Many things remain unfinished where I am from. Connecting roads, most notably, face the villainy of the government cutting funds. Formation of local community initiatives is stymied by bizarre thirsts to quench. The search for identity is crippled by changes in priorities. The pursuit of curiosity is drowned in a sea of cultural and religious limitations. And who would forget the unfinished buildings; ruined derelicts, housing veteran junkies during the day and stray cats at night? The construction of these structures is often halted due to numerous economical factors, from weird inheritance dilemmas to a sudden desire by the owner to "invest this place for a few years and see what happens" (haha).
Tonight, a stray cat wandered too far from such a building and too carelessly in the dark streets of unfinished roads that failed to be completed in over five years. It (the cat) is black with a few white patches around its neck. It lies there in the middle of the street, covered in its thick blood. Its legs kept kicking the cold air in a desperate attempt to follow that genetic code that pushes all living things to survive, before they finally gave in to the sweet, sweet promise of that last goodnight's sleep.
The loud murmurs from the few people that bothered to illuminate the scene with their phones' flashlights tell me that a car ran over the cat. "The driver was speeding," a teenager's voice said. And as I stood by the roadside, soaking wet from the night's drizzle, with the loaf of bread I just bought in one hand and my phone in the other, I was taken aback at both the driver's action and the witnesses' indifference.
Everything moves towards disorder, suggests the second law of thermodynamics. Even the forecasted heat death of the universe, a state of final entropy where all energy is evenly distributed, seems to indicate that things only get exponentially worse. It seems comforting on paper until it dawns on you that everything everywhere will become nothing — from the stardust that turns into planets and passing life, to existence itself, a forgotten nail in the wall of a history no one would ever remember.
It doesn't get any better if we decide to trace back our steps and concern ourselves with only the timeline that matters. Think of the sperm marathon that each of us has raced in our mothers' wombs — gross, I know — the sacrifice millions of sperm made so we could be born, those fights we buried deep in the inaccessible parts of our brains.
We're born, to begin with, with no permission of ours— a concept of permission for which might only exist in the confines of our childish humanity — faced with an unusual reality we know nothing of. Or perhaps we agreed to embark on this journey; accepted the terms and conditions without reading just like we still do today. Then again, even if we surrendered ourselves to this fate, we still have the right to question why we had chosen to do so.
The older we become, the more distant we get from the world around us. That childhood wonder turns into a busy schedule of distractions. Nature becomes a small spectacle to be viewed through our smartphone cameras. Travel becomes the vicarious pleasure of the Instagram feed. Holidays take on the glitz of a dated ad in an old newspaper, sitting on the table like a memento we hold onto long after it is worn out. Our upbringing denies us the simple impulse to take a step back and truly wonder why we're here.
Along the way, we asked silent questions and battled with different frequencies of existential dread. We formed strong bonds with other individuals, people that make this journey bearable; then, abruptly, they, too, die. We even fell in love for the first time at some point. It suddenly clicked. This is what we've been waiting for — this flawless individual who fills the voids we have struggled to understand. Even that, however, eventually turned bitter for many people.
It is chaos all the way. Oftentimes, I wonder if chaos remains an integral tool for the most impeccable storytellers throughout history simply because they recognize to tap into the cosmos' tendency to abstain from monotonicity.
With time, however, we learned to skillfully diminish the absurdity of it all — necessarily recognizing intensities of beauty amidst the rollercoaster ride — but if you breathe deeply enough, when we recognize that repetitions doesn’t equal order, it all rushes back and the pointlessness resurfaces.
This struggle has echoed since the beginning of time, at least since humanity was able to think about it, in the variation of the single question “why" and no one seems to objectively answer it well enough. Many deduced that this search for meaning and harmony is a personal quest. Although it makes sense, it is never sufficient; merely a notion we accepted because we had no better alternative.
Albert Camus famously said: "The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart." This is rather comforting because the higher we climb this impossible mountain — the more terrors we survive, the more cruelty we endure even if it stems from our own doing, and the more rusty, unanswered questions we exacerbate — the more we realize that the answer we sought is not in sight. The more we learn about the universe, the less confident we get about our ability to recognize the answers we seek if we eventually stumble upon them.
Horrible things happen all around the world. Cats get run over. People get kidnapped, raped, molested, abused, trafficked, slaved, and wrongfully persecuted. Every day. Just 64 years ago, there was still an operating human zoo in Brussels, Belgium. And Russia's invasion of Ukraine only added to a long list of the lives that are being lost over demonstrations of power.
Maybe the key to understanding ourselves and the chaotic cosmos is in the very notion that everything happens because everything that happens happens. The struggle toward a better life and the search for more plausible answers — whatever that means for each generation or culture — should fill our hearts with hope. One that can sustain us, no matter what challenges come our way. A hope that reminds us that though we know we must struggle with the dark questions of why we live, we also are given a special vantage point to see the possibilities of how we can better enjoy our brief existence.
Cities shed their skins to give way to civilization. Unfinished buildings eventually get finished or demolished to get repurposed. There are reasons to be optimistic about our fight against climate change, even as global temperatures rise. We need not live a grim existence. It's still confusing and strange — it is still chaos all the way — but these are the cards we're dealt. And for all we know, they may be the only cards there ever were.