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Since I was a kid, I've been able to sleep through anything -- storms,  sirens, you name it. Last night, I didn't sleep.

-- Dr. John Dorian, Scrubs, "My First Day"

I wonder why I feel the need to do it now, over a year since my last proper entry in this blog; one week before my final exams of my final undergraduate year; three hours before I have to leave for class, having had no sleep and spending the last number of hours not studying, but this is just something I need to let out.

There will come a time in everyone's life, I believe, when the whole idea of existentialism sort of smacks you right in the face. I remember my experience. (If, provided, existentialism is the right word for it, that is, pardon me if it isn't.) I can't recall my specific age at the time but I couldn't be any older than six or seven. Or maybe it was eight or nine? Anyway, I realised, (I've no idea how I'd come to that realisation -- I guess I was a strange child?), that I was here in this body, looking at the world through this person's view. And I wondered, why is that? I could have been any other person, at any other time, in any other dimension. Why wasn't I born a tree? Why am I seeing the world through this particular point of view? Does that make me special? Is my perspective even consistent with reality? What if, the things I'm seeing, touching, smelling are all delusions that my mind has interpreted to be reality, and, as my child self would've thought: if aliens landed on Earth, would they see what I see the way I see it?

And worst of all: what happens when "I" die? Will there no longer be this ... entity - this soul, if you will - staring at the world through a shell?

This begs the question: what are we here for? In the religious view, we'd say that we're here to serve a higher power, and that this life is merely a test before we move to the next. Scientifically, we could say that we're here to populate the earth, to reproduce and preserve our species and to "connect the circle of life", as King Mufasa so wonderfully phrased it. And those are all such lovely things to believe in, but what of individual purpose? Are our choices, good or bad, meant to bring us to our intended, predetermined destination? That all the regrets, all the hardships, will ultimately bring you to your own sustained self-contentment?

The rest of my life can't compare to this night,
And only the heartaches have given me sight;
They bring me to you.

-- Joshua Radin, "They Bring Me To You"

Or are choices nothing more than choices - if you make a good one, great! But if you make a bad one, well that's just too bad - you'll just have to make do with it and work your way from there; that everything, anything that happened or happens or will happen in your life depends on every single event that takes place; and the simplest turn would change everything? If you're meant to be a hobo, it wouldn't matter whether you reach that path straight away, or whether you spent years of your life studying for a degree and having a successful career but end up losing everything. But if nothing is predetermined, if your book of life is being written as you go along, wouldn't it kill you to think that any single choice you've wrongly made or any single event that failed to occur at any point in your life could have stopped you from becoming a hobo?

It's a scary thing to dwell on, really. Or maybe I shouldn't be dwelling on it at all? I've been reminded once by a good friend that life doesn't come with a manual. I guess I just like things to be certain. I've found myself adopting an all-or-nothing approach in my everyday ventures, where I'll only do something if I'm absolutely certain it'll result in the way I want it to and to distant myself from it if it won't. I suppose you could understand why.