Now my philosophical and spiritual beliefs have been very murky these past years, ever since I found myself entangled within a crisis of faith. On one extreme, I do often feel that we live in an uncaring universe, on an ill-regarded planet, orbiting an unremarkable sun. We are victims of chance, the end results of a trillion, trillion, trillion dice rolls, random points along the lines that form the trajectory of the quadrillion, quadrillion particles spewed out from the Big Bang.

On the other hand, I can’t help but believe that there is a benign intelligence sitting behind the holographic illusion that we accept as Reality™, and that each of us is born with some purpose. The purpose need not be pure. It can be ignoble, or mundane. It can be tragic or ridiculous. But we all have paths predestined for us, whether by the Laws of Physics, or the Will of God. (And is there really a meaningful difference between the two?)

On a random Friday night such as this, after drinking one or two too many beers while lounging on the seashore amongst some of the smartest people I know (one of them quipped that there should’ve been a lightning storm floating above us given the amount of brain power concentrated in one place), I can’t help but ponder the age-old question: “What is my purpose?” I don’t know why I am gripped with this mania, believing that I am meant to do something great, or at least something of significant magnitude (good or bad, who’s to say?) Maybe it’s just the fact that my parents and my aunts and my uncles have constantly reiterated this mantra, blindly believing that I was destined for something beyond their ken.

It could all be an illusion.

But what is Reality™ but a highly detailed illusion perpetrated against your sensory organs? How do you know you aren’t sitting in a vat of saline, hooked up to a gigantic supercomputer that is feeding you sensory input. How do you know we don’t actually live in the Matrix?

The fact of the matter is that you don’t, and you can’t know, that there’s no feasible way to find out (unless you happen to work your way out of the Matrix with the help of people on the outside), and we may as well accept what we see, hear, and feel as having some semblance to the universe we live in.

I am a knight-errant searching for some kind of quest. The more impossible, the better. (I am nothing more than Don Quixote tilting at windmills.)

The more I think about it, the more certain I am that I am doomed to live the rest of my (hopefully relatively brief) days in solitude, on a hopeless quest to find the Holy Grail.

Or perhaps I am meant to find the Spear of Longinus, to heal the Wound that Does not Heal