Questioning the Universe
You might wonder, after posting somewhere in the region of five thousand times to this blog over the last seventeen years, if I might ever run out of things to write about. I wonder about the same thing – more regularly than you might imagine.
I suppose somewhere along the way I realised that while we have so much in common with each other, we also differ in countless ways – and those differences are endlessly fascinating. Here's the thing though – sometimes we cross paths with people we share so much in common with, we begin wondering about causality – about fate.
Do we subconsciously seek each other out among the crowd, or do the cogs of the universe turn us inexorably towards each other?
I feel lucky to count one or two chance encounters over the years where the whimsical part of my brain has begun to suspect involvement from the universe – but then the rational part lurches into action, and reminds me that we are all making it up as we go along – and that we are all experts at interpreting meaning from chaos. We're built that way, whether we like it or not.
It's worth reminding ourselves that the same specialisations that afford us the ability to recognise a friend at a distance by their walk, or by the way shadows fall across their face are also responsible for seeing monsters in shadows.
How can we be so similar? How can it be chance? This must have been predetermined.
Where am I going with this? Maybe towards pragmatism of a sort. While we can chase down blind alleyways in attempts to pick apart the workings of the universe in pursuit of the “how” and “why”, it sometimes feels like doing so might cause us to forget to live.