Field Notes—

Good Vibrations: The Chickadee And The New Year

By Curtiss Clark

This week started with a New Year’s Day — the day we greet at midnight by plucking at the endless string of time to make it sing “Auld Lang Syne.” As the champagne bubbles rose to our lips when we took “a cup of kindness yet,” past and future were knit together in a toast to better days ahead. Just like the good old days.

And in this wallowing between past and future, the present is nearly forgotten, but for the fleeting kisses that attend that brief moment when the calendar circles back on itself to touch nose to tail. The past thins and dims in our memory, and the future always keeps its secrets. But sometimes it seems the present is the truly elusive part of the time equation. The present moment is the place we never are as we preoccupy ourselves with nostalgia or regrets, hopes or fears.

At dawn on New Year’s Day, as the exhausted revelry of the night began its own descent into memory, the present moment showed up, right on time, in the form of a bundle of burning energy — not the rising sun. I’m talking about the chickadee.

If you want the perfect model for life in the present moment, observe a chickadee. At half an ounce, it weighs about the same as a letter, and it goes about its appointed rounds with a dispatch the postal service can only envy.

Chickadees have bold personalities all year long, but in the winter they really stand out. They are such a slight sliver of life seeking survival in the harshest conditions of the New England winter. Every moment of the day is spent searching out calories to stoke their tiny metabolic firebox. They would expire in the night with any lesser effort. They are the first to find a food source and the last to abandon it. They are fearless in this quest. They will flutter about your head and shoulders impatiently as you fill an empty feeder. If you are still, relaxed, and patient, they will eat seeds from your outstretched hand.

Chickadees also have the ability to reduce their metabolic debt to the coldest nights by reducing their normal body temperature (about 107 degrees Fahrenheit) by 14 degrees or more.

The urgency that leads them to play every angle against the elements can be heard in their breasts. Their heart rate is 700 beats per minute, which through a stethoscope sounds more like a vibration than a beat.

Our notions about time have everything to do with vibrations that cycle with consistent frequency. In nature, they present themselves in innumerable processes. The first attempts to accurately track time, for example, grew out of observations of the cycling motions of the sun, moon, planets, and the stars. As civilization evolved, it became clear to keen observers that everything in the universe has a cycle, and the intervals, or frequencies, of those cycles became useful tools for mapping that odd one-way street of time. The day: one spin around the earth’s axis. The year: one spin around the sun.

At one extreme, consider the frequency of our galaxy, the Milky Way. It is a pinwheel 80,000 to 120,000 light years across and about 7,000 light years thick. Our sun, a meager mote in that spinning mass, sits on a spiral arm about 26,000 light years from the center, which it orbits with our solar system in tow with a frequency of once every 200 to 250 million years. Our speed in that epic journey is about 155 miles/second.

At another extreme is the frequency of our most accurate clocks — cesium-beam atomic clocks. The reference frequency for these clocks is the frequency of what the proprietor of one such clock, the US Naval Observatory, calls “the microwave spectral line emitted by atoms of the metallic element cesium,” which is 9,192,631,770 hertz. (One hertz = one cycle/second.) Cesium clocks dice time so precisely that they are accurate to within one second every 1.4 million years. That’s some vibration.

Even the galaxies of champagne bubbles swirling in our flutes are generated by vibrating pockets of carbon dioxide trapped in the small defects of the glass.

And physicists now postulate that “the endless string of time” may be something more than a metaphor. Their search for a theory of everything has led them to string theory, which holds that all the matter and all the forces in the universe are composed of infinitesimally tiny vibrating strings, playing out “Auld Lang Syne” and every other manifestation of non-nothingness. Everything, according to the theory, has a resonant frequency — cesium atoms, chickadees, champagne bubbles, galaxies, and even human beings wallowing between the past and future at the turning of a new year.

I like to believe that finding and living in the reality of that resonance requires of each one of us the kind of fearless quest undertaken every day by the chickadee. It means sticking with the here and now as best we can. That’s easier said than done.

The Haitians have a saying that describes our difficulty in managing our relationship to the present: “You have the watches, we have the time.” Years will come and go, but the present moment will be with us forever no matter who we are or what unique vibe we contribute to eternity. Maybe this will be the year I lose the watch.