This morning when I woke up my hand already was cramping. Late nights spent writing,calculating, recalculating and rewriting assignments have left me slightly exhausted to say the least. These days I find that I am learning so much stuff that I find it hard to find time to think for myself.

At night when I am tired and confused about what I am learning. I stare at my pen, the page, and the table and think, “What are these atoms that I am learning about?” These things that we see all the time and yet never really “see”? How many things out there exist that we cannot see? What really is this thing called seeing?

There is something scary/wonderful about learning in that it lets you see things in a new light. It lets you appreciate things that you take for granted in new ways. Science itself pieces together the fragments that we do know (or at least that we think we do know) and brings them together to explain. And while no theory is every complete or entirely correct, it is amazing that a theory can explain things at all.

Pick up something sitting close to you, a pen perhaps and drop it. Drop it again. How terribly exciting: it falls, nothing new. However, how much do we actually know about the pen falling? If you think/learn about the physics behind the pen falling you find something beautiful. The fact that something as natural as a falling pen can be explained using a simple equation is incredible. Falling, as we know it is measurable to some extent. The pen accelerates down at ~9.82 m/s^2. That means every second it’s velocity increases by 9.82m/s, forming a parabola if you take consecutive pictures. If we don’t know much about physics all we see is a pen falling in a straight line downwards. But if we do know a bit, even just a tiny bit then we can “see” something quite different.

But there are some things about explaining that I do not like. Explaining the world around us in terms of science leaves very little for the explanations of the self. Through science people can be explained as bundles of organs, cells, chemicals. We can comfort ourselves in thinking that things are systems that can be explained rather than complete mysteries that enshroud us. People can become subjects, animals can be tested, brains can be picked apart, with time things can be dissected. These thoughts leave part of me empty, they seem to take away some of the awe in the world. Maybe there is comfort in not knowing things. Such as what makes things right. What makes things wrong? What is love, what are feelings? Wy do we keep pushing and pulling. And why of all things do our hearts keep on beating?

Perhaps a pen on paper will never be truly explain the nature of things. And while science powers on, while science attempts to gain insight on things, perhaps sometimes it is nice to have things that we do not understand. Sometimes, maybe the self is created by the things that we do not know.