Conditions that are observed in the universe must allow the observer to exist.- Weak Anthropic Principle
He was in a jungle when he noticed the blood streaming down his arm. There wasn’t pain, just confusion, heat and the pulsing drive to reach down and grab his friend who had fallen to the ground. The world was moving too fast…then it slowed down like syrup left in the refrigerator. Years later his kid would ask what that shiny mark on his arm was where it looked like the skin had melted into living dark glass. But right then, a cosmogonal decision was made. He was going to live while his friend was going to die. The Universe had come to that conclusion while once again leaving us completely out of the loop. Maybe, in some other reality, I was never born. The bullet that in this world had turned human skin into liquid had traveled closer to this soldier’s heart than just his arm and I no longer exist.
Life’s a bitch, and then you die providing no comfort for those who question why.
The first time I was confronted with what death truly meant I was eating a tuna fish sandwich. Mind you, it was one ecstasy inducing tuna fish sandwich made on toasted wheat bread that felt like Ritz crackers in your mouth. This was summer break, back when summer break meant watching G.I. Joe and the Super friends in the morning and then riding your bike as far as rules would allow until the sun left us all alone in the pre-haze of darkness. This was when innocence held me through day time imagination…a dream that was broken when my mom hung up the phone and sat down on the chair in front of me. Her eyes looked almost afraid, which for anyone who knew my mom is a look seen once in a life time. “I need to talk to you…could you sit down next to me?” I was seven years old but knew enough to be afraid too. That was when I was told a story about how my best friend had been crossing the street with his younger brother…a street we had run across many times before…when a car came out of nowhere and hit him, then sped away. He was taken by Life Flight to the hospital but died on the way. They never found that car…I guess I never stopped looking.
“When people go, why do they go? Why don’t you choose me?” - John Legend “Show Me”
Aristotle wrote, “Nature adapts the organ to the function, and not the function to the organ”. One could say his stance was one of Teleology, believing in a purpose for human creations. If this is the case, then why am I here? Why are you here? What is your purpose, or do you believe that things simply happen chaotically and there is no rhyme or reason to any of it at all.
However, you do have a purpose, don’t you? You feel it as the motivator waking you up in the morning, causing you to go to school, to search for friends, to have sex and to eat. You feel hints of it upon logging into a forum with the hopes of finding like minded individuals being present who also felt they had a purpose stronger than simply the act of being. It pushes you to do something…more than simply following in line. Or is that drive an illusion…a state of insanity held by those who have the audacity to think they are more than average or that their lives even matter?
In the balance of right and wrong, up and down, left and right, the art is in the fact that the opposite even exists.