The sky, the man and the stars.

Tanmay Viraj
Sep 8, 2018 · 3 min read

Imagine walking across the street, looking through your glasses. The dark blue sky, the unwavering clouds and the sheer satisfaction of watching the birds circle around in wild patterns. Sometimes, such serenity is the only thing one needs in his life. A poor day at work, a bad day at college, whatever it be. A simple stroll in the park can fix it. Most of the times, at least. But more often than not, one is left with a tingling sensation where he feels like he left a little too early. Some evenings are those that you wish lasted forever. But it doesn’t stop there.

Upon deeper thought, one realises that all human emotion can be narrowed down to mere chemical imbalance in your blood and brain. At the elementary level, it is the polarisation, depolarisation and repolarisation of neurons that makes us think and feel. The 'bonds' that people make and associate things with; they are but a result of evolution. These sensations were mere tools that enabled ancient men to live longer. Following this very line of thought, it is simple to understand 'desire' as a state of chemical balance that is just right. And the truth, as Rustin Cohle puts it-

"Everybody has an abscess, everybody knows there’s something wrong with them. They just don’t know what it is. Everybody wants confession, everybody wants some cathartic narrative for it."

And so begins our quest to find the right balance. The perfect 'feeling’. It is the best generalisation of one’s dream. It could be a number of things, if specific. But in the vast, wide eddies of space-time, could it really be our world that is so fortunate to witness the wonderful events that we look forward to?

Enough about humans and their dreams. Let's talk about the Universe's purpose.

According to our current knowledge, it all started with a gigantic expansion in a miniscule amount of time. Inappropriately titled, the Big Bang, it was initially a small, dense point of no dimensions. A state of the lowest possible entropy, or randomness. Now, the second Law of Thermodynamics states that an isolated system will always move towards a state of higher entropy, or randomness, as time moves on.

Based on these few facts, one can interpret the purpose of the Universe as a dying need to maximise it's randomness- to increase its chaos, to disturb it's own peace. So much so, that it would keep expanding until nuclear distances become infinities. The Cosmos will eventually turn into nothingness. The Universe's dream is to slowly wind out of existence, to be forgotten.

So, human emotion is vague and the Universe is self-destructive. Thus, arises the ultimate question:

Why get out of bed in the morning?

And the answer to that question, I haven’t been able to find yet. Sometimes, it’s a football match, or physics or a movie or a book or a song. Sometimes, a person. The reason may vary, but the underlying cause is the same: a distraction. Anything that makes one forget about all the things one thinks of when alone.

Solitude is a brilliant thing, indeed.

Tanmay Viraj

Written by

A farouche dissemination of my post-bedtime, unsolicited thoughts can be found here.

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