What To Make OfThe Mass Of Uncertainty

(I’m writing something every day for #100days. This is post 65/100.)

There’s a description in this week’s New Yorker of the earthquake that will destroy a sizable portion of the Northwest of the US:

Just north of the San Andreas, however, lies another fault line. Known as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest …

The “subduction zone” … refers to a region of the planet where one tectonic plate is sliding underneath (subducting) another. Tectonic plates are those slabs of mantle and crust that, in their epochs-long drift, rearrange the earth’s continents and oceans.

Most of the time, their movement is slow, harmless, and all but undetectable. Occasionally, at the borders where they meet, it is not.

We live in houses, drive on roads, work in office buildings — and we assume all these are stable and lasting.

But they’re not. At least not to the extent we think they are.

They’re temporary. Completely reliant upon, and dwarfed by, the tectonic plates on which they, and we, sit.

And as we are to tectonic plates, tectonic plates are to the planets. And planets are to the solar system. And the solar system is to space.

At some scale, you start to question if you have any value at all when set against the backdrop of the universe.

From this place of ambiguity and uncertainty, we reach for understanding.

We have to resolve for ourselves what happens after we die.

We have to try and fit the concept of an infinite universe into our finite brains.

We have to make a decision about what we believe existed before we did.

We have to come to terms with time that stretches out boundlessly in front and behind us.

We have to reconcile the miracles of the universe — human creation, the speed of light — with our own fallibility and limitations.

To these questions, we search for answers.

And either those answers are unknowable, unexplainable, arbitrary and unimaginably complex.

Or there is God.

And where that road splits, where I have to decide — Is there a higher power here? Is this all for a reason? Is this planned? I feel more at peace with the idea that there is not, it is all for no reason and it’s all unplanned.

I can understand pulling together all this uncertainty into a God, but I can’t bring myself to believe.

I wish I could take all this formless, endless ambiguity and tie it together in a way I can comprehend, but I cannot.

I believe strongly in my right not to believe. Just as strongly as I believe in the rights of others to believe what they do.

But on the question of spirituality. On the question of God.

The answer that makes sense to me is just that there are not any final answers.

There is more that we don’t understand than we do.

And my job is to find the things in my life that are realest to me and treasure them. Because in a world of no answers, there is no guaranteed tomorrow.

I try to make sense of it all by embracing that which is most certain to me.

The rest? I can leave it unbound.