The Seed

I do not believe that anything is random. The word itself is an imaginary definition. It describes something that has no affiliation to anything else, something entirely removed from cause, something like an island in the stream of time, but floating on top of the current. The closest approximation to a definition of randomness is an intergalactic alien interrupting my breakfast to hand me a trinket on a holiday it celebrates in another dimension. But even this is not random- it is pulled from a pool of possibilities that I have imagined and articulated.

In 1824 Nicolas Carnot expounded on an engineering conundrum. In developing an engine, he was faced with the common challenge of exchanging as much energy for work as possible. An engine which is fueled with copious amounts of gasoline but coughs out fumes and only moves a car slowly is therefore very inefficient. However, he realized the concept of perfect efficiency is impossible. No amount of energy can be exchanged for work without losses to heat, and this principle tore a rift in the previously perfectly symmetrical universe. Time only moves in one direction, since we engines can never return to past states of being.

Every thing builds on another. In a sense, it is impossible to erase an experience- even forgetting things do not eradicate them. There is no one alive today who can remember Mozart, but many remember what his music sounds like or portraits of his face look like, and in a sense it is irrelevant whether Mozart the man really ever existed. He is a giant and infinite stack of experiences added to time, just like everyone else before and after him.

There is a quite a detailed game plan to this universe, with many imaginary X's and O's drawn out on a cosmic chalkboard. None of us really have minds large enough to see the entire thing at once, but we can see the edges of our own chalkdust, and with good faith, we can imagine the larger letters we form. I'm not talking about a master plan devised by God, or really any single thing. I mean that there is an enormous equation, and it is unfolding in one direction, always adding the past.

Anyways, my intentions are not a culmination not only of weeks and years, but an entire lifetime, and abstractly, the lives before me. When people ask me why I want to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, I don't say any of these sentences. I usually have something wry to say. But if you really want to know, I really could not even tell you. I would have to hand you my lifetime, and let you sort through it.

But seriously, there's a reason. Sometimes I recite Thoreau's words:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

We are fleeting particles on this world, that only get to kick it briefly with other particles. If we don't understand our present particle-ness, then we may quickly be fused into a larger and different compound that does not even resemble what we once were. I want to understand this universe firsthand before I have it handed to me by someone else.