The Unsolvable Problem

It feels wrong to say much right now. People hear what they want to hear, and do what they want to do. They want comfort and pleasure and they want to kill each other. They’ll stay that way until they don’t exist anymore, and I don’t have any control over that.

The days are getting shorter. Nights are colder. I’m still here, doing what I always do, for reasons I’m not supposed to figure out. At some point I’ll drink water and eat and sleep to keep doing it.

One of the things I always do is writing. I don’t know why. Time is too short to ask why. I guess I want to make people happy or show them something pretty. Some neurotic “humble” answer like that. Maybe I just want to feel connection with people, the magnetic pull I was never good at finding any other way. Whatever. I just do it and I keep moving.

I don’t need any more than what I have right now. Sometimes I daydream about living in a huge house in California and paying other people to do my work for me. But I’ve met people who have that and they get just as miserable as anybody else anywhere when they’re not doing what they always do. They still get tangled in the fundamental friction of life and blow it the same way I do, worrying themselves insane thinking about the future, falling into uninterrogated selfishness, where fear and anger like to hide.

I don’t know anything, and nobody does. Life is a problem that can’t be solved. A question with no answer. Drill down to the core and that’s all there is. It’s all we have. Ex nihilo. How?

We could easily destroy the unsolvable problem, but that’s the ultimate sin. We shouldn’t do that. If we have any imperative, it’s to keep life going, to stop it from being destroyed. Something turns to nothing constantly. Something came from nothing only once.

It feels like I’m on fire if I don’t try to live, keep facing the problem that can’t be solved. I guess that’s true of everybody, or we wouldn’t have invented drugs.

There are three trillion trees on earth and as far as we will ever know, there are zero anywhere else. Ex nihilo. How?

My mind keeps circling back to the ending of a book I haven’t read in years. Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. I guess because it makes me happy and it’s pretty.

I’ll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful.

I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep.