Have you ever stopped, looked around, and thought: How weird is the world we live in?
We are exposed to the universe through our five senses, and only our five senses. We know this place through them, but this infinity of matter can't be just that. It's too big to be experienced only through touch, smell, sight, taste, and hearing. But before we get into an endless spiral on how weird it is that we don't know anything about everything, let’s start with a very weird thing: sound.
illustration by vy
sounds are weird
sounds are weird
by martina h. a.
Sound is the vibration of the air around us that gets into your ear, which reads it as sounds. Now re-read that sentence and think about it. Really think about it. Everything that you are hearing now is the vibration of air. The cars outside, the wind in your room, the dog that keeps barking. It is all just a bunch of air particles just moving around and we read that as sounds, and even though that makes perfect sense it just doesn't. Sounds don't make sense.
And that's not even the start. The law of vibration dictates that everything is moving at all times. For example where you are sitting. Its particles are moving at this moment, that's just how our universe works. But if everything is moving at all times, silence doesn’t exist. Silence is the absence of sound, which is the vibration of the air, which is caused by the movement of
something or someone. If everything is moving at all times silence doesn’t exist.
But that is not even half of it. Have you ever thought about the sound your rug makes. Not the sound of you playing with its texture or it being put down. The sound that it is making right now, completely still. What is the sound of your rug? because it is making them as you read this. Its protons, neutrons, atoms, molecules, strings…they are all moving. So what sound does your
rug make?
We are so caught up in just experiencing the world and feeling it in different ways that we don't stop to actually understand it. Sounds are weird, but so are the others. I mean, we only see the reflection of light and we think we know what is in front of us. We are not capable of actually touching things, but we still feel their different textures in our skin. We can taste and smell things for god's sake, like, how is that possible.
But what is even more interesting to think about is that, looking only through our five senses, its how we are so little but so much. We are the colors that bounce off of our bodys, and we are the taste that someone feels when they kiss our cheek. We are the smell of our sweat, and the feel of our wet forehead. We are so many things through our senses, but nearly not enough. How can we be enough in the middle of this never ending space: living seamless lifes, with pathetic schedules, and a thrive to distract ourselves from these little inconvenient matters.
We give so much worth to this life we live because it is the only thing that we have, but it is something that will eventually end. Then what? Our senses come from life, our knowledge comes from life, we come through life. How is this simply going to end? Again, this makes sense but it also doesn't. I mean, really, who are we? What are we doing with ourselves? What are we doing with our life? Preparing for a future that doesn't yet exist but we would like to think it does. After all, we did write in a piece of paper that we would travel on the 25th and receive a check of printed paper on the 4th. We are not enough and the universe is too much.
And while we are at it, sounds are weird, right?