There is something so wonderfully tragic about repetition. That something can happen, in the exact same way, again and again and again and again ad infinitum. I say it’s wonderful because it is beautiful, like a pattern, like a prophecy. I also say it’s tragic because it can sound like a cage sometimes: circular, unending, inescapable.

I have always loved staring at things that move in an expected way. How raindrops trickle down the window pane, or how ceiling fans spin at a constant rate. It’s comforting to know that they will continue to move in the same way. I like finding what connects seemingly unrelated things. Footsteps in sand are the same as a tissue box in the way that they sound the same, a psst - psst - psst.

The human brain is programmed to seek out patterns. It is how we’ve survived and evolved this far. We possess the uncanny ability to see what’s common, what’s repeated, what’s expected. It’s how we analyze faces and expressions. But it stretches far beyond that, and it has helped us understand the world around us. I think that ultimately everything exists in a pattern. It may seem random, but when we zoom out, far out, there is always a pattern. We learned it in a mathematics class one day, I think, about how the world can be boiled down to mathematical patterns.

When you look at it that way, you can see that there is no such thing as pure randomness. Everything must exist for a reason. I believe that, and still, I believe the other end of the spectrum: that everything can happen without a meaning, that maybe the world is just an abstract sludge of nothingness and everythingness all at once. Maybe those two opposites can exist at the same time. Maybe there is no such thing as binary. Maybe all there really is is abstraction.