The End of the World Running Club

by Adrian J. Walker

I believe what I believe to make life less terrifying. That’s all beliefs are; stories we tell ourselves to stop being afraid. Beliefs have very little to do with the truth.

I loved my wife and I loved my kids, but that doesn’t mean to say I had to be happy about it. For me, then at least, being a husband and father meant being simultaneously exhausted and terrified. I was like a man on a cliff-edge, nodding off.

I used to dread being asked whether or not I believed in God. Either answer aligns you with an entirely new set of certainties. Say ‘yes’ and you’re certain of a myth, you say ‘God bless you’ and mean it quite literally, you commit to a wild insanity of faith. Say ‘no’ and you’re an atheist: confident, assured and certain of the scientific method and all of its own twisted ideas – string theory, infinite universes, emergent consciousness – equally strange, equally alien, each requiring its own version of that insane faith. I know now that it’s certainty itself I have a problem with. Certainty doesn’t feel like something we’re supposed to have.

We’re not really supposed to be on our own Ed, we’re not built for it. Spend too much time running away from reality and that’s exactly where you get.’

I felt like a child. I was a child; I am a child. Because we don’t grow up; we grow over, like weeds over new grass.