I accept the monotony of the routined life implicitly almost all the time: getting up, dressing up, showering, working, laughing, playing, teasing, eating, drinking, yelling, reading, sleeping. And then to repeat that refrain, repeat that refrain, till it would seem silly not to. But, all of sudden, at the heightened numbness of any peripheral sense apart from those familiar gerunds that constitute life as I know it, when all seems regular and commonplace, I do something simple, like cut my nails for instance, and the whole prosaic world and its happenings become engulfed in inapprehensible wonder.
These nails! How perfectly construed? What if they weren’t there? Can you imagine long nail-less stumps for digits? How grotesque and unimaginable. How came it to be so? How came I to be so? What am I doing here, breathing, with a history a life, and who are all these people around me. What gives me thought and a mind so curious and introspective to even contemplate such extraordinary wonder?
These unfathomable wonders of life and our tiny presence in it is so baffling and indescribably awesome, that it seems like our traces through life and our every waking hour should be spent unraveling this mystery of mysteries–for, every mystery in earth is contained within this one encompassing mystery. Who killed John Peters with the saltwater reel? Well, why does John Peter deserve life in the first place? Who gave him life, worry later who took it away? Where are my ill-forsaken keys, how I wonder!? Where could they have mysteriously been deposited? I have looked in every crevice of this house; I have turned over the furniture in every possible direction, every corner of space has been looked after; the chain of events leading from its possession to its uncanny disappearance have been measured and vivisected to every possible degree and circumstance, and yet still, no keys!
How pitiful and irrelevant such a care, when juxtaposed to such a care of cares! How collogued time with space to form such an elaborate grid of life, for which we may lose our keys in some coordinate yet unsearched. The laws of nature, as we may think we know it, are such that a pair of keys cannot be vaporized into nothingness without a cause. The immutable laws, as we may think we know it, assert with virulence that something must occupy space, and the keys therefore, in the finite space of this earth, must exist somewhere.
Yet on further contemplation on such trivialities, I wonder, our existence on earth was accepted in all its mystery and wonder without question — breaking the laws of nature, as we know it. The heavenly bodies, the sun of incalculable magnificence and in whose existence we are all indebted to, exists and is so positioned without question. Even our eyes suddenly retain the memory of life, and we are introduced to a mother a father and we slowly accept this as life — but isn’t it a wonder beyond measure? A wonder that breaks the logic-machine of natural law but we accept this most central awe implicitly, yet the other laws of nature we claim will never bend. If it started with an immense bend of law unwritten, and isn’t the whole container of life supernatural in itself? And, if so, why do we not accept the things within to be capable of the supernatural? It seems preposterous. Superman can exist! Magic is never a farce. The feeding of five thousand with five loaves and two fishes cannot at all seem unreasonable! Neither, the escape of death onto resurrection, or the walking on of water.
To return to the keys, if someone were to say, “perhaps the keys have sprouted wings of such unprecedented proportion that it has escaped the envious grasp of earthly gravity and is now floating through space and time into galaxies yet unknown to us”, such a position, considering the implausibility of happenstance that has created what we know of as life and life has created the keys, isn’t it at all possible?