Heartbeat

Much like a classic CPU has a tiny piece of quartz, its “clock”, vibrating billions of times every second, telling it when it should advance to its next operation, the Universe itself has a heartbeat. 10⁴³ times, every second – it beats – letting every particle inside itself know that it should advance, that it should move on to its next instruction, to its next little – but significant – step. If even one of these steps is taken differently, the whole outcome of reality is changed. One step is as important as a hundred, a hundred steps are as important as a thousand, and a thousand steps are as important as all the steps that have come before and that will ever come after.

Why do we keep going forward? Why do we – despite the feeling of impending doom that we all start feeling around the age of twenty – keep going until nature eventually takes its course? Many of us do, anyway. There are those who manage to escape time. Those who have suffered more in sixteen years than others have in eighty. Those who de-synchronize their heartbeat from the Universe’s – as the Universe’s relentlessly keeps going, ticking tredecillions of times every second, theirs abruptly stops. Many believe those people deserve their fate; that they are “messed up”. That their mental health somehow makes them weaker. I like to think that those people have simply served their sentence in a shorter time than others. This is our hell. We have to push through it with all our strength – with all our might – but, at some point, our strength is bound to run out. Some people have less strength than others, and that’s okay. Those deemed weaker should not envy the stronger ones, for their sentence is far prolonged. Those deemed stronger should not envy the weaker ones, for their sentence is acutely painful. Those of us who de-synchronize; those of us who leave this reality, in hopes of silence – in hopes of finally being left alone – those are the warmest people. They know how it feels to not feel. They know how it feels to be both numb and in pain. So they help other people not fall in the same deep dark ocean that they are in. An ocean so deep most people never manage to reach the surface. An ocean so dark it makes the people swimming in it not see how close the surface actually is – so they give up. An ocean so wide, most people today have at least come in contact with it. And the ocean’s name is Depression.

Our species has been battling this ocean for millenia, and we have yet to come up with a solution for it. We’ve cracked faster than light travel, we’ve cracked quantum mechanics, we’ve invented and reinvented things our ancestors would have never dreamt of – yet we are still battling the same monster as they were, thousands of years ago. How is that possible? There must be something innately human about it, something so deeply personal to each one of us that it manages to convince us that we are worthless, yet so general that it affects all of us.

As for me, as I’m writing this note, I am living on borrowed strength. It is time for me to de-synchronize. May the next tick of the Universe find you in good health, fellow human.

– Notes of a Traveler, 2637 Anno Domini.