Electron Annie!

Time and all my best laid plans
Cease to exist with shovel in hand...

 I garden the same way I clean house - randomly, and with reckless abandon. I often find myself out for a leisurely stroll around the yard or to pick up a bit of litter after church, and end up hours later with grass stains on the hem of my Sunday skirt and good, clean dirt under my fingernails. Oh, and a smile on my face. The same is true for cleaning (though it's less poetic to write about). I don't know how many times I've started in just to tidy up a little pile of papers and ended up mopping floors in good clothes. I'm not much of a planner, you see. Plus, life is so much more interesting that way, isn't it?

Do you remember looking at drawings of atoms in your high school chemistry book? They were so neat and ordered - the plump, happy protons with their cozy little neutron spouses, surrounded by a passel of electron babies whizzing around them in an orderly (albeit breakneck) manner. The diagram always implied that electrons followed a set pattern - much like the planets around the sun - always predictably in line and never bumping into one another or flying off into another 'nuclear' family's territory. In fact, scientists actually believe that electrons aren't quite the chubby little atomic cherubs we thought them to be. There is a theory called the Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle that describes electrons more in terms of being a wave than a particle. Bill Bryson (one of my favorite authors) summed it up thus in his excellent book A Short History of Nearly Everything:

What this means in practice is that you can never predict where an electron will be at any given moment. You can only list its probability of being there.... until it is observed, an electron must be regarded as being "at once everywhere and nowhere."

Well, there you have it. I must be an electron. At least, that's surely what my family must think of me. My children certainly believe me to be either everywhere or nowhere at once, apparently. Sometimes they can't hear me when I'm standing right next to them, and other times they marvel that I have seen or heard their devious little schemes. I guess you can say that this is one example of how well home schooling works. These three kids already have an innate and deep understanding of the complexities of  Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and they're only 10, 6, and 3. For example, while they're not sure that it's totally possible for me to be in two places at once (or to disappear completely), they understand it, at least, as a theoretical possibility. They've also done some practical research on the topic, and have mapped out the most probable locations in which to find me. Apparently, according to them, I'm most likely to be in the bathroom or on the phone. Go figure. But, I digress...

I woke up today planning on cleaning, doing laundry, and catching up on bookwork. I'm not willing to concede that I'm still not going to do those things at some point today. Actually, I'm kind of already doing them, since I've got laundry in the machines, the dishwasher is open and half full, and my table is sprinkled with financial documents just waiting to be entered into the computer. There is still some probability that you might find me at one of those locations at some point today, albeit a low one. If I were a betting gal, though,  I'd say that it is much more likely that you'll find me outside today. After all, I've already felt the lure of the sunshine and gotten a bit of dirt under my nails while putting in some orphan plants given to me by a friend. (Of course, along the way I also started digging out an old tree stump, began weeding a flower bed, transferred a few strawberry plants, and got the yen to mow.) Whatever I end up doing, you can bet it will be seemingly random, but that's only to those uninitiated in the finer points of physics. After all, even those electric robot vacuums clean all the spots on the carpet eventually in their endless 'Roomba Rumba' dance through life.

I'm sure there are elements of the atom that scientists will continue to unfold as the years go by. God's handiwork is not well or easily understood by mere human minds, much as some scientists like to think otherwise. However, until they come up with a better theory, I'm in agreement with ol' Heisenberg. After all, just because no one can actually predict with any certainty where an electron (or I)  will be or what it (or I) will be doing in any given moment, I am content to know that God makes His own perfect order and purpose in what appears to be a confounding, seemingly haphazard series of events. At least, that's the story I tell my husband and children, and I'm sticking to it!

(I'm throwing in a bonus picture with this blog entry. Just in case I didn't really express myself well in words, or if you're more of a picture type person, below is an excellent illustration of exactly what I was talking about.)