Blind Bats
What. The. Fuck.
It suddenly hit me.
It was one of those mild sunny summer days in Northern California. I had my head perched half out the car window like a happy dog, inhaling the sweet botanical breeze when I came to the idiotically simple yet groundbreaking realization that I EXIST.
You know things. Or at least you think you know them, but they are just words, memorized phrases. The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, be kind, vegetables are healthy, blah, blah blah… But you only really know things when you feel them, and that type of knowledge is momentous. It’s either a heavy clicking into place of boulder-sized Rubik’s Cube pieces or a violent knock to the head; an earthquake so powerful, yet perfectly timed that it knocks you into another dimension with nary a scratch. That’s kind of what it felt like when I realized I EXIST, THE WORLD EXISTS, and I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.
You think life doesn’t matter? You think you can be bored? Excuse me, but we have no idea how we even got here, how there even is a “here” to get to. And you think that existence is just dead matter? When the sheer mystery of everything is staring you in the face ever millisecond of every second and we have no choice to accept the fact that we are completely blind, helpless creatures forced out of the womb and into suffering, choice, pleasure, and a fully formed earth. Why is it this way? Why is the ocean made of water? Where did time come from?
I was suddenly two years old again - except the newness of things didn’t fill me with joy - but rather an awestruck terror of the largeness of things. It’s not just that there is infinity, but that there is specificity. There are many trees, but that one has thirteen leaves on that branch and one of the leaves is yellow with a blue vein running of kilter on its left side and it looks like the blue vein running diagonally across my left wrist. And my name is Simone and I have a family, and when I blink my eyes close, and moss feels dry yet squishy, and praying makes my whole body tingle, and when I feel things are truly true I believe that makes them a part of this objective thing called TRUTH. The weight of it all strikes me and I think: none of this is inconsequential. I was entrusted with this life, soul, and body, and it all feels like a test I haven’t prepared for (or maybe somehow I have), and I just have to take it. There is no escape but death and even that vanishing act is a total mystery because maybe it’s not even an escape after all but a further deepening into whatever this is.
But right about now is when the voice of my pesky inner atheist starts poking into my brain saying “why do you assume intention to the universe?” And then I reply saying, “how can you not?” For mindless evolution to be the only truth (and even truth becomes a nebulous concept under this assumption), is absurd. And where did consciousness come from? It feels like it was bestowed upon us. How are we even an “us?” Separated by bodies yet somehow united by these things we call place and time - impenetrable realities that also define our existence.
And then when I clean myself of all assumptions, of all ordinary-making thoughts of the inevitability of things being this way and not that way, I am left with the bare obviousness of our predicament. We were born, we will die, and this thing we do in-between is temporary and therefore urgent.
And then I realize there is something on the back of my head: a knot. And when I pick apart at it, I realize I have a blindfold on, and that the scientific assumptions of complete knowledge and dead matter, the myths of progress and modernity, the smug certainty of my culture’s stories about the awfulness of the past, slowly fall away. Underneath my blindfold, the skin is pink and raw. My eyes are covered with a cloudy film. But I can see that things are different even if I can’t make out their shapes. I am still functionally blind, a body and mind trapped in time and space, helpless and weak, and painfully dumb. But now at least I know there is something out there, watching me maybe, aware of me and you and everything else. And I pray and hope and intuit that maybe just maybe, our blindness has purpose, and our ancestors in their ancient spiritual humility understood this much better than us. They took other realms seriously in a way we often dismiss… but when you are finally struck with a brick to the head by the true mystery of existence and you can no longer look away, you will finally be smart enough to realize how stupid you were. And there is nothing you can do except surrender to it.
