maybe. mistakes.

there's this thing one reads about so often: causality.

not casualty. no, not death and war.

causality.

the happening of things. nobody really knows how it started. we all pretend to understand how it works. we are all just making it up as we go along.

and by 'making it up' I mean figuring things out however we can. this sometimes involves teachers and textbooks and silly powerpoint presentations. most of the time it involves making mistakes.

I had a good friend once whose motto was 'stuff happens, things occur.'
yep. real profound, don't you think?

there's a rather brilliant webcomic, 1/0, whose title sprang from the premise:

The fact that the universe holds something over nothing, that it prefers to exist, rather than not exist, is fundamentally absurd. No being can ever come to deserve its own birth. 1/0 is a cry out against mere logic and efficiency. Stuff exists. All existence, all truth, cannot be ultimately justified: it can only be described, explained, and enjoyed.
1/0 is illogical. 1/0 is irrational. 1/0 is impossible. 1/0 is transcendentally unfair.
1/0 is true. Deal with it.

I'll hold up a small question at that 'explained' bit. can all this stuff that makes up life really be explained? I mean properly, so there will be no more questions left.

of course not. there will always be questions. why goes on forever. (mostly because ignorance goes so deep)

but to a degree, causality explains the world. it's just a word. it means there are rules.

Douglas Adams:

Anything that happens happens, anything that in happening causes something else to happen causes something else to happen, and anything that in happening causes itself to happen again, happens again. Although not necessarily in chronological order.

ah rules.

if ... then ...

x + y =

etc.

it gives the poster outlines to our understanding of the world, causality does. it hangs the plots of novels up in coherent pieces. it helps us make sense and meaning out of all the weirdness of the universe. it is behind all sciences, philosophies.

the irony is we have such freedom, even without even the vaguest hint of ever escaping the rules.

I mean, if there weren't any rules, we wouldn't be able to mix a little sugar and salt and flour and get homemade bread, would we?

by 'a little' I of course mean some down-to-the-teaspoon measurements that somebody else figured out, long ago, before there were recipes and cookbooks.

how did they figure it out?

mistakes.

maybe your mum told you not to talk to strangers. but it isn't til you meet one and feel sick at the 'let me buy you a drink' coming out of his mouth that you really get it.

maybe.