We found where tomorrow lives

The proof that your whole life is electric

Hi, friends,

It’s been a week since I collected the keys to my first house, in a small town in southwest England.

The strangest thing about this move is that on some level, I’ve always known it was going to happen.

Back when I was married and living in Los Angeles, I knew that I was supposed to live in the West Country.

This didn’t make any sense.

I’d never lived there before—I was brought up in London and, for a little while, Tokyo and Connecticut. I was married to a third-generation Californian with deep family ties in Southern California. I had no community in the West Country. No job prospects. Nothing.

But we’d go to Cornwall or Somerset for holidays and the occasional wedding, and every time, I felt like I was splitting in two. My whole body ached with the longing to stay. And I didn’t experience this anywhere else I went.

Sometimes my then-husband and I would talk about this fantasy of mine. Sitting in our flat in northeast LA, blocks from the LA River, the Pacific Ocean a few miles and many hours of traffic away, I’d show him properties I’d found in Penzance, St. Ives, Falmouth, and we’d talk about the life we could live there. Even while we talked, I think we both knew it was impossible. A kind of willing delusion.

But do you know about tadpoles?

Researchers at Tufts University in Massachusetts have discovered that when a tadpole is growing, it’s not the genome that dictates where the frog’s face and limbs will go. It’s electricity. Here’s a quote from Sally Adee’s recent book We Are Electric, excerpted in New Scientist:

The video showed a frog embryo busily dividing to become a tadpole. Then, this tiny, smooth blob began to light up. Electrical patterns flashed a series of unmistakable images across it: two ears, two eyes, jaws, a nose. These ghostly projections didn’t last long. But 2 or 3 hours later, exactly where they had glimmered, the real things appeared: two ears, two eyes, jaws, a nose. Here, at last, was the proof […] that electrical patterns provide a blueprint that shapes a developing body, coordinating where to puts its face and grow its other features.*

Where does the future live?

I used to think it was another planet; some far-off place we’re forever looking at but will never reach. But reading this, and knowing how my own life has unfolded, I’m not so sure.

The way my current life lived in my past body was a little like the way the frog’s eyes and nose and jaw lived in the tadpole. In some crucial way, it was always already there. A ghostly charge. An energy.

Of course, you could say that at least in my case, this was a self-fulfilling prophecy. That of course I moved to the place where I wanted to live, as soon as I was free to do so. But my move to this part of the world wasn’t planned. When I returned to England, I planned to stay in London, close to the family and friends I’d been so far from for so long. Then it just so happened that I found the community I’ve been looking for my whole life, and the studies that make everything else make sense—and that they’re based in the part of the world my soul had been pulling me to, without knowing why.

And chatting to an old friend about these ideas this week, she reminded me that even when we were undergraduates together, almost twenty years ago now, I used to talk about my suspicion that I wouldn’t have children. Not because I didn’t want to, but because some part of me knew that my life and my body weren’t going to work out that way.

That particular electrical charge has been a hard energy to live. But even when a given charge isn’t what I’d have chosen, I find it unutterably beautiful—the ultimate consolation—that energies like this exist. That life has an intelligence and a plan all of its own.

Because if that’s true, I know that my job is not to achieve some ten-year plan, come hell or high water; or to bend circumstances to my own iron will; or to flagellate myself for my failings. It’s to dance with what is, with the charge I was born to carry. It’s to live that energy as generously and as fully as I can.

And if all this is true, I also know that the best bit is only just beginning.

Love,

xx Ellie

*H/t to my wonderful friend Mel Brough for sharing this article with me—she’s currently working on a project about energetic literacy that I can’t wait to share with you, when the time is right.