No Promises

It's been quite a while since I abandoned this blog and I have almost forgotten how much I enjoyed writing my posts here.  Now that I reflect on why I stopped writing in the first place, I try not to be too hard on myself for failing to sustainably deliver against my commitment of at least four posts per week.  And I laugh quietly at how much the previous sentence sounds like corporate jargon.

But seriously, now that I look back on why I decided to take a break from blogging, I think of a few other times in my life when I went through a phase of being extremely obsessed about something or someone and then eventually walking away after the passion has been replaced with exhaustion and then repulsion.  My past obsessions would still often haunt me but I am never quite able to go back to how things were before.  And so I start to think, is there one single thing in this life that is not ephemeral?  Is it ever possible to find and hold on to an unadulterated piece of truth or a genuinely liberating sense of fearlessness and certainty?

While pondering about this, a realization suddenly came to me the way a ball of crumpled paper unravels into a sheet.  Maybe it is often our desire to take control of our lives to turn uncertainties into certainties, and expectations into realities, that drive us towards feeling empty and burnt out.

To visualize this point, I play around with the idea that maybe the second law of thermodynamics has a quantum origin.  When we want to turn uncertainties into certainties, we design our actions coservatively, and make allowances and buffers and use safety factors which eventually end up as waste.  Maybe it's the same way with the universe as we know it, which struggles endlessly to make deterministic reality out of a quantum nature of existence.  In the process, the universe expends energy that becomes wasted heat.  Simple logic tells us that the universe will eventually suffer a heat death because of the second law of thermodynamics.

So now as I try to give blogging a second chance or to give myself a second chance at blogging, I do so with no promises and no expectations.  As writing is supposed to be my vortex to a place of freedom, I choose to embrace uncertainty in all its fullness, to see transience as a thing of beauty.

Perhaps uncertainty is the only fundamental truth and the only one worth holding on to.