Long before he was the revered, quirky old genius with an unmistakable shock of unruly hair, Albert Einstein was a difficult, tantrum-prone child. A source of worry to his parents, he skipped the early babbling stage of toddlerhood and didn't talk until he could speak in complete sentences. He exasperated his teachers. He loathed rote learning and refused to study subjects that bored him.
I'm guessing that his early preference for using a rope to hold up his baggy trousers, dislike of socks, and preference for sandals (sometimes women's) didn't help him overcome the misfit image.
After graduating, barely, from Zurich Polytechnic in 1900, it would take Einstein nine years to land the job he was after in academia, in part because his former professors weren't eager to recommend the class-skipping guy with rope holding up his pants in lady sandals. Stuck in a relatively undemanding (for him) job as a clerk in a patent office, he worked out how to sail through his day-job duties in a few hours, freeing him to spend the remaining hours researching and writing.
Five years into the job, he published four seminal papers that would set the stage for modern physics — including the immortal E=mc2 equation demonstrating that energy and matter are different forms of the same thing.
Scientists would later look back on Einstein's 1905 work and declare the year annus mirabilis (the year of miracles), acknowledging that he had transformed the way we see the universe.
Maybe years filled with personal and global storms hold mustard-seed sized possibilities. It's temping, common, and understandable that in the closing days of 2020, our attention and conversation revolves around overwhelming evidence of disunity. Yet we're bound together not only by common wounds, but also by the brief, indispensable mercies that can appear out of nowhere when we need them most. When you're reflecting on 2020 and all the seismic shifts shaking our collective foundation, is there room for harvesting its lessons? Are we on the eve of fresh mercies?
Are you willing to stay open enough to detect them? I will if you will. Deal?
