The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.

The theme emerging from my notes for this project is quite clear. It has been developing under my nose for a few years, but I did not become aware of the developing thread until recently, when I found an article pondering the concept of nothingness. I made the connection even before I read its contents.

Since realizing its existence, thinking about it has always generated a simple conclusion: Death is scary. But, over the last few years the abject fear has evolved into something more useful — call it a thought process, a pathway, or guiding principle. It still scares the shit out of me, but I’ve become more comfortable with the idea that in the future I will consider life from a different perspective, which perhaps means my conception of its end could mature.

Why do we have such fixed ideas about existence, anyway? It was only a few hundred years ago that EVERYONE (not just the crazies) thought the earth was flat and the sun revolved around this planet, so how can we be so sure of what we perceive now?

Even if we take into consideration everything we now believe to “know” about the universe, we could only conclude that our significance is as infinitesimal as the atom is to us. And if this is so, from where does the fear originate? I don’t truly know for sure what will happen to me over the timespan of a day, yet I manage to overcome that doubt to fold the sheets every morning. If our physics is correct, my presence here will be even shorter than one day is to my lifespan, so obviously duration is not the origin of the dreadful void that worries me.

Maybe as we age we are more comfortable with the end because we tire of the constant inputs. Or, perhaps we just stop caring about the meaning of this thing we perceive and the ways we can define it. I don’t really know, time will only tell for sure.