A bus, a stranger, and a question about time, information, and the observer.

A few days ago, after leaving a hospital appointment, I decided to walk instead of taking the bus.

The consultation had ended with the news that I would soon undergo a second corneal transplant. Although it wasn’t entirely unexpected, I still needed time to absorb it. Walking has always been how I think. Even in the middle of a heatwave, I found myself choosing the longer way home.

As I crossed the road outside the hospital, I noticed a woman waiting quietly at a bus stop. There was nothing remarkable about the scene, and I simply kept walking.

A few minutes later, as I reached the next junction, I saw a bus turning up the hill. Because of where I was standing, I could already see it. She couldn’t.

Then, almost without thinking, a strange question appeared in my mind.

Had I just seen her future?

At first, the answer seemed obvious.

Of course not. I wasn’t predicting anything. I simply happened to be standing somewhere that gave me access to information she did not yet have. But the thought refused to leave.

Suppose, instead, that I had called her at that very moment.

“Your bus is coming. It’s blue. The upper deck is almost full.”

A few seconds later, everything I had described would become part of her own experience. To her, I would have been describing the future. To me, I was simply describing the present.

The bus itself was never in the future.

Only her experience of it was.

That small moment made me wonder whether we often confuse two very different ideas: something that has not yet happened, and something that has already happened but has not yet reached us.

Those are not necessarily the same thing.

Imagine a medical test. The laboratory has already completed the analysis. The doctor already knows the result. Yet the patient will not receive the phone call until tomorrow.

Where does that diagnosis belong? Is it still the future? Or does it already exist, while only the patient’s awareness remains behind?

The same happens every day in ways we rarely notice. A football match reaches television viewers several seconds after the players have already celebrated a goal. Light from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach Earth. The galaxies astronomers observe tonight often appear as they were millions or even billions of years ago.

Our knowledge of the universe has always depended on information travelling through space. Perhaps this is more than a curious coincidence. Perhaps every observer experiences reality through the arrival of information.

This made me think differently about the present itself.

Maybe the present is not a universal moment shared equally by everyone. Maybe what we call the present is constructed from the information available to each observer.

If two people standing only a few metres apart can experience different presents, then what exactly is the future?

Perhaps the word future quietly gathers together several completely different ideas. Sometimes it means something that genuinely has not happened. Sometimes it describes something that already exists but has not yet reached our awareness. Sometimes it refers to events that are still uncertain, yet can already be anticipated from the information we have.

Our language treats them as though they are the same.

Perhaps they are not.

Interestingly, this question reminded me of one interpretation in modern physics.

In one interpretation of relativity, sometimes called the block universe, time does not necessarily flow from past to future. Instead, every event already exists as part of a four-dimensional spacetime, while our conscious experience moves through it one moment at a time.

Whether this picture of reality is correct remains an open question.

I don’t know whether this is how the universe works. But it offered me another way of thinking about the nature of the future.

It raises an interesting possibility.

If a different observer could somehow access a larger portion of spacetime than we can, would they appear to know the future? Or would they simply be seeing parts of reality that we have not yet experienced?

Perhaps what we call the future says as much about the observer as it does about time itself.

The bus arrived.

The woman stepped forward and climbed aboard. Within seconds, the ordinary street became ordinary again.

She would never know that a stranger across the road had spent the next hour thinking about those few unremarkable moments.

Neither of us had changed the world.

The only difference between us was where we happened to be standing.

Yet that small difference left me wondering whether the future is truly something waiting to happen, or whether it is, at least sometimes, simply a name we give to reality before it reaches us.

A simple question raised by a 5,000 year old microorganism led me to wonder whether time is truly part of the universe, or part of the observer.

Recently, I came across a fascinating article. Scientists had successfully revived active yeast from microbial samples preserved on Ötzi the Iceman for over 5,000 years.

What captured my attention, however, wasn’t the yeast itself. It was those three words:

Five thousand years.

What exactly is five thousand years?

From a young age, we learn to understand the world through time. Five minutes, five hours, fifty years, five thousand years, five billion years. These numbers exist so naturally within our language that we rarely stop to ask whether we truly understand what they mean.

I suddenly found myself wondering what those five thousand years meant to that microorganism lying dormant in the ice. Did it truly experience the passage of five thousand years? Or was it, from its own perspective, simply a long sleep followed by an awakening?

In our daily lives, we have created a shared system for measuring time. We look at the same clocks to go to work, attend school, meet friends, and we use the same calendars to record history. Over time, we naturally come to believe that we all exist within the same timeline.

But I often wonder whether this is merely a convenient agreement that allows us to communicate and organise our lives. Objective time, as a shared method of measurement, appears to exist. But is it the same thing as the time we actually experience?

For someone who is waiting, a single minute can feel endless. For someone who is happy, an entire afternoon may disappear in what feels like an instant. We may live by the same clocks, yet we do not necessarily experience time in the same way.

This led me towards a more daring thought. What if time is not one of the universe’s most fundamental properties? What if it is simply one of the ways consciousness makes sense of change?

