The Maze and the Flame

To dabble in the unknown—this is our oldest hunger. To poke the sleeping beast with a stick. To skip stones into the abyss and pretend we aren’t waiting for an echo. Why? Because the alternative is to sit still, to accept the script handed to us at birth: Wake. Work. Sleep. Repeat. But humans are terrible actors. We ad-lib. We burn the script.

We invented reversible time because we are children who cannot bear to let go of broken toys. What if we could glue the vase back before it shattered? Erase the wound before the knife fell? But the past is a fossil—touch it, and it crumbles. Our longing isn’t for correction. It’s for dominion. To be authors, not scribbles.

What if the stars wrote our story first? If every breath is pre-choreographed, why do we still choke on guilt? Why claw at the walls of a maze whose center we’ll never reach? Is the maze itself the answer? The act of wandering? Or is the question just another turn in the path?

We build civilizations like sandcastles—grand, temporary, doomed to be washed smooth. Globalization is a funhouse mirror: the “monkeys” see their reflection stretched into grotesque parodies of “civilized” selves. Climb the ladder? What ladder? The rungs dissolve as we grasp them.

Do we matter? Ask Sisyphus. Ask the ant carrying a crumb in a hurricane. The cosmos doesn’t care. It hums its old song, indifferent to our choirs and screams. But here’s the joke: we’re the ones who invented “mattering.” We conjured justice from the void, then wept when the void didn’t applaud.

The strong eat the weak. Yes. And termites eat empires. And stars eat themselves. What’s “fair” in an ecosystem built on digestion? Yet we keep planting gardens in the warzone. Why? Because the alternative is to lie down in the dirt and call it a bed.

Maybe questions are our only compass. No—flares shot into the dark. They don’t light the way; they prove we still want to see. Even if the answer is a shadow. Even if the shadow laughs.