If you know me at all, real life or not, you’ll understand that I have no choice but to be reminded of death pretty much on a daily basis due to my job. They’re passive thoughts at this point, after over a decade, but as time goes on, they seem to become somewhat more relevant (for obvious reasons). I need to concentrate while I work, but my tenure has afforded me the luxury of a pretty sweet autopilotting system that lets me play with ideas inside my head. The hundreds of hours I get to do this per season allow me to poke holes in, and then patch up ideas and theories, over and over until it has given me a strong confidence in my tenets. What it also does is keep me from going insane with boredom, which is why when there’s nothing left to figure out, the thoughts drift towards shores I know they can never reach due to my limits as a human being.

I grew up going to church, and can say although I never took it seriously, let alone behaved, there was a lot of information that fuelled my later, more advanced self. Heaven and Hell were pretty clear-cut concepts at first, but when you’re older, it’s hard to believe you can be sent into a fiery pit of anguish and brutal butt-stuff for all eternity just for sleeping with that person you liked, but not enough to put a ring on their finger. If you can’t bring yourself to believe that one, the whole thing starts to shake a bit. But I like to believe the tradition passed on through my relaxed sect of Christianity and the other religions were onto something, something the people at the time couldn’t properly interpret as seeing, or being showed to them. When you think about heaven and hell, the consequence over subsequent aeons only add up to boredom. I think even an eternal soul would be over it after the first thousands years of ecstasy / agony. There are still only two simple options for the afterlife and those are that it exists, or it does not. It’s either everything, or it is nothing.

So let’s go back 13.5 billion years, to when there was nothing, but everything. Everything, compressed into that perfect sphere, that flawless seed of the Big Bang, when the infinity of potential could fit in the palm of your hand. Then, at absolute moment zero, two things happened: space expanded over time. The forces simultaneously afflicted each other, and so, if everything began, why not everything else? What if instead of one perfect, flawless sphere in that initial nothingness, there was an infinite dimension of them, accounting for every aspect of a multiverse, with their only difference being a 1 instead of a 0 somewhere in their complex code? Every variable in our existence’s history, accounted for, simply to see it play out through to the end. This makes me think of time as less of a line running forward and more like an infinity of lines expanding outward from moment zero in tandem with the expansion of space. The time-sphere would act as a complete record of not all that ever happened, but also all that ever could, then!

So where do we fit in all this? Well, imagine all those bad decisions you made and wonder what life would have been like otherwise. It’s out there, playing out, hard. Go the other way. Think of someone close to you, that your journey would have been much worse without and think of never having met them. Would you have been fine? Maybe. Maybe not. Both are playing out. Every consequence and odd spread out across a sphere of existence that literally takes everything into consideration. Imagine continents on the sphere, made up of massive impacts on the universe, or even our world. Not so far off would be that area of present days where World War II played out the other way, a place where an entirely different history has played out. That far off, odds are your parents never met or were let alone born, so neither would you be, but if there is even an odd, that niche version of you is out there somewhere. Unless, however, we ourselves are numbered and therefore predetermined to ‘occur’ no matter what aka ‘fated’, but that’s an entire post in itself.

Everyone with an answer to the meaning of life usually has a pretty good one and I wonder if the answer itself is simply experience. A true harvesting of every perspective, and that a possible ‘heaven’ is an infinity of all the good times you’ve ever could have had and ‘Hell’ is of the worst, and somewhere in between is you, right now, acting as a fragment of some super-file being compiled with an eternity of reflection at your disposal, if you believe in that sort of thing. To me, this is the only option available to be able to truly ‘rest in peace’ with the books closed and nothing left unsaid or undone. If any of it, then, what would be the point of any of it if you’ll converge anyway with a you who became a billionaire as well as the more common statistics? For me it boils down to, again, competition with oneself. It gives me a drive to be in the one-percent who had the strength and the guts to make those hard decisions, so as not to be ‘that guy’, and to remember him with disdain as we all reflect in the gardens of eternity, or in those final moments before the all-consuming void! While not traditionally faithful by any means, I understand the power of faith thousands feel of the billions who claim to feel it. A purpose can be found in, at the very least, defining not just our existence, but existence itself and I’ve found it most profitable lately betting on everything over nothing.

Thank you for enduring my rambling mess! Be the best you that you can be… just in case!