Perhaps what we call time is nothing more than a description of sequence — a way of distinguishing before from after. When change occurs, when memories form, and when observers begin comparing what came “before” and what came “after”, time unfolds alongside them.

If no consciousness existed at all, would “the past” and “the future” still have meaning? If the answer is no, then is time truly a property of the universe itself, or is it simply the way consciousness understands change?

And, taking the question one step further, if consciousness had never emerged in the first place, on what basis could we assume that the universe operates exactly as we understand it?

Many people would immediately object. What about dinosaur fossils? Geological layers? Radioactive decay? The cosmic microwave background radiation? Aren’t these all evidence that time has been flowing long before humanity appeared?

I do not deny the existence of these things. In fact, it is precisely because they are so real that they make me question time even more.

Through these traces, we reconstruct a history of the past. Dinosaurs once existed. The Earth formed around 4.5 billion years ago. The universe began approximately 13.8 billion years ago. These conclusions are entirely reasonable and grounded in careful observation and calculation. Yet I cannot help wondering whether these historical traces are really demonstrating time itself, or merely showing us that certain states of reality once existed.

Have we too readily equated history with the passage of time? If time only acquires meaning through consciousness, then what exactly are those past events that none of us have personally experienced? Do they represent time itself, or are they part of an objective background against which consciousness later emerged?

I do not have an answer.

But if we have never truly settled the question of what time actually is, perhaps continuing to ask the question is not such a bad thing.

As I followed this line of thought further, another question emerged. We often say that the universe began 13.8 billion years ago.

But what does that figure actually mean?

Modern physics has already shown us that time is not absolute. Under different conditions, it flows at different rates. If that is true, on what grounds do we assume that our understanding of 13.8 billion years applies uniformly throughout the entire universe?

Could it be that, under conditions we cannot even imagine, what appears to us as 13.8 billion years of cosmic history may, from another perspective, have happened only a second ago? Have we unconsciously mistaken the human way of understanding time for the universe’s own scale?

If so, then what is time?

Is it a fundamental property of reality, or an experience arising from the observer? Does it exist within the universe itself, or within consciousness?

Ever since reading that article about Ötzi the Iceman, those words — five thousand years — have remained in my mind.

For us, five thousand years is enough time for civilisations to rise and fall, for kingdoms to be built and lost, and for the world itself to be transformed. Yet that dormant microorganism has made me question, once again, whether we truly understand what time is.

Or perhaps the version of time we have always assumed to be complete has never been the whole story.

How a tiny hamster changed the way I see the world.

A few days ago, my niece forgot to lock my Winter White dwarf hamster’s cage after playing with him.

So Tofu escaped for the third time.

Tofu is tiny, with completely white fur. Normally, all I have to do is call his name once, and a little white head appears. Within seconds, he comes running towards me.

But that day, the house was completely silent.

I called his name over and over again. I knelt on the floor with a torch, searching beneath every piece of furniture.

Nothing.

As the hours passed, I couldn’t stop imagining the worst. Had he fallen somewhere? Was he hurt? Would I ever see him again?

Tofu is incredibly small.

Small enough to reach places that I never could, and places I had never even noticed.

Almost twelve hours later, I called his name one more time. This time, he quietly wandered out of the bathroom as if nothing had happened.

The first thing I did wasn’t scold him.

I picked him up and carefully checked every part of his tiny body, relieved to find that he wasn’t injured.

Only then could I finally breathe again.

Yet what stayed with me wasn’t his escape. It was everything I discovered while looking for him.

I had always thought I knew this house well. After all, it had been my home for years. Until that day, I noticed a narrow gap beneath the bathroom cabinet that I had somehow never seen before.

To me, it was little more than a crack.

To Tofu, it was a tunnel.

To an ant, it might be a valley.

Then another thought came to me.

For Tofu, are the lines between the floor tiles like endless white plains? Is the space beneath the sofa a vast cave stretching far beyond what I could imagine?

The house had never changed.

Only the scale of the observer had.

Suddenly, I realised that the same house could contain completely different worlds.

Perhaps we often assume that we all live in the same world. Perhaps we simply share the same space.

Every living creature enters it through the scale of its own body.

We cannot see ultraviolet light.

We cannot hear ultrasound.

The microscopic world has always existed—simply too small for our eyes to perceive.

The distant universe has always existed too—simply too vast for our everyday experience to comprehend.

Not seeing something has never meant that it does not exist. But the thought that stayed with me the longest was something else.

I have always tried to give Tofu the best home I could. Soft bedding. A warm little house. A running wheel. Toys. Fresh food and clean water.

I honestly believed I had given him everything he needed. Yet this was his third escape.

If I had truly given him everything he wanted, why did he still leave?

That was when I realised something I had never questioned before. I had never really tried to think like a hamster. I had only imagined, from a human perspective, what a hamster’s life ought to be.

To me, his cage was a safe and comfortable home.

To him, perhaps it was simply a place to return to after exploring a much larger world.

Perhaps the desire to explore is simply part of who he is.

Not courage.

Not rebellion.

