In The Abode Of An Elder Geek...
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| Deep Thoughts In The Den |
What is it about the quiet late hours that make the mind travel through existential space? Somehow, I find that words fall out of the word tornado at the center of my inner world in an order all their own in these "wee hours."
Maybe it's because the world seems smaller when you can see and hear less of it. Maybe it's the quantum entanglement of a collective subconscious quieting the world with a traveling wave of sleep that rhythmically sweeps the globe, a ripple through an ocean of billions of minds. Maybe we're just one of the dreams in that liminal space before we fall under the wave ourselves. The last leaf on the ground under the tree of this corner of humanity before the wind carries us away.
Maybe being a dream is why poetry comes to me, or artistic inspiration to draw, just as others are inspired to sculpt air into beautiful sounds that dance in our ears, or sometimes in our bones.
Still, like any question, it boils down through a thick onion of layers of "why." Why do we exist at all? Are we random chance? Intelligent design? Some alien-tweaked conglomeration of both, as twisted a plot as any writer could hope for? If the World (I prefer universe, but this is our corner of it, I suppose) is a stage, who then is the audience? What is the play about? Who wrote it, or was it the gas-lit dreams of a hundred cosmic monkeys that finally wrote Shakespeare, and didn't know enough to stop in the end?
Then the final "why" drops, and falls into the black hole at the bottom; "How do we matter?"
The Piscean dreams of the Piscean age shove this question aside by throwing it upon the shoulders of a god or gods who are an endless array of surrogate parents. I don't think that humanity can believe that it needs to answer to itself. If we're the children of God(s), it implies that we must someday grow up.
Philosophers have argued this argument, debated this debate, and thrown up their hands for unsated curiosity since as long as humanity has had any collective memory of any kind. That last question can never be settled for the collective whole of living humanity.
Astrology seeks to know as much as it can of the onion through reading the shape of its many layers, and so does Tarot. These are wonderful pursuits, for they occupy our minds in the vacuum of a non-present answer. They help to out-loud the relentless ticking of the wheels and gears of our perception of linear and finite time.
So does watching TV, learning a language or musical instrument, working, or any other possible human endeavor. They're wonderful distractions to amuse us while we wait for the vaudevillian "curtain fall."
Does it matter if we love, and whether that love is requited, consummated, lasting, or short? Does it matter if we become parents, or grandparents? Does beauty matter? Finesse? Anything?
This is where adulting gets hard. Remember that "children of god(s)" thing? We have to grow the eff up and answer the damn question for ourselves, before the end of our own little stage play. Neither cosmic "dad" nor "mom" are going to come down from on high handing out cotton candy answers.
We have to, each and every one of us, answer the damn question for ourselves. We each have to *choose* whether we or anything else matter. At least if we're going to have our own answer. The only other option is to let go of the question. It's like letting go of the rope holding us from falling through the event horizon of oblivion, isn't it?
No ancient book, no dead philosopher, nor any living philosopher, can give us "the" answer to whether we matter or not. They can only give us the answer that they chose.
So I'm going to choose, for me, myself, and I. I have nothing else, and I don't feel like letting go of any rope right now.
I choose love and beauty, because they matter to me, and they'll do my part of making the world hopefully a little nicer for those around me while I'm here, and for however long they might remember me after the wind has swept the branches and the ground at the end of Autumn.
AquarianM
By: Daniel A. Stafford
(C) 02-15-2026 (Written 100% by human hands, AI-Free)