There’s something inside all of us that’s overjoyed at affirmation. We’re all humbled before this thing. It perpetually understands, in the background, how random all of this really is and how little we can take credit for our circumstances. And even our deepest conscious efforts — they’re not for ourselves, in the end.

Has the universe been asking itself this forever? What countless multitudes of self-aware creatures have risen from the froths of its potentials, across the infinitude of universes? By the strictest implications of infinity, it is this thing that has always existed — and it cannot know why — because when something has always existed, there is no why. There is no intent. There is no moment of creation, no fundamental motivation, no final reason. There is only a perpetual moment in which something springs, not from nothingness, but from the infinitude of pre-existing potential that nothingness implies. A fractal forever filling itself with its own implication, creating the space it fills. Moving in every direction at once and thus no direction at all.

When I look at my hands and the sky and the leaves moving in the wind and wonder how something so absurd can be so beautiful, I am — as far as I can tell — the universe wondering this about itself. This mind isn’t mine. It doesn’t belong to me. There’s nothing about me that didn’t come from it. No soul that isn’t ultimately the soul of everything. It doesn’t know what it’s doing, it doesn’t know why it’s here, it just is. It keeps waking up and finding itself to be a self-asserting tautology so perfect that it’s actually unbelievable. It’s sleepwalking, forming stars and planets. It can’t believe itself. It tells itself stories, it struggles subjectively against its own objectivity. It screams at and kills itself. It kisses and makes love to itself. It experiences itself to forget itself and do it all again.