Let me tell you a short story.

Imagine you are an armed guard. You are walking through the city when you see an individual running out of a store while people are shouting, “Stop the thief! Stop the thief!” In an instant you understand what is happening and try to stop the suspicious individual, ordering him to halt. He does not stop and keeps running. You try to chase him, but he is very fast. Since you are armed, you also shout, “Stop or I’ll shoot!”—but nothing changes: the individual keeps running and eventually manages to lose you (ah, those damn cigarettes…).

That evening, when you get home, you listen to the news, which reports on an individual matching exactly the description of the thief you chased: shortly after your encounter, he entered another store and this time killed numerous people.

At that point you feel sick. You could have stopped him with your weapon, but you did not. If you had done so, many innocent people would still be alive right now.

You spend the following days with this thought constantly on your mind, generating an intense sense of distress. You could have shot—maybe in the legs… Why didn’t you do it? But above all: was it right not to do it? It is a dilemma that haunts you, gnaws at your brain, and leaves you in a state of disorientation that shows no sign of fading.

Eventually you meet a close friend and tell him your story. Your friend is a quantum physicist and knows superposition states well. He explains that with your mind you have created a monster by linking two separate situations and turning them into a single, inseparable whole. Trying to determine whether your actions were appropriate or not with respect to that unified whole is impossible.

Because there are two situations.

The first is that of a thief running out of a store. In that situation you acted correctly, doing everything possible to stop the individual without shooting. You do not shoot someone on the mere suspicion that they have stolen something; moreover, there were people around, the person could have been armed, and you could have caused a disaster. In short, you behaved by the book, taking into account the context and the rules of engagement. You have nothing to reproach yourself for.

Then there is the other situation: that of a dangerous individual carrying out a massacre in a store. This is a completely different, separate situation, occurring in a different space-time and having nothing to do with the previous one. In your mind it must be kept rigorously separate from the first.

In this second situation, had you been present, you would undoubtedly have tried to stop the individual, even by shooting if necessary. But you were not present.

Connecting the meanings of these two situations simply because the same individual appears in both is something the mind, with its associative abilities, can easily do. But allowing it to do so in this case is a serious mistake.

There are moments in our lives when it is right to try to connect situations to one another, in terms of meaning, in order to arrive at a deeper understanding. But there are others in which we must avoid doing so at all costs, if we do not want to fall victim to profound confusion, with all the distress that follows.

Your friend’s words have an immediate effect on you. Suddenly, the distress that has plagued you for days vanishes, and calm returns. Before saying goodbye, he adds something else that strikes you.

It is important, he says, to distinguish between discovering connections of meaning that already exist and creating new ones. The first process, discovery, often opens us to deeper understanding. The second, creation, requires great care: while on the one hand it allows new possibilities to emerge, on the other, if used without discernment, it risks trapping us in states of superposition with no way out.