World Views

I watched an ant walk the length of a table the other day. On his way to somewhere to do something, most likely look for food. But there’s no telling what his journey was about. He was just a tiny being, walking in his world, unaware of me or my world. And while I sat in a community of friends listening to music, I wondered about his community of friends. Did they miss him? Would they even know if he never came back?

And I wondered if I was like that ant, blissfully moving around in a world I thought I knew, while a world I never could know swirled around about me. Given what we’ve discovered, as we look further and further down into the world of quantum mechanics and tiny things, it’s unlikely we stand at the top of that realm. Which is why, I guess, we’re looking back and up with the Hubble Space Telescope.

We want to make sense of what we see and answer the question. What is it? But what if we don’t have the language to describe what we see, because perspective counts. I make no sense at all to that ant, even when it touches me. And maybe this is why science fiction appeals to me, and I enjoy books like the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, in which an inexplicable universe has its way with the world, and humans discover they’re not the be all, end all.