Built for Questions We Cannot Answer

What mystifies me most is consciousness.

Not intelligence. Not memory. Not even love, though love is a magnificent puzzle.

It is the astonishing fact that there is an inside to being alive.

Light hits the retina, neurons fire, chemicals move, electrical signals race through wet tissue, and somehow there is blue. There is the smell of rain. There is embarrassment. There is longing. There is the private sensation of being you, looking out through one particular pair of eyes at a universe that existed for billions of years before you arrived.

We can describe a great deal about what the brain does. But why any of it should feel like something remains deeply strange.

And then there is a second mystery tucked inside the first: why we care so much.

We are temporary creatures in a universe of absurd scale, yet someone failing to call can ruin an afternoon. Losing a pet can break our hearts. We will cross continents to sit beside someone we love. We save photographs. We plant trees we may never sit beneath. We worry about people who haven’t been born yet.

From one angle, this is ridiculous.

From another, it may be the most important thing about us.

I am mystified by how humans can know perfectly well that life is temporary and still live as though permanence were the default setting. We accumulate grudges. Postpone tenderness. Fuss over things that will vanish. Then a death, an illness, a sunset, or a bighorn ram standing silently on a trail suddenly tears a hole in the ordinary world, and for a moment we see it:

None of this was guaranteed.

Perhaps that is what wonder really is. Not ignorance, but the brief collapse of familiarity.

A rock becomes astonishing because there is something rather than nothing. A hand becomes astonishing because it will not always be there to hold. Morning light becomes astonishing because we have been given one more morning to see it.

And beneath all of that is the mystery I can’t get around:

Why does the universe produce creatures capable of noticing the universe?

For billions of years, stars burned without anyone naming them. Then matter arranged itself into eyes, nervous systems, memory, language. Eventually a little piece of the cosmos looked upward and said, What the hell is all this?

That is wonderfully strange.

Maybe life is the universe being curious about itself.

Or maybe that’s just a beautiful story consciousness tells itself while sitting on a small planet, drinking coffee and trying to make sense of Sunday.

Kim