my thoughts, and allow myself to feel what is essential. I do it during a morning walk in Bryant Park. I do it when I sit and watch ducks land in the lagoon in Central Park. I do it when sitting in front of a giant Renaissance painting in a gallery at the Met. And I don’t think I’d want to be in a grounded state 100% of the time anyway. That Walden Pond life just isn’t for me. For me the beauty lies in the moment my ground state meets the excited state. When my essential self meets the energy of the world around me. I think that is when I really glow, in the transition state, in the moments when the world is shaping who I am, and I transform into something new.

Then Pilgrim’s Monument came into view on the horizon and I felt a jolt of excitement hit my body. I pulled my binoculars to my eyes and focused them on the distinct tower rising above the Provincetown landscape. Its gray stone a beacon of arrival. The ferry moored in the harbor and we disembarked. The luggage wheels rolling on the ribbed metal surface made it sound like a million cicadas were waking up from their decade-long nap. I stepped onto the dock and loaded up my luggage and climbed into a pedicab, my mind racing with what the next few weeks could hold: lobster rolls, tea dance, late nights with friends from far off places, my feet in cold Atlantic water, my skin tanning under the sun. 

Ground state meeting possibility.