For the night
There are two questions almost everyone knows. They mostly come at night: Am I alone? And what will become of me? This page has no answers. It keeps you company.
Am I alone?
Everything you have ever experienced, you experienced inside yourself. From in there, there is no way to check whether the others really exist. The question is not strange — people have carried it for thousands of years.
But look: the language you ask it in was given to you by someone. Your words, your images, half your inner world — all of it came to you through others. Whoever can ask like this already carries many people inside.
And you carry things older than any question: the iron in your blood, the calcium in your bones was made inside stars. Everything you have ever loved comes from the same beginning. You are related to all of it.
And sometimes someone knows what is going on in you before you have said a word. Maybe that is just long practice in living together. Maybe it is more.
Even physics knows a connectedness that no distance dissolves: two particles of light that were once together remain one whole — however far apart they fly. What that means for us humans, nobody knows. But being separate is not the world’s last word. Some even believe consciousness does not arise in each head separately, but is one — like a light falling through many windows. Nobody can prove that, and nobody can disprove it. You are allowed to hold it possible.
And what will become of me?
What is meant is the end — and what comes after. Nobody knows. Not even those who sound very certain — in either direction. Even science has grown quiet here: the more precisely it measures the world, the larger the mystery has become, and as far as it can tell, the future is written nowhere. It is the same open place for every human being; with this question alone, you are not alone.
A few thoughts you can hold like a stone in your pocket:
In nature, nothing gets lost. Everything only changes — nothing simply stops. Whether the thing in you that says “I” would be the one exception? Nobody knows. The opposite, too, is only a guess.
A wave runs onto the beach and stops being a wave. Yet nothing of it is lost: the water remains, the sea remains. Maybe you are more sea than wave.
And one thing holds without any maybe: that you have been can never again stop being true. No ending erases a single one of your days.
Some physicists even read time itself this way: what has been is not gone, it only lies elsewhere — as real as the now. An image, not a proof. But it comes from the very middle of physics.
If you believe in God, you may long have a word for all of this: that nothing falls out of God’s hand. If you don’t, these thoughts carry anyway.
Both questions are allowed to stay open. No human being ever had to solve them in order to live. When they grow heavy, lay them down like a book. The breath goes on, the day comes back, and around you are people who carry the same questions inside. That, too, means: not alone.
If your head stays awake: What stays open
These are quiet thoughts — not therapy. If the night gets too heavy, you are allowed to reach for more: a conversation, another person, professional help.