Daily Dose: A whole lot of nothing
It seems absurd but for over four weeks, I’ve been here blabbing on and on to no one at all. Though this may suggest the tendency of a madman, I’ve tweeted and squawked, argued and acquiesced, typed feverishly and written neatly on a variety of topics. In the grand opening, I started off with vaginal swabs and rickety, wrinkled hands. Just after I told you why you should quit.
Now when we find ourselves in the sweet, uncomfortable middle bit – that hanging moment when you bite into a creampuff and have not yet reached the cream – it’s coming to this. It’s a lot. It’s a little. It is nothing at all.
Really. It's the puff of the cream. No matter how much I try to convince myself otherwise, nothing is all I’m promising you, all I can promise you, and all anything I’ve written to amounts to.
Look – this is not some hack journalist’s feigned modesty. Instead, it’s the truth that this – all of this, from these words to the chair you sit on to the worries that litter your emotional state to your very identity – is unimportant. It is worthless. It is zip, zilch, nadda.
It is the naked, empty space in between these words and paragraphs.
In a Universe so large and complex, how can we be anything else but insignificant? We are a speck of a speck of a speck, a mere hiccup in an otherwise unbreathing beast. Our lives are troublesome, awkward bores, and if they were to whisk away in an instant, if I were to stop typing this very sentence, not reach its end, just stand up, leave this basement, and do something else entirely, no one, no thing, no body would even care. My editors would be unphased. The world would still dance. The galaxies would keep twirling. And every day, the sun would rise. We are unimportant because we live in a Universe that is so much more important by comparison.
And for that very reason, our insignificance makes us incredibly significant.
It seems contradictory to say, but if our lives are meaningless by virtue of their hilarious accident, then it is up to us to make them meaningful. Nothing else can do that except for our own fingers and legs and brains slogging away against the world, the Sun, the very bubble of the Universe. We must ensure that every day is spent living because the moment it is not, we have faded into the inevitability of everything we have ever known. That is, we become just another pause in a time that is itself paused.
I’m not telling you anything meaningful of course – as I said, this all means nothing by and of itself. But what I’m trying to say, perhaps more than anything else, is that these words do have purpose if I give them one. If I were to guess what that would be, I’d trace my finger along my keyboard to my screen, place it right in the center, and hope you could see me pointing at you, whoever you are and however far away you may be, and you’d know that together, we can survive this whole mess of a thing. All it takes is knowing that we are nothing, and that this nonentity is more than something: it is everything we want to be.
It may seem like nonsense, but that's the point. We need to make sense out of nothing. We owe it to ourselves after a billion of random processes that have climaxed into us - living, breathing, wonderful, little mistakes.
