…in the fall from grace.

Despite life’s irregular and chaotic nature, I’ve searched for something to hold on to throughout my existence. Not quite an anchor to hold me down, but a sail to provide direction.

Recently, I met up with the Fantastic Four, and to the question of what is left on the bucket list, Water said “nothing” in a very reassuring and non-consequential sort of way. Often I feel similarly, but instead with a sense of burned-out dread. Having no more desires sounds like the soul-at-peace’s ideal, yet rings defeatist, surrender-ist, or apathy-ist. Life’s offered hours are too short to accomplish anything substantial yet too long to let that stop you from trying. Then, without a goal towards that anything substantial, are we just aimlessly fighting our battles within the dream space somewhere between Lorelei:s and Rainbow Unicorn:s, of phantoms-of-the-opera:s and godlike Messiah:s, of everyone and no one, battling the self bloody and broken.

“Perhaps God really is the only truly worthy goal after all”, I told Mulan as an answer to none of her questions, but to all of mine. An investment not into life, but into something ethereal. But where is God in a world made by mankind? How could God speak through the words written by humans? How could God manifest in the fantasies and conceptions of the human mind? Would it not be God that adds God to God’s construction?

In some vague form or aether, I have a theory of knowledge. Knowledge is becoming, not quite a god, but like a shooting star over the unreachable heavens led the wise men to the Messiah, it leads to the ultimate truth. For sure, there must be a theory of everything. An ultimate truth, the perfect honest display of how it all fits together. Each of us is a cog in a machinery designed to unravel the fabric of reality. None of us are sufficient, yet it is only through joint knowledge that the veil can be lifted.

Quantum mechanics, mass and energy, molecular structure, cellular regeneration, photosynthesis, the infinite cosmos, platypuses. The all-ensuing math of the universe: irregular in its conformity, structured in the sheer connectivity of the complete picture. Together our knowledge is approaching something grander. Together we learn the face of God.

Maybe this is why I work so much. The reason I spend my insomnia nights reading the dumbed-down popular science articles on topics far too complex for me to comprehend, hoping somewhere that one missing component of the answer reveals itself to me.

Meeting our maker not by submission, but through curiosity.