Strange: unusual or surprising in a way that is unsettling or hard to understand
That’s the dictionary definition. Which I agree with. So how can it be that I find the strangest thing of all to be everyday life?
The life that you and I are living right now. Me sitting at my laptop in a house in rural south Salem, Oregon, seemingly nothing unusual or surprising anywhere to be seen, and you reading these words wherever you are, which likely also seemingly doesn’t contain anything particularly unusual or surprising.
Because — at least for me, and I’m suggesting that perhaps also for you, at some point in your life — a sensation breaks through my usual view of everyday life that rouses me from my habitual taken-for-granted slumber.
Doesn’t last for long. Hard to put into words. Best I can do is something like this.
This world is freaking strange. Just as it is. Since while the world just is as it is, we humans can picture the world as it isn’t.
I’ll try to explain.
Fourteen billion or so years ago, the universe sprang into being via the big bang. From clouds of cosmic dust, stars and galaxies formed. Now there are between two hundred billion and two trillion galaxies, each containing around 100 billion stars on average.
Earth orbits one of those stars. About four billion years ago life formed on our planet. Yesterday one of those life forms, who is writing this blog post, sat in front of his television and avidly watched two World Cup soccer matches that featured other humans trying to get a ball into a goal.
Now, that is really strange. Not to most people. And not to me most of the time.
But when I allow my imagination to zoom out in space to those hundreds of billions of galaxies, or to return to the Earth prior to life four billion years ago, the fact that I’m able to watch a soccer match, or do anything else for that matter, strikes me as both amazingly unlikely and astoundingly unique in our unimaginably vast and old universe.
Another way to put it is that the strangest thing is that the world doesn’t appear to be strange.
Again, we are so accustomed to the world as it is, that we lose sight of our ability to view the world as it isn’t. With no me and no you, for example. That could easily have been, and definitely was for the countless people who could have lived just as we are now, but didn’t. For every being alive on Earth today necessarily had an unbroken string of ancestors going back all the way to the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all life, LUCA.
There’s no way to know what is going on in galaxies far, far away. I’m willing to bet, though, that there isn’t a World Cup soccer match going on, or a microwave oven heating up a leftover baked potato, or a 77 year old man writing about the strangeness of the world on a MacBook Pro laptop.
All of which occurred in my house recently.
Now, I’m not suggesting that we should spend what remains of our life marveling at the strangeness of the existence that surrounds us, and indeed is us. I’m merely suggesting that if you, like me, occasionally have a sense of everyday life being unusual or surprising, given the context of the vast universe of which we are a teeny-tiny part, this is both normal and healthy.
You don’t need to have ingested a psychedelic to feel that strangeness washing over you, though this definitely can be a shortcut to such an experience. It just takes looking at the world with fresh eyes, not taking for granted ordinary activities and objects.
What is surrounding you right now, and you yourself right now — almost certainly that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the universe. To an alien being, Earth and everything on it would be perceived as astoundingly strange. Enjoy it as such, fellow strange human.
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I can’t say that I’ve felt the world to be strange by Brian’s dictionary definition, although yes, I do appreciate it as being hard to understand. And I wonder why, and when did we begin to form abstract thoughts about life and the universe? Science points to evidence going back some 70,000years of making art, burying the dead with grave goods and ritual, etc., that marked the beginning of our thinking in the abstract.
Not too sure about that, though it is thought that language appeared around that time, and language may have unlocked internal dialogue. Once we could speak outwardly, we may have begun to speak inwardly too. This internal dialogue I find strange and does interest me in the sense that, although forming concepts is a great advantage for us, concepts also form the basis of divisions between humans – and within ourselves.
Nothing wrong with conceptualising, until the desire to formulate reasons for existence, for our existence, breeds the strong tendency to invest life and its happenings with abstract ideas that often deny reality – with all its ensuing conflicts both for ourselves and with other people.
So yes, this aspect of life I do find strange and unsettling. I wonder why we can’t just experience life just as it is. Nothing wrong with trying to improve or change a bad situation, but why do we habitually divide what is with what I ‘believe’ it should be?
There is a myriad of questions about life and the universe that we may never find answers to. Better to admit that we are limited in what we can understand rather than invent otherworldly explanations. Still explore by all means, but not as a reason to pacify our fears and insecurities or to justify who/what we are.
Ron, yes, we humans are complex creatures (compared to other animals) who are skilled both at knowing reality as it is and at imagining how reality could be. The “could be” part is both an asset and a liability. It allows us to creatively envision alternative futures, but it also creates anxiety as we downplay here-and-now in favor of what-could-have-been or what-should-be.
I enjoy both aspects of being human. In this post I liked playing around with some thoughts about what-could-have-been if the universe as a whole had evolved differently, or if life here on Earth had evolved differently. For me, this gives me a deeper appreciation of here-and-now, as what is is so contingent on a wide variety of causes that would have produced a very different future if the causes had been even slightly different.
Like if one of my distant ancestors hadn’t been able to have a child for one reason or another. No child, no chain of ancestry for me as it exists now. So no me. Writing that, I feel a sense of wonder at the fabric of reality, which is being woven out of so many threads that we will never fully understand, even as we marvel at the overall fabric insofar as we can grasp it.
I had this very experience today. What is this? Who am I? What is this universe? Everything around me, the things, the people, me, all of it surpassing strange. And yet the strong conviction that it’s not a dream.