I was driving home from the ocean, when I caught myself wondering why dogs love us so much. Or why someone like me loves them with such passion. I genuinely could not tell you which way the question was pointing. And then, because this is apparently how my brain works, I started wondering why I was wondering that…and why I do this to everything, every single ordinary thing, all day, forever.
That is the moment I’d like to report to you from. A grown woman in a car, interrogating her own existential thoughts, getting nowhere, loving it.
WHY is my favorite word. It is the load-bearing wall of my entire personality.
Someone says “I’m hungry” and I think, sure, but why. Why did the body land on that exact little ache as the signal? Why does it nag? And, why like that? And, I don’t want the chemistry answer because I know all the science here, but what is thing underneath it. I want to know why it should be this way at all.
I ask questions for a living, so no surprise that it turns out I ask them for a life, too.
Here is a sample of what’s been rattling around lately. None of these are urgent, but all of them keep my mind wondering. And, none of them to be deeply answered by just simple science.
Why does music give us chills? The WHY of how did the body decide that beauty should feel like cold
Why do we cry? Why did evolution, of all the available options, land on leaking from the face as the response to too much feeling
Why does a yawn cross a room? Why does a stranger’s laugh
Why do we close our eyes when something tastes really good?
Why do certain smells drop you straight into a memory you weren’t even looking for? No warning, no consent
Why do we talk to animals like they children? And, we do it in a weird special voices
Why does time speed up as you get older? Why was a single summer ten years long when I was eight
Why does a sunset move us? It is just light leaving so why should that ache
The thing nobody warns you about is that the brain doesn't have a separate setting for the big stuff. It's all one dial. So, in roughly the same mind-drifting-on-the-highway tone, it'll keep going:
Why do we love who we love?
Why do is nature attracted to spirals?
Why are we the only animal that knows it’s going to die and still gets up and makes breakfast?
Why is there something instead of nothing?
Why are we here?
There are no rungs on this ladder. That’s the part I’ve only recently made peace with. I used to think the squirrel question and the meaning-of-life question lived in different rooms, but I don’t have the drawers. To me, “why does my dog love me” and “why does anything exist” are the same question wearing different outfits, and they arrive in the same five minutes, usually while I’m doing something deeply unremarkable like waiting on hold, listening to elevator music.
It’s all one fall. The acorn and the abyss. You start the morning watching a squirrel bury a nut with the focus of a man defusing a bomb, and you end it on the nature of existence, and the truth is you never noticed where one became the other.
Here is what I actually want to know, and it’s why I’m putting this here instead of letting it rot in my Notes app: do you do this too?
It is my job as a journalist to investigate. Maybe everyone’s brain is quietly running this in the background and we’ve all just agreed not to mention it because it makes us late and weird. Or, maybe it really is the specific affliction of journalists, scientists, explorers and four-year-olds, the people who never got the memo that you’re supposed to stop asking after a certain age.
I’m getting older, and one of the things I want, more than I used to, is to be around people who haven’t stopped. People who’ll sit in the metaphorical parked car with me and go huh, yeah, why DO we close our eyes.
The surface is fine, but I keep reaching for the trapdoor in the floor of every normal conversation, and it’s nicer to fall with company.
^ skip to 27 seconds
So, tell me…
I’ll answer mine if you answer yours.
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