Noun or Verb?

You’re a thing right. A proper noun sometimes. A stable self, sitting there. Looking pretty.

But wait. You’re not holding still.

Your heart is beating, and between beats conducting electricity by opening and closing about a trillion sodium and potassium and calcium channels and that’s all being mediated and influenced by quintillions of other cellular activities (per second) and don’t get me started on all the shit happening in your blood. And my god your brain. Your guts. Your bone marrow (one of the more “stable” parts of you) is making more than two million new blood cells every second. Eighty-six billion neurons are passing signals. Inside each of your roughly thirty-seven trillion cells, thousands of chemical reactions are running at once. And everything is moving. Information, energy, substance ceaselessly in exchange, between systems, between cells, between organelles.

There’s nothing holding still.

The noun that is you exists in one place only. Your conceptual mind. It’s an abstraction.

And check this out for yourself, but nothing anywhere ever is holding still. A mountain and every element, molecule and atom are vibrating, interacting, dancing. And at the gross level that mountain is eroding and moving on top of its tectonic plate, and hurtling through space at about 30 km/s.

A candle flame is the same. It looks like one calm tongue of light, but it's countless molecules burning every instant — a chaos of tiny events your eye smooths into a single steady "thing." The flame isn't an object. It's an enormous amount of happening, seen from far enough away to look still.

So are you.

And it isn't only you. Pick the most solid thing you can imagine — a mountain. It looks like the definition of standing still. But it's rising where the plates push it up, wearing down in every rainfall, its atoms never once at rest. Heat is always bleeding out of it into the cold — that bleeding-away is entropy, the slow running-down nothing escapes. Give it enough time and the mountain moves like a slow river. Nothing, anywhere, is holding still. All the way down, reality is made of events, not objects.

So where are the nouns?

A noun is a snapshot. Your mind takes something that is endlessly happening and freezes one frame of it, so it can be named and pointed at. That's useful. But the freeze is in your head, not in the world. Out there, nothing stops long enough to actually be a thing. "Mountain" is a word. "You" is a word. What's really there, in both cases, is a vast, ceaseless process.

The world is not made of things. It is made of happenings.

You are not a noun. You are a verb.

Nothing in reality is a noun. The only place nouns exist is in conceptual thought.

"This is the greatest discovery of the scientific enterprise: you take hydrogen gas, and you leave it alone, and it turns into rosebushes, giraffes, and humans." — Brian Swimme