Another Coffee for Your Soul

Where did this all come from? Are we really supposed to believe that some fish-lookin' creature crawled from the primordial muck aeons ago and then, through a process of freakish happenstance, transormed itself into an even more bizarre creature capable of creating all of this? Cars, planes, skyscrapers, bridges, McDonald's, Starbuck's... But really, what's the point? Makes you wonder at least. 'Give us a reason!' they screamed into the sky. And tell me it's more than just being born, stumbling blindly through life, and dying, having hopefully, at some point, been successful enough to pass on those fickle codifiers of your existence, genes. Cosmically speaking though, it leaves us feeling pretty damn insignificant. Even those who change the world, in the grand scheme of things, are just blips beneath the surface. Life goes on. The world goes on. The universe goes on. But our lives, our worlds, our universes... don't. Change the world or no, we're all still bound for that silver tea tray in the sky. How's that for squashing ambition. 'I'm gonna change the world!' 'Yeah, but it won't mean a thing.' Maybe it's better to save the world. Then, even if you're not remembered, there'll at least be people left to forget you. Oh please don't forget me. I'm gonna write my name in the sky. Hundred foot tall letters to tell the world that I... I was significant.

Ever wonder what ants have to say about us? Or cats? Or birds? Probably that we're quite significant, but we can't fly. Same maybe as we think of elephants, or whales, or dinosaurs. But they haven't created this faux existence. Why's that? Is it solely because of the lack of an opposable thumb? Was that the fluke that instigated all this madness? Arguably. But it could also be claimed to be the capacity for language. Or maybe both simultaneously. Or one leading to the other over millions of years. And my head's spinning. Think of it, philosophize all you want, but it never becomes much clearer. How'd it all begin? When will it end? Can you comprehend infinity? Where do we fit in? How'd we begin? Are there others? The chicken or the egg? Well... that's easy. The egg. Obviously. An egg laid by something almost, but not entirely, like a chicken, and when it hatched, having cosmetically altered that last genetic hiccough et, voila, the first chicken.

Call me a liar, and that much at least is true. But it's only because the truth scares me. The truth that we're all composites in some minority of the universe's matter loosely clinging to our own conglomerate spinning rapidly around some enormous nuclear reactor and yet we don't even know who we are. Why am I here? Why am I granted a possible seventy or eighty years amidst all of this? Thrown headlong into a world I've had no part in shaping and told, quite simply, live. But what else? What else is it that I'm here for? And what's that answer everyone's been going on about, but no-one's found? And maybe most importantly, how am I aware enough of 'self' to question all of this? Maybe it doesn't matter.

Maybe it's enough that I do.