I see your trick, nature. I see how you out-clevered physics. No no, we all said, free will could not possibly exist! How could it? Nature is of two ways only, fixed or chaotic, and from these nothing free could come except illusions and dreams.

But I know your trick. You created dreams, and through them the will is freed. You could not in the present butt heads with physics, so you created imagination. Here, we roam free, though still nature bound. Here, alternate universes are born and explored under watchful eyes, driven by instincts and desires, wants tested. Then back to the present we come to take a path, one that was not there before. It’s like you let us live multiple lives temporarily then allow us to make the call on which one to choose in the present. And in this way, we are decoupled from immediate fate. We are de-coupled from the present.

I declare free will exists.We are not rocks rolling down a fixed path on a hill. We are rolling down, yes, in the sense of entropy, always, but we choose which downward path to take, see and decide which rock to avoid, and which to jump over. We just have to look, imagine, and decide.

I drink the espresso electric

Intense, syropy and sweet

Pleasure.

The world deteriorates outside

In my mouth, a defiant intensification

Entropy denied.

I dreamt was taken apart, organ by organ, cell by cell, gene by gene, atom by atom. I was there, unrecognizable, and you were there, and he was there, and everyone was there. In elemental form.

In pieces I was still there looking at myself over almost infinite parts. I was more than all my pieces.

Every atom was put on a ship, and sent to the corners of the universe. Fast ships they were, and in days reached the end.

My consciousness stretched and stretched and stretched with the speeding ships, through vast empty spaces filled with majestic things. I was everywhere in every particle in every ship moving outwards, my consciousness in lockstep.

As the last ship and the last atom arrived at the end of space and time, I felt one with the universe, aware of its vastness, its uncertainty and certainty, its light and darkness, its overwhelming largeness matched by matching smallness. Along the way I also saw life, more varied and plentiful than on earth. But most of all, as I stood at the center aware of the ends of the universe, like a spider aware of every thread and every intersection of its web, I became aware of a sadness of the kind impossible to covey. The universe was lonely. And all of existence in all of its wonders and blunders was a frantic effort for meaning. It was here at the edges looking back that I finally got it. For only from the edge do you feel the finality of it all. And physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, all a desperate attempt to escape.

I finally realized that it has at last succeeded. I, you, everyone, are the manifestation of this success. And I don’t mean physically as in we are some wonderous engineering feat of creation, far from it. I mean our ability to be aware and to imagine. For by going inwards, the universe found a way to go outward beyond its finiteness and limitations. By going inwards, a finite world gives way to an infinite one. This void of nothingness I stand at the edge of is there for us to fill. You and I can fill this void with all sort of wonderful things, like morality, kindness, generosity, love, vision, hope.