SHATTERED SYMMETRY
She was always a big fan of the patterns in life, the random moments that lead to new revelations - seemingly through no more than chance. She relished the moments when she would hear a cover song by a band, say Faith No More performing "Easy" by Lionel Ritchie, on her satellite radio then change to a random channel and hear Lionel Ritchie singing whatever he was singing. It didn't matter what Lionel was singing on the other channel, the fact that the two totally separate channels could be so close always made her smile.
It was the same feeling she encountered when she would randomly recall a conversation or moment spent with someone long since forgotten, only to run into them later that day at the grocery store. It was fascinating happenstance, and it got her excited every time. It made her think there was more to life than the mundane routine she sometimes felt trapped in.
She found though, that after a few years of fixating on random butterflies flapping their wings to create new realities in her world, that nothing much mattered anymore.
She was bored. She wanted more. She wanted the unknown that existed within the known. What she wanted most, was to be able to see the patterns that so clearly existed just beneath the surface of what was plainly perceived. Everything clearly happened for a reason. There was no fate or destiny, only that which had been preordained.
Her dilemma became how to plot the inevitable without a solid definition, and it remained her elusive goal.
It trickled down over a span of several years, and it seemed the harder she sought the patterns, the more elusive they proved to be. Eventually it got to a point where even the most obvious patterns blurred into an indistinguishable smear of the recognizable.
Perfectly set tables, place mats aligned and cutlery squared immaculately, would blur and shimmer into an unknown smear that was almost unrecognizable from the arrangement she had originally sat down before.
She would look to the stars at night, and the constellations would realign because there could truly be no constants in life...
That is what she often felt, and how she always viewed the world. And then one day, she walked into the ocean expecting it to part and reveal a passage to Europe.
The ocean did not part. The ocean pummeled her with its warm salty fists and sealed her stinging eyes to a new reality: That which is random, is random by its very definition. There can be no seeking out the random patterns in life, for those patterns is what makes life random by its very nature.
Random is not something which can be truly be defined in nature, nor in life. Just as symmetry can not be reduced to the equal parts of a whole having an equal representation, it is something much harder defined.
As she sputtered to the surface of her shattered reality, and gasped for life, she realized the error of her ways. There are no true patterns in life due to the very nature of life itself. Life is a random assortment of moments that happen to be immaculately structured throughout time, only for those moments to drift apart throughout the very passage of that which gave them essence to begin with: Time.
In that single moment of salty sputtering she realized what was true, and honest, and essential in life...
Time.
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