By Zac Adam
To wrap my arms around it is an invitation to tremble. Why does anything exist?
Like peering down an endless corridor, born out of mirrors facing off, my mind accepts a truth it cannot understand. The corridor doesn’t end. Reality is not nothingness, and I’m aware.
Nothingness is not scary. It’s not anything.
A world teaming with nothingness is not a world. Space by itself is still infinitely more present than nothing, and infinitely more dreadful. For nothing can’t do anything, and requires no explanation.
But something can and does.
And why should that something be us things? How must we be explained? Contemplative voices, fastened to, and given charge over, a body of particles who mostly obey.
Why do they?
A mathematical fabric, contorted into nebulas and otters—bursting at the seams with knowledge to unload. Hard stuff, wet stuff, fiery stuff, and poems littered with the word stuff.
As far as we know, there’s only one way out, and getting in is tricky.
There’s this thing called time and it’s not the same everywhere; it can escape you, distort you, strengthen you, and heal you. It can end you. Time is fluid, and yet only goes forward. And it cannot explain itself.
What can make a conscience, and why? Does not judgment hunt the guilty?
What could stand at the beginning and at the end, behind the veil of the present? Who is responsible for eternity in the mirror? And who can see it’s end?
Reject meaninglessness. Reject serenity.
We are far too calm about the fact that anything exists, let alone everything. Cherish the Answer, now that you mind the question.
It’s why you are here.
“What is the chief end of man?”
Westminister Shorter, Q1