I think most people encounter this question throughout their lives, and most the time we have an answer. In my case, I think I do know my answer; it’s a question of whether I can accept it.

It is a thought I’ve noticed instinctively for a while, whether it because I have always precariously straddled the ridge between agnostic and spiritual, between faith and doubt. And over and over again, depending on my mood perhaps, or the colour of the sky, I would eventually experience this repeated disillusionment, overcome it, and come to agonize over it again.

Today, I felt the uncertainty all the more pronounced, with crushing humility as details crashed into blindness; and for a moment, I wondered where my amicable confidence came from as I walk in bright daylight. To what degree am I that fool, the one that plays their lives out like they are the star of a show as they sought the greenest pastures and the glory of ideals, ignoring, or simply not seeing at all, the world as it turns, crumbling or growing, simply changing for better and worse? On the fly my mind can’t grasp it because that cavernous unknown simply isn’t streamlined, simplified and reassuring like I would like. I think this is called my paradigm. How broad, accurate, flexible, far-sighted, functional… is it?

This is my telescope through which I see my world, and so I wonder who I am, a member of the human civilization that is said to have lasted only for a 30-second window in earth’s history until present, if it were shrunk into a period of 24 hours—the blink of a giant’s eye—amidst at the very least a trillion of others who had lived and died, are living and dying, and will live and die. To fully appreciate my life and hopefully make a powerful, heartfelt goal for myself, wondering every day how to avoid William James’ existentialist crisis, or whether evolution did occur, or whether there is a God, and whether humans have a soul or free will and whether we will one day go extinct, or what histories of philosophers have wondered about, but myself being not educated in the way of thinking or the accumulation of theories, and wondering who our politicians are, if the political science students on my our floor are some of the more disrespectful people I’ve met so far, and what career I would like to take and what other life goals I want, and what love I would like or if I would ever have a love, or what of the lives of my friends, families and the multitudes of students teeming the university, on a world so severely renovated and arranged by humans to their liking…

And if I were eventually not to concern myself with most of these thoughts, one question does linger: how short-sighted are we and what does it mean to me about how we spend this mysterious, tenuous life of ours during our time on earth? What would I do anyway if I knew the answers to these questions? Where do I draw my strength for faith in something because it is practical, and to take the opportunity to question and wonder?

I think I know my answer: to let myself be recast as the star of this little show in a train of trillions of boxcar shows. But there is a part of me that is yet to accept the fragility of human existence. What am I fighting, after all?