Be who you are

(The grandest of New Year's resolutions)

It was a bright October night. I was a child. My Grandpa Talley lay dying. Each one of us got a minute or two with him in his bedroom.

I knew how much Grandpa loved baseball. Heck, almost as much as I did. So I whispered to him, “I’m gonna be a pro baseball player someday.”

He said, “That’d be nice, Benny. But just be who you are. That’s all you gotta do.”

I’d like to be able to tell you from that moment on I heeded his words to me. Instead, I must divulge that it took the better part of a lifetime for me to fully understand.

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Quantum physics (the study of how matter behaves at the level of the infinitesimally small) is perhaps the most interesting thing you or I could ever study. Yes, the higher mathematics involved can be daunting, even unreachable, for many. Yet if each of us could study enough to grasp even the most basic understanding of the quantum world, we would come away exuding a newfound awe at the elegance and beauty of ultimate reality.

To take the advanced math involved and put it into simple everyday English, a very good translation might well be, “Be who you are.”

Those words sound so simple.

And they are.