Consolidate

It starts out as a friendly group activity. You invite a dozen of your friends to go on a night hike up a nearby ridge. It'll be fun and athletic and everyone will have a great time. But it's an hour before the hike was set to begin, and the last person falls out. One has to work the next morning, one's too tired, one's got an injured ankle, others have no reason at all.

So you go it alone.

You pack a bag. Extra sweater, water, flashlight. You go out to your car and begin the drive to the trail head, just a bit agitated about the situation, but determined to make some use of the evening. It will be fun, even if you're all alone.

You park the car and begin hiking, along moonlit paths and past shadow-ridden orchards. It's all a bit spooky, but the flashlight lends it's beam of comfort, and you trek onwards. Up, up the slope, you make random noises to scare off animals and start playing your music. The music that finds comfort in loneliness.

The cold wind bites at your face as you climb higher, looking up to the stars and the full moon, shrouded in thin clouds. As you reach the crest, you turn around and see the whole valley laid out before you - the lights that form the town glimmer, the monotonous red lights flashing from the wind farm, the cloud bank marching in over the distant hillside.

You start to cry. Standing there, on the ridge, you start to cry, the tears freezing as they run down your face, with your comfortably lonely music and the stars and the valley and the full moon and the sound of the brush as it plays in the breeze.

And suddenly it all collides. The past, and the future. Who you were, and who you will be. Where we once were meets where we will be. It has never been like this before. Always it's just been fragments of the past, imaginings of the future, together making you as you are now. But on that ridge, the tears start as you suddenly realize the world.

As you realize yourself.

It's not just that we're incredibly tiny in this universe of ours. It's that we're tiny and alone. Tiny, alone, and incomprehensible. It's said that we can not fully understand others - not without actually being them. We imagine others as a mix of what we have experienced of them, what we expect of them, and how we relate to them. But really the problem is: how can we understand others when we do not understand ourselves? How do we understand others when they don't understand themselves?

And yet, that's not even it. As you stand high on the ridge you contemplate everything, and you come to a realization.

As you start the hike down the ridge, you try and cope with this fullness of self - but you can't. Even as you begin to embrace it, you begin leaking away again until you're back to your fragmented self. And you can't help but start to run. Run not out of fear, and not of a desire to be anywhere sooner, but rather because there is no other option. You are incapable of not running, and you don't truly know why. As you approach the shadows once again, you realize that what people fear is not the dark. It's not the shadows, or monsters. What people fear is life.

You sit in the car, having run all the way back, and stare blankly. What are you to do? Where are you to go when your past, present, and future have collided? You go back to the beginning.

You call your parents.

We're all alone in this world. We barely have the capacity to understand ourselves, let alone others. Too often we find ourselves clinging to friends or lovers as a source of entertainment - assuming them a constant. And when they've finally made their leave of us, we no longer have that rock, that source of comfort and consistency. In the end, there is only one constant: yourself.

As I stood on the ridge, I realized: life is what you make it. All life, not just your own. The world is yours to craft. And all along, humanity has been asking the wrong questions, and thus looking for the wrong answers.

In truth, there is no answer to the meaning of life. But that, you see, is because there's no question to begin with.