Life on this planet is strange, ungainly even. It’s like watching a toddler take their first steps. It seems, on the surface, random in its advance, sheer luck that it doesn’t fall, though to every chaos an order and to every order a chaos. It’s popcorn evolution, the kernels wild and unpredictable as they puff out from incomprehensible seeds, time, space and energy creating bursts of progress or regress which can be done or undone by events seemingly insignificant and the proverbial dominoes that fall afterwards aftershocks of a sort.

Most of us get buried in the avalanche, are crushed by it, are entombed, though some of us can catch a glimpse and perhaps snatch the notion of a grander scheme should they survive the sinister shifting. They can see the cogs of some great machine grinding away through the years in their millions, their billions, and a flash of understanding like sunlight and clear skies in the eye of a hurricane strikes them with a surreal sense of, for lack of a better term, ‘what the fuck’.

It’s seeing some lady obsessed with maintaining a perfect lawn raking leaves at midnight, a miner’s hard hat complete with flashlight strapped to her head, the rattle of tines and the grinding of landscaping stones as she gathers the withered fruits of Fall into neat little piles. It’s blue gloves and cleaning products, a pristinely white bucket and a Mr. Clean mask, as a man who sanitizes his hands a hundred times a day scrubs what’s already clean. It’s the stock market trader staring at caged numbers in a high rise office, blind to the city lights that sparkle like a galaxy’s worth of fallen stars from horizon to horizon far below outside his window, his tie loose and his jacket slung over a leather highback chair, his mind full of the calculations of calculations which were begotten, born, by other calculations of calculations.

Some people chase money, others chase their tails, still others chase the elusive specter of an unattainable perfection, a perfection that has been the primary goal of life since the dawn of life’s time, since the magma cooled and the violent quaking stilled, since liquid water and air and the first lands to rise from freshly born seas existed and proffered bands of barren rock and lifeless dirt to denizens of carbon rich depths.

In the end, it could be said, the face of the world is a hidden thing, masked and coy and as dangerous as a playful panther with tail atwitch as it prepares to pounce. There wasn’t a mirror, a camera or a pair of eyes in existence that could truly capture that ancient face, nor appreciate, enumerate, the enormity of its complexity or capriciousness.

You just live with what is, as an individual, and you try to survive. The true meaning of life can be found in the sum of a simple equation: adapt or die. Either A is greater than D…or it isn’t.