It’s nice when you have hope, but you shouldn’t let the lack of it stand in your way. After all, hope is irrational. The realistic view is to admit you don’t know and move on.

Too much fuss is made about hope. It’s not necessary. All that’s required is the will to move forward, to continue, to keep dealing with things as they come. Hope is passive, another word for waiting, another mode of biding one’s time, procrastinating the inevitable present.

Now is all there ever is. There is no back-story. You weren’t born, you didn’t grow up, and no path brought you here. You woke up and there was now, that’s all, nothing else.

Your memories are the notebooks of an extinct being. Your old photographs are hieroglyphics of a bygone era. They are two-dimensional illusions. There is nothing to extract from them.

I mean, look critically. You live, what, 100-years if you’re extraordinarily fortunate? How old is the universe? How long will it continue? A billion more years? A billion billion?

How can your few, trivial years spent living in the midst of this aeonic drift tell you anything about it’s ultimate nature? You’re like a chimpanzee contemplating Motzart. Not even a chimpanzee. An amoeba.

And the future? Dare we even speak of the future? What gall to stare into its protean depth and imagine some comprehension. Countless probabilities cascading into an incalculable event horizon, quantum states blinking in and out of being with such speed, the mind cannot grasp their intervals.

Why seek to grasp the music of the spheres? Many sailors before you have run upon jagged rocks attempting to divine its source. It is always beyond us. Beyond everything. It continues, oblivious to observation, agnostic of meaning, devoid of hope, complete in every possible way.

The word algorithm comes from a Latin mistranslation of some 9th century Persian guy’s name, coupled with a false relationship to the Greek word “arithmos” meaning “numbers.” Though loosely defined, it generally means a sequence of computations that accomplishes some specific task.

The term algorithm belongs to the world of computer science, but can just as easily describe us. What are we except a sequence of computations accomplishing the feat of our individual existence? What is the food, water and air we consume except data for our algorithm to process? And what are our brains except highly efficient sensory data processors?

Sure, sure, many before me have talked about these parallels. It’s not an accident.

Simply put, we understand new things via comparison to old ones. “Existence” is a very abstract term. It is not an object that can be handled or comprehended with the senses. Things “exist” but one cannot see “existence.” However, this is similar to light, a very common sensory phenomena which, though illuminating everything, cannot be directly seen. In this, we have a simple metaphor and example of what I mean. Light, though invisible, is known to us by its absence – darkness. In the same way, existence is known to us by its absence, through non-existence.

Another way to put this is that we generally advance our understand of things from the concrete to the general. My son, for instance, understood the word “truck” before he understood the concept of “vehicle.” It was only after he learned what a “bus” and a “car” were that he began to see a comprehending pattern in their behavior. But what of a flying vehicle, such as a plane or a helicoptor; does my son think of these things are in the same class as ground vehicles. Are they linked in his mind? Or are the planes just large birds? How is he classifying things?

Of course, this method of classifying things, this ability to move from concrete to abstract, specific to general, and vice-versa; this in itself is an algorithm used by our brains to compute the vast amounts of information bombarding our cerebral cortex.

It’s enough to make one wonder where these algorithms come from. What produces them? Is there some cosmic algorithm from which all others derive their movement? Would this thing be God? Or am I just comparing God to something older and more specific from my memory? Maybe my parents…

The strangeness of the world is that some people are probably offended by the idea that they are just objects in a mind-bogglingly complex computational system, but not by the concept that they are slaves of an omnipotent and infallible God. From my perspective, I cannot discern the difference. What is a “person” after all? Their body? The one that is changing, growing and decaying all the time? Is it their restless, stateless mind, constantly remembering, forgetting and mutating its views? We only know when we compare it to something or use mystical words like the “soul” or the “essence” of a person. But these don’t answer anything and only leave their interpretation to someone else considered more qualified to expound on such lofty conceptions. These mystical interpretations are generally either rationales for solipsistic introversion or theocratic domination. Metaphoric comparison, on the other hand, is something even the dimmest of us can accomplish.

When metaphors are frozen and new comparisons are disallowed, the algorithm of discovery and exploration is arrested. Our purpose is our function and our function is our purpose. There is no difference. Or put another way, different only means non-identical to some degree, it is not an absolute, but a continuum.

Each of us has a guiding star; a principle, a pattern, an obsession that never let’s us down and always squeezes the last bit of juice out of us. I think that star is purpose and it always points you home. Strangely for me, my star has often taken the shape of fear. Wherever I have found something to fear, I have found a doorway leading beyond. And now I get the strangest sense… that my greatest fear is to have none.

All that advice you get about how to make your life better isn’t going to work. Or, maybe it will, but better isn’t really what you want. Not even best when you think about it. Really, deep down, what you’re looking for is perfect. Be honest, aren’t you secretly always looking for some advantage that’s going finally release you from whatever stress or irritation that keeps nagging at you? You’re going to finally get a bigger house and that’ll make things right. You’re going to get some couple’s counseling and that’s going to mend the fence. It’ll be a permanently mended fence. The house will always be just right. You’ll get there if you just stay positive and keep saying yes to the possibility.

That’s one way to go.

But for those who understand how long this game has been going on without resolution, the prospect of spending one’s life following a script written by fools isn’t particularly savory. For those with a taste for the original, you want to break out of this oscillation and move in a straight line. You want the sensation of getting from here to there. Because here isn’t as good, not nearly, as there. If you can just commit yourself to the path, if you could just be more disciplined, you would see the perfection awaiting your rejection of the cycle.

There’s no dishonor in that.

But maybe that’s just another game, played a different way. What if, instead of immersion or rejection, we chose door number three, the true path, the instantaneous alchemy of whatever into whatever you want? Oh man, now we’re getting some where huh? Now we’re talking! If I told you what it was, you would immediately realize you knew it all along but had, somehow, just forgotten it. You would kick yourself.

… but I won’t tell you. No, I thought about it and, really, I can’t see the point.

I don’t want to rob you like that.