Colliding neutron stars (kilonovae) are one way that new elements are created. Two swirling masses collide, an explosion occurs, and *poof!* Our periodic table of the elements gets updated with something that has greater complexity than we’ve seen in the past.
Our society prefers to avoid explosions. The suffering and destruction are assumed to be bad – and of course from the human perspective, the injuries and losses are horrific. We make it worse because of our dysfunctional relationship with grief and our societal norms that keep our discussions of such catastrophes swirling in the vicinity of blame or fear. But at a cosmic level, the destruction of human life and that which we hold sacred is simply our species equivalent of a kilonova – stars colliding, creating a colossal explosion, and generating the creation of something new.
With recent events such as the latest mass shooting and the horrific bombings in Israel, we see our aversion to explosions, clear as a bell. We cannot handle the intensity of the suffering that’s generated by the collision of value systems, of light and dark, of what we label as good and evil. But cosmically – two stars collide. The heat and intensity of the explosion forges molecules together in new ways. A new element is created. We “discover” it, add it to the periodic table, and feel pretty smart. Nature uses explosions to catalyze complexity. We can too, if we revise our relationship with judging collisions as bad, and open to wonder how complexity is being catalyzed.
Most people jump to knee-jerk solutions: ban this, punish that, pass new laws against this, apply countermeasures to that. But that would be like banning neutron stars from colliding with each other: not gonna happen. Nature will create “explosions” one way or another, in the form of some kind of disruption, chaos, or something that dismantles a old structure so that something new can be formed. We get bogged down because we remain focused on what is wrong, but we would enjoy our human experience more (and create a more humane world) if we reprogrammed our nervous systems to get curious about what new structures we might create in the wake of the loss of so much that has been dear to us.
This means becoming more nimble in acknowledging, feeling, and allowing grief (and normalizing this in our culture). It means working skillfully with the waves of emotions that move through our bodyminds after intense experiences. It means allowing all of the ripple effects to wash through our body with less resistance and more curiosity about what our uncomfortable feelings might mean. And it means honoring what we value ( and how life has brought it to our attention that we value it, through its seemingly senseless destruction of it) and building something new that expresses and holds these values.
What new ways of relating might we create, so that those we’ve labeled “terrorists” or “mentally ill” have more options for allowing their distorted energy patterns to express themselves, besides destroying innocent human lives?
What support structures might we build, so that people receive the necessary support to have their needs met and illnesses treated before they can build up to the point of “explosion?”
What would we have to care about, to create a world that uplevels the baseline for all, so that these distortions don’t need to exist?
New intense experiences will arise, as the cycles of creation will continue, but the baseline of suffering will continue to move in the direction of greater wellness, overall. We are, after all, evolving.
Think of how far we’ve come since the Crusades! We have wars, we have deaths, but percentage-wise? We have elevated the ways in which we disagree to include internet forms of abuse, and while these experiences certainly induce trauma, it’s a different kind of trauma than blunt-force axes and spears from the days of yore. It’s no consolation to the families of those who lose loved ones in the epidemic of mass shootings that we’re experiencing these days, but in general we really have learned to no longer bludgeon each other to death when we disagree. Why? Because we created complex legal systems to address social deviance. Now it’s true, our legal systems need to evolve to recognize and restrict greater nuances and complexity of emotional harm and trauma, not just physical attacks, but this will come in response to some new “explosion” that illuminates what’s missing in our society and catalyzes enough desire and pressure to build something different.
Of course, legal systems are reactionary (passing laws to address what has happened before) and what we really need is proactive – lenses through which to look at the subtle realm of causation and notice where we may create interventions to PREVENT explosions – not because explosions are bad but because our species is being called to learn how to become a single species instead of a bunch of different nationalities and religions and “others” who learn to harm one another in the face of fear, thus destroying the single species that we are. (How many other species destroy themselves, really?) We’ll need solidarity to face whatever existential “neutron star” equivalents threaten to collide with us, in due time – creating the next requisite explosion that catalyzes creation.
In the meantime, scientists are curious about how fast the universe is expanding, and have been studying kilonovae to find out. The explosions are loaded with intelligence and data that help us to make sense of the cosmos. If we could hold less judgment of our societal “explosions,” perhaps we might learn from the intelligence and data inherent in the collisions and discover creative new possibilities just wanting to be born.