What came before?
I had a drama teacher that used to ask this question when we began a scene. Before the characters spoke, there was a long history of happenings that paved the way for that moment. On the cosmic scale, I have the same questions.
There's a well supported maxim that every effect has a cause. So what caused everything that is to come into existence? And what came before it?
One idea is that time is really the problem, as in, time is not real. This also means space isn't real, and this also means that nothing is real.
This moment is the first moment. There's something comforting about that thought. I'm sitting here almost a month overdue on a coding project designed to create decentralized encrypted content storage. The deadline is tonight.
I'm so overwhelmed and alone in this endeavor that I almost want to stop. What grand folly motivates me to persevere?
Gravity
So I am really good at being distracted. My distractions follow patterns. This is kinda how I think of gravity. It's like the single most important organizing principle of the universe. I will get distracted.
Einstein described gravity as curvature of space-time, like a bowling ball on a soft bedspread, creating a hyperbolic depression (of course, it would be in 3 dimensions, not a 2D surface. Still, this is a really helpful metaphor for a very complex phenomenon.
We haven't figured out how to mess with gravity. We haven't figured out how to break the laws of thermodynamics. Is that because we're rolling downhill from the start of everything?
Entropy
Things get more complex over time. It takes more information to describe the states of things. Even as I write this, it makes me want to question it. I think about a complex organism like a human. This complex human dies and each cell decays, is eaten, metabolized, merged with microorganisms and soil. Arguably more complex, but also in a way, a simplification.
A black hole sucks in everything around it, and where there was many now there is one. A grand process of decreasing the information. Many complex things now equals one black hole.
There is one theory of everything that involves a perpetual expansion and collapse, and scientists have tried to figure out if the relative density of stuff in the universe is sufficient to bring everything back together or if it will just keep expanding until it cools to a giant wasteland of nothing.
What do I do tonight?
Do I have it in me to gather? To race against the clock against the entropy of complexity? Every problem I solve raises a batch of child problems. The information I'm holding in my head is maxing out my capacity. The gravity of my distraction lures me to watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which my wife has on while I code from the other side of the living room.
Well, actually, I'm not coding, I'm taking a break to write this. But I will go back because at the dawn of everything, something happened, something inevitable, something unstoppable, and possibly repetitive, and definitely glorious.
It's not about me in this scene at all. It's about everything that came before... abstractions of abstractions until it can't be held. But right below it, the simplicity that things are born and things die. Things come apart and they rejoin.
Tonight, I ask them to join.
(cover image: Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash, large dominoes lit internally with warm colors begin to topple from right to left)