Ramblings on Einstein

My Facebook feed has become a swamp of framed platitudes, cute animal photos, bad puns, and old people acting superior because they know how to tell time and write in cursive and once knew how to dial a phone. Of course I’m just being cynical and there’s some good stuff, too. In the platitudes category, I just saw a whole list of quotes from Albert Einstein, most of which we’ve all seen before, but this one struck me: “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. Matter is spirit reduced to point of visibility. There is no matter.”
As a physicist, he was a pretty good poet. I mean, that is one way of looking at it, and it’s a very beautiful way of looking at it, which has the advantage of being the literal truth, but to see ourselves as beings of energy, frozen light, is not exactly a practical way to view the world. I mean, if you’re riding down the road and your buddy whose driving starts saying things like “I am pure spirit, and the car is pure spirit, and we are vibrating at the frequency of the air and there is no past, present and future (that was another of the quotes) and we and that truck heading toward us are one” you’re probably going to freak out a little bit.
Even though he’s right.