On the beauty of never fully knowing.

Technically, we are permanently trapped within our own experience of reality.

In Plato’s allegory of the cave, prisoners spend their lives watching shadows move across a wall, mistaking those shadows for the whole of existence. But the cave has an exit. The prisoners can walk outside, and see the source of the shadows.

So where is the outside of a human mind?

Every sight, sound, memory, and thought reaches us through consciousness. When we encounter something unfamiliar, we experience it through a series of limitations set by our bodies, our memories, and the kind of creature we happen to be. We can leave a physical cave, we can’t step outside of our mind.

Thomas Nagel asked, “What is it like to be a bat?” We can imagine being a bat, we have enough scientific knowledge about bats to do so. But this is still a human imagination turning human sensations into the shape of a bat’s life. We don’t discover what it is like for a bat to be a bat.

I will never see nature through the eyes of a butterfly or know what it feels like to breathe underwater. I can be with another person for a lifetime and share grief and joy with them, yet I will never experience the world from their perspective. 

There is a strange loneliness in this. Imagination and empathy can try to overcome the boundaries of the self. We can try to translate each world through science and art but we can never transfer it whole. 

Isn’t it somehow beautiful? This ‘loneliness’ is one of the strangest fascinations of being alive in this vast universe. Each creature has a consciousness through which the universe witnesses itself, and no two are alike. Every mind is mysterious in its own way, temporary, limited, and astonishingly specific.

There is no “outside” available to us, not as an experience. There is no single creature for whom the whole picture could ever appear. That is not a prison, it is part of its intricacy. The universe is too vast to understand through one form of consciousness.

A poem, a painting, a piece of music, or a conversation is an attempt by one universe to reach another. Stay curious about all the forms of light we will never see. 

"To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour."
- William Blake

On cosmic messages, lost purpose, and becoming someone I never expected.

Albert Camus described the absurd as the confrontation between our desperate hunger for meaning and a universe that remains silent in return.

I have always wanted the universe to be there for me.

Not in a religious way. I don’t believe in a higher being watching over me, and I have never imagined an old man in the sky testing or guiding my choices. But I liked believing that the universe was hanging around in the background leaving messages for me to decipher. Cosmic breadcrumbs leading me toward who I was meant to become.

It was a comforting arrangement because it took some of the weight off my shoulders. I didn’t have to know exactly what I was doing. The universe knew.

There was once a version of me who believed that creating things and growing intellectually were the most important purposes a person could have. They weren’t hobbies to her. They were evidence that she was living correctly and the universe was doing everything in its power to keep her that way.

Funnily enough it didn’t make me happy enough to stay.

That was difficult to admit because I had expected this purpose to do everything. It had to give my life meaning, provide an identity, make me interesting, keep me intellectually alive, and ideally turn me into someone I could admire.

But of course, I could never be perfect. Nothing I did was ever enough for me. I had placed so much pressure on that path, to satisfy me, and prove something about who I was that I eventually burned out and moved toward something I expected much less from. I decided low expectations were perfect for me.

And here I am, walking along a path that the person I was ten years ago would barely recognize, feeling lost and unfulfilled, with nothing to feed my soul. Waiting for a miracle from the universe to bring my purpose back. She might be disappointed. I am disappointed sometimes, too. But she was also younger and dramatic.

Lately, I have come to the realisation that it was up to me all along. I can’t alter what happened to my younger self, but I can change what her life means to me. She doesn’t have to be my disappointed judge. She can simply be an earlier draft, earnest, imperfect, and slightly too confident about her purpose in life.

I have started bringing my soul back into the world. I have finally accepted that the universe is not going to help me collect the scattered pieces of myself. Oddly, this no longer feels like abandonment. More like a liberation.

I don’t need to manifest a perfect life or wait for a miracle to point me toward it. I need to behave like someone who still wants to participate in her own existence.

It may not make me as successful as I once hoped to be. Nothing has ever been as successful as I hoped it would be.

But perhaps success isn’t the only reason to bring something into the world. Just write the strange essay at 3:31 AM on a Sunday ‘morning’.