There was once a little child who was unwell. Or it felt like that anyway. Every day, when she woke up, she felt hopeful and cheery as she cautiously climbed out of bed, but as the day would unfold and the buzzing confusion of unpredictability of life took over, things would just come apart at the seams, and by the evening she was in shambles—caught up somewhere between rage, wonder and uncontrollable tears. It wasn’t that anything was wrong in particular, but things were not also right. Try as she might, somehow, she could never put back things the way she imagined, or wanted. And while all she wanted was something permanent and whole, it seemed that every actual experience would escape her grasp. That every day she would try to make sense and meaning, to stabilize and control, but every day, the cruel fingers of entropy would unmake, would render the world jagged and arbitrary and unsafe. And she would not, once again, be at home.

And so the days continued like this-she would try hard to build and maintain her home, and her surroundings, and when she got older, she recognized the daily construction and reconstruction of our self. And every day she would grasp at something eternal for comfort, beyond the reaches of time and chance, a moment in which the spaces are all smoothened out. But the world was weak, and she saw that whatever order she created was hard won and ephemeral, and despite her sense of having conquered it, it would come apart at the seams in time. That whatever she suffused with meaning, she was also draining of it at the same time.

I don’t know what happened to that little girl. I don’t know what will happen to her. Only if I could and she could listen, I would tell her that the cosmos will unfold as it must. That it is true that everything is everything and she (and everyone) is the chaos, that all is quicksand. Maybe she could remain stubbornly aware of the storm, to love it and to keep remembering the stories, to remain connected to the continuous possibility of being without succumbing either to the sadness of impermanence, or forgetting it. And in doing so, perhaps in foregrounding the wonder of our struggles with meaning, she may be free of its grip and be well.

Arjun Jaydev