Breathe

            I wasn’t there at the beginning.  Many think that I was, but this is only because I’ve been here longer than they can conceptualize.  They think, “If he was here before all of this, he must have been here for the beginning.”  The truth, of course, is that there was no beginning.

            From a logical, rational standpoint, this is unacceptable.  If a thing exists, it must have started.  It must have begun somewhere, somewhen.  I’ve seen what you might call beginnings and endings, but I know this is only the slow breath of the universe, its billions of years of exhaling, its billions of years of inhaling.  What is a blink for some is inconceivable for others.  The fruit fly does not see its life as fleeting; it knows only that time, and therefore that time is eternity.  Unfortunately, you, who can theorize time outside of what you’ve experienced, demand something less simple.  In reality, it could not be more so.

            If you want to know the truth, you have to accept concepts like “forever” and “infinity.”  You have to be comfortable with the idea of “endless,” because those are the things that are also “beginningless.”  You have to know that empty space is never empty and that time, as you consider it, is imaginary.  You have to know that the answers you want are not the answers you need, and the answers you need are impossible.  There is a reason for everything, even if those reasons are unreasonable and everything involves a lot of nothing.

            Can you do that? 

            Then this is what you want to know:

            The universe breathed.  But the universe doesn’t breathe the way you breathe.  It breathes in everything, and it breathes out everything.  Eternity lies in a every cosmic breath.  The last time the universe exhaled, everything was created.  Its breath brings what you see (and what you don’t see) into existence.  And it is still releasing that breath, still bringing new things out of nothing before taking everything back to nothing.  This is how things happen. 

            The universe didn’t plan for you.  It doesn’t recognize you.  It didn’t mean for you to happen just as it didn’t “mean” for anything to happen; there is only what is and what isn’t.  Intention is a falsehood.  You, and everything around you, including your thoughts and your strange notions of purpose and place, are because you could not not be.  It’s as simple as that.  You will cease to be (as you understand cessation) in the same way that everything will cease to be.  Of course, what that really means is that you will never cease to be, but the manner of your being will change.  When the universe breathes in again, when it takes itself into itself, you’ll still be there, even if you won’t know it.  And who’s to say that you won’t be again when it releases that breath?

            I’ve been part of this more times than you could hope to count, since what you might call the first breath.  I know, however, that there is no such as the first breath, nor will there be a last.  There is only the breathing, in and out, only this and nothing more, and if you can find yourself in the nothing, perhaps you might be me someday.