Death is change is the nature of everything.

Part of my problem is that I deal with everyday personal stress and drama by letting go and releasing my mind into contemplation of the All of Everything...backing perspective outward and outward until we are ants scuttling in an unending sandhill that scatters into stars and seas and the silence of dark and space. It inundates my conscious mind with images of poetic nuance that shape the words that leave my mouth and fall like dead leaves to the wayside. People say that winter is the season of death but that is incorrect. Winter is the season of neutrality, of being dead. Of waiting, of hiding, of limbo. Fall is the season of death, of dying, of corpse grey and slow rotting. Plants die as do hopes and dreams, but so do fears and lacks and lies. Death brings change to the things that can no longer support themselves. Slowly the living wood on our outermost consciousness either hardens to heartwood and becomes part of our foundation or it peels and rots away. Negativity gives way to positivity which reframes extant negativity which peels away to reveal new positivity...into infinity.

There is no such thing as Good and Evil out in the vacuum of space, any more than in the sparks of neurons reaching action potentials and firing away. All morality and all language is an illusion of discrete perspective created in order to give a single consciousness a method of processing sensory input with a widely applicable range. We want to extend the line on our graphs, we want to predict what will happen so that we are less afraid and alone. We want to understand the emotional longings that we call loneliness at all. We want to be a part of something, to feel like this enormous universe, this complex interlocking constantly shifting state of existence is personally relevant, that it is within our ability to control, to regulate, to bend to our particular personality and taste. No grain of sand is too insignificant, no distant star is too irrelevant, because we are all minute particles in the endless sandstorm of universal birth, growth, decay, and death. One day there will be no evidence left to show that human beings ever existed. One day every speck of matter from our solar system will have transformed utterly into something unrecognizably different. That has not happened yet, but it is as inevitable as the illusory passing of time as measured by, once again, our infinite desire to codify the cycles of change around us into something recognizable, predictable, and ultimately answerable.

We learn to ask questions so that we get answers. We feel pain and therefore comfort, we feel alone and therefore we belong. We see beauty and want to set it in stone, forgetting that stone itself will crumble, and that beauty is something in constant flux. It is an ideal that can never be actualized into something concrete because there is no right answer. Beauty is something to strive for in one's own mind, something to interpret. It's not something worth pandering to others, because it's not something that can ever be truly achieved. Emotions color our interpretations of beauty; the more we get to know people the more beautiful we sometimes find them, even glossing over physical things that we normally find unattractive. If nothing else this means that although we can see a perfect stranger and appreciate their appearance, true beauty is always something which runs deeper than simple physicality because our own needs and desires are far beyond that. And beauty is nothing more than our projections of desire. Just like everything else.

Part of our interpretation of the universe is expression of, projection of, and derivative from our desires. Collective and singular. We build instruments to prove neutrality is possible and to isolate unbiased truths, forgetting that everything that ever was simply IS and our interpretations are what color and bias things in the first place. Light travels at its own speed. "Where there are physicists there are oversimplified simulations. If they can build a simplified simulation, you are not in the simplest possible universe. If they can't, you are not in the most complex possible universe." Does this negate the importance of such work? Of course not. It's intrinsic; it's the most important thing we CAN do. But only because what we want is to take control, to call shotgun and ultimately get our universal driver's license instead of being stuck in the backseat craning our necks trying to figure all this stuff out.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that some days I like just riding along in the backseat.