Gems
The deeper human understanding of the world goes, the more similar we find everything is. Every vertical of human knowledge has testified to this: chemistry revealed all we can touch is but atoms, biology revealed all life is but cells, genetics revealed the common mechanisms that drive all life to replicate and change; physics interrogated all motion and stillness and found energy commands both; astronomy inquired of our magisterial sun and found it was but one of infinite kin; medicine ousted germs as the main culprit for disease, thereby banishing the myriad spirits, demons, ghosts, hexes, curses, magic, voodoo, and putrid essences that we thought assailed us; meanwhile, history reduced the past to broken loops, economics reduced all behavior to incentives, and, with a broad stroke of the darkest paint, thermodynamics showed us that all things meet but one fate.
Through wit and insight, we've reduced the world from a trillion distinct calligraphy characters, each unique in meaning, down to an alphabet—a world of common building blocks following common rules. Things are linked, either in composition, behavior, or both. All things descend from less than we think. This has the effect of widening our appreciation for the world. Similarities make the world smaller, more singular in color, more digestible, such that to love one thing becomes increasingly to love all things. How can one admire a diamond, but not coal? How can one marvel at the elephant, but not the field mouse? How can one love the city's culture, yet not the baker’s croissants, or the laborer’s grit? Connectedness is the view of the divine. Omniscience and omnipresence must come from understanding that all things are connected everywhere and all the time, like folding a piece of paper over itself until it’s but a single, thick square: poke one hole and you've pierced the whole; drip a drop of dye and you've colored it through. In this mission of finding similarities, of folding the paper over itself, it's clear we will only ever make progress. Many a scientist dreams of a Theory of Everything, a final, universal theory with ultimate explanatory power, a single idea which unites all that we can touch, conceive, and comprehend; we’ll continue folding, and folding, and folding, until we've somehow managed to condense the paper into a single, cream speck.
And yet, as humanity strives towards coalescence, you and I, people that love, fight, and cry, that live the human experience, make our lives doing the opposite: finding distinctions. The experiences we cherish arise when we distinguish this from that, ours from the rest. The greater the distinction, the more fierce the experience. Joy, sentimentality, patriotism, home, and love all adhere to this rule. The joy you feel in a moment doesn’t come from its similarity to others moments, but from its distinctness to all others. Your oceanic fondness for a painting doesn’t come from its similarity to other paintings, but from that it’s your daughter’s first painting. A patriot doesn't fight for his country because it's like all others, but because it's unlike any other in history, because God himself birthed it, because if it falls it will never rise again. Home is so distinct that even though we can place it anywhere we wish and make its borders as wide as we want, we still end up storing our solace in just a few square feet. A man with four houses on one thousand acres may declare all of it home, but only a particular room, a particular corner, a particular chair will offer him rest. Always there is a minuscule space that feels more holy to us than any temple, a space we believe is as perfectly distinct as our eternal soul. That is home. From billions of people we reserve our love for him or her, for our family, our friends, for we cannot hand a rose to all people all the same and live human lives. What mother loves their child because he is like the next? What friend his brother? What shepherd his flock? Everything we treasure is a gem we’ve chiseled from a monolith: something we’ve chosen to regard for its distinctness despite the material reality that it’s not.