Ways in which I make myself crazy…

Once when I was about seven, and waiting my turn for the weekly, ritual Sunday night bath, I began contemplating the vagaries of life. What if life didn’t exist? What if there were no people, animals, planets, or anything else? What if only nothingness existed? I tried to imagine what nothingness would look like; a boundless gaping abyss of, well, ….. nothing. When I sensed myself verging on panic, I attempted to pull back from the ledge of terror by humming Yankee Doodle.

Now as an adult, I clearly haven’t learned anything at all because I still find myself engaging in the same kind of pointless, mental exercises that never result in any definitive answers.

There are currently seven billion people crammed together on this planet of finite resources. All seven billion of us basically want the same thing, which is mainly to survive. If survival isn’t threatened by disease, starvation or war, some of us have dreams. We think our dreams are important. But are they really? Mankind has been around for thousands upon thousands of years. We have built remarkable things like pyramids, coliseums, hanging gardens, and even great, huge, stone heads that only recently revealed themselves to have gigantic bodies buried beneath the firm terra on Easter Island. Now we scratch our heads and wonder what purpose they once might have served.

Empires have risen and fallen, and countless wars have been fought. In the end, everything crumbled to dust only to be buried beneath layers of earth. Wars became swiftly forgotten, and all the reasons why they were fought that seemed so important at the time. Like our predecessors before us, all of us live for but a fraction of a moment ,and then pass out of this world. The small hole left behind by our passing closes in the blink of an eye, and all the things we deemed so important while living have been rendered meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

One only has to look out the window of a plane at twenty thousand feet to see how miniscule we truly are. From down here we seem large and significant. From up there in the clouds, we are smaller than spores. It’s both humbling and frightening at the same time, so much so that I begin humming Yankee Doodle in my head.

There are seven billion people on the planet and I have yet to find a true soul mate, someone who carries the same hopes and dreams as me. Love plays hide and seek, losing itself within those seven billion souls spread throughout the planet. I would have to sail the seven seas, and scale the rugged face of Kilimanjaro in order to find “him”, but I’ve grown long in the tooth over the past few decades and the thought of traversing oceans and climbing mountain ranges only makes me want to take a nap.

Then there’s the “God” thing. Believing in God of is a matter of faith, and none of us can ever prove the existence of a divine creator. We simply have to take it on faith.

If God doesn’t exist, and the universe is therefore random, then it only stands to reason that if there is no grand scheme, no divine purpose, no order to the universe, then life itself is defined by whatever meaning we assign to it. Technically speaking, good should subsequently have the same value as evil, which when reduced to its common denominator would mean that killing and philanthropy are essentially equal.

I’m tired now. I’m also humming Yankee Doodle.