Questions...

What is it that determines the path a life will take? Are there reasons behind each of our choices, a link that can be made similar to a dot to dot drawing connecting all, both pivotal and not so important, motions that a body will fall through, or is it all completely random? Is it down to fate, or genetics? Does it even matter? Is it true that our choices are what make us who we are – or do we have a soul, and is our soul fixed to our body or are our body’s ephemeral objects that eternal beings such as souls flit in and out of when the time is right? Are the mind and soul two separate things?

Obviously these are some of those unanswerable questions, which makes them that more unavoidable, that you just can’t shake from the back of your mind. They creep upon you when you are too tired to keep them out, or if you are feeling particular sad or down (they never seem to appear when you are feeling a sudden burst of happiness or excitement), and if you are like me, these thoughts always plague you when you look up at the night sky and realise just how tiny our Earth really is.

Such a silly notion, it feels, to think there is a cosmic power that created each individual person and deals in the fates of lives. And what a mundane task that must be. If you have the power to create the universe, or even just one planet, and to masterfully put together beautiful landscapes and create mystifying beasts… why would you spend the rest of your time writing out plans for billions of lives. Maybe it is the mundane nature of it all that stops everybody being happy and keeps some people in a permanent black hole. Or maybe you realised that for one person to be happy, another has to be sad. For somebody to be alive, another has to be dead. To feel guilt there must be the inspiration of that emotion. To feel love, there must be hatred. But how do you make that choice between who shall love and who shall be hated?

I guess we could be looking too far into it all. Maybe there was an ultimate creator who built the planet we all live upon and share. Maybe he created the orb that once was merely nothing but rock and pushed it on its path to greatness. Maybe there wasn’t a plan for life, and life just happened? Or maybe those first few single celled organisms were created and evolution just happened? Or maybe it is a great game, where you put certain plans into motion and then wait and see what evolves?

Who knows, there maybe thousands of planets like ours all created by the same cosmic power – or maybe we are the only one? Who knows? Well I guess God knows, or the Creator knows, if that is what happened but for the sake of argument, who knows? And does it all matter? Why do I let my mind wander over these thoughts and allow the darkness to seep in when I am already feeling blue? It isn’t exactly nice to come to the ultimate conclusion that the universe is just too grand for our planet to unique and special, and too many terrible things happen for there to be an Almighty creator looking down upon us and giving each and every one of us a path to follow that will lead to our eternal glory. I can’t help but be pessimistic, or realistic, as all pessimists like to say, when it comes to my thoughts on the origin of life.

So why do I let the thoughts creep in? Well what else is there to do but think when you are a tree. My 110^th birthday is coming up and I can’t help but let my mind wander…