All at Once

Time is spinning out of control, as if a relentless rogue clock has taken the universe hostage. The timepiece is flaunting its unchecked power by accelerating the passage of days and weeks and months, causing them to rush past in a chaotic blur. Moments fueled by the temporal equivalent of nanoseconds on speed. A year ago I turned nineteen years old; I was thirty-two, nearing my forty-fourth birthday, before midnight a month later. Last week, I watched in horror as my fiftieth year flashed by in the blink of an eye, on the way toward the one-hundredth anniversary of yesterday.

An inverse exponential relationship exists between passion and hopelessness, according to an imaginary graduate student pursuing an advanced degree in pandemonium, with a specialty in bedlam. Obviously, even within the miniscule sliver of knowledge we possess, we have no concept of the intricate, exceptionally complex entanglements that pervade the expanse of time and space we think we understand. When we look at DNA, we think we may see hints of the keys to understanding life, but we see only a microscopic fragment of a beast whose enormity is utterly beyond the comprehension of the brightest minds of all time. Considering how—looking at the size of that fragment and realizing how futile it is to compare its size, side-by-side, with the distance between the center and the outer fringe of the knowable universe—undeniably hard it is to have even an inkling of understanding of EVERYTHING, my tiny little mind melts into a puddle of awe.

Neither science nor religion have any hope of achieving real understanding. The former, at least, seems to be going in the right direction. The latter? Understanding is not part of its core; it is best suited to serving as an imaginary protective shell that attempts to comfort us when we begin to understand the immeasurable enormity of the scope of our blind ignorance.

This flood of incoherent gibberish is a poor, useless, vain attempt to scratch the surface of the vastness of the complexity of all existence. Any attempt at understanding is, at best, a way to fill the void left when Time departed on its way to the other side of forever. Gibberish. Massive confusion. Misfirings of all the synapses of all the fibers of all the nervous systems of all life forms, all at once.

If Time were food, all of us—simultaneously—would starve while combatting layers of fat a thousand light-years thick. Obesity as we know it today would be unimaginably slim and svelte.

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Despite how this post might seem, I am not consuming psychodelia.