Just instinct.

The happiness I thought I was giving him was simply my understanding of happiness.

If our bodies determine the world we are able to enter, perhaps our instincts shape the world we long to explore.

Almost twelve hours later, I found Tofu again.

But somehow, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the one who had truly lost his way that day wasn’t him.

It was me.

I had become lost somewhere between the world I imagined and the world he actually lived in.

For most of my life, I thought of the body as nothing more than a vessel for living in the world. Until that day, I realised that it quietly determines what I can see, where I can go, and even what I am capable of understanding.

Perhaps we all live in the same universe.

Yet each of us can only ever step into the part of the universe that our own body allows us to experience.

On finitude, time, and relationships that begin even when we know they will end.

I used to think that love was built upon hope.

When people fall in love, it is often accompanied by visions of the future: the next meeting, travelling together, building a life side by side, perhaps even growing old together. Forever seems to be the ideal ending of every love story.

Later, however, I found myself in a very different kind of relationship.

From the very beginning, we knew there would be no conventional future. Ours was not moving towards a shared destination, but felt more like an hourglass quietly counting down. We knew the ending had already existed. We simply couldn’t stop the sand from falling.

I never expected to fall in love with him.

The first time I saw him, he was simply another classmate. Then someone asked how old he was, and he responded with an awkward, almost shy expression. For reasons I still cannot explain, that moment stayed with me.

Even now, I remember it clearly.

Later, I often wondered: in a world filled with countless people, what makes us fall in love with one particular person?

To this day, I still don’t have an answer.

Perhaps it is simply because he was himself — gentle on the surface, yet carrying untold vulnerability underneath.

Had he never appeared in my life, perhaps things would have been calmer. Yet because he did, I learned to accept helplessness. I learned that some relationships, no matter how deeply we love, are not meant to last.

During that limited period, we were both utterly fearless.

Knowing the ending, we cherished the present more intensely.

Every meeting became precious.

Every embrace felt like an act of resistance against time itself.

Most love stories assume there is still plenty of time ahead.

But when the hourglass is placed unmistakably before us, when we can see the sand will eventually run out, what are we truly seeking?

Love itself?

Or simply the chance to walk a small part of life alongside another person?

If we know we cannot have forever, yet still long for one more conversation, one more embrace, then what is it that we are truly reluctant to let go of?

One day, as we were approaching our inevitable farewell, he said to me:

“We did it.”

Even now, I still find myself wondering what it meant.

Was it loving each other?

Was it restraint?

Was it sharing that brief stretch of time together?

Or was it quietly choosing to love wholeheartedly, despite knowing that the ending could never be changed?

I don’t know.

Perhaps that is precisely why those words have remained with me for so long.

Many people believe that if the ending is already known, the relationship should never begin.

Yet I began to question whether the value of love could truly be measured only by its duration or its outcome.

Perhaps our deep attachment to “forever” stems from our discomfort with finitude.

As time moves forward, both the people we love and the selves who love them inevitably change.

Are we really loving a fixed person?

Or are we loving the fleeting moments of existence we once shared?

Perhaps what we truly long for has never been forever.

Perhaps it is simply the brief opportunity to transcend loneliness and bear witness to each other’s existence.

To this day, I still don’t know whether this would be considered a good love story.

After all, it never arrived at the ending people usually hope for.

But if love cannot escape change, if forever can never truly be guaranteed,

then

what is it that we are really loving?

How a simple toy made me wonder about the universe.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve been fascinated by kaleidoscopes.

I was never satisfied with simply looking through one. What fascinated me most was understanding how those endlessly changing patterns were formed. So I would take them apart, pouring out every tiny coloured fragment hidden inside.

As I grew older, I learned to appreciate the beauty inside a kaleidoscope.

Over the years, I’ve collected quite a few of them. Every gentle turn reveals a completely new pattern. No two are ever the same. Each one looks so intricate that it almost feels deliberately designed. I’ve always enjoyed watching those endless transformations, yet I never really stopped to ask what made such extraordinary variety possible.

Then one day, I looked through a kaleidoscope once again.

I suddenly realised that the coloured fragments inside had never changed at all.

Only their arrangement had.

With every turn, a pattern appeared that had never existed before.

At that moment, I found myself thinking about quantum physics, a subject that has fascinated me for many years.

Not because it has given me answers, but because it has reminded me, time and again, that the universe is far stranger than my intuition suggests.

I don't understand the mathematics behind it, and I certainly can't claim to explain the true nature of the quantum world. But it has led me to wonder whether many things we take for granted simply reflect the way we perceive reality, rather than reality itself.

I looked at the kaleidoscope once more.

The same fragments.

The same rules.

Yet every turn revealed something entirely new.

I couldn’t help wondering whether nature keeps repeating the same principle.

Twenty-six letters can give rise to countless novels.

Twelve musical notes can become an endless variety of melodies.

Four DNA bases are enough to give rise to millions of forms of life.

Finite.

Yet capable of creating something that feels almost infinite.

Modern physics also suggests that everything in the universe can ultimately be traced back to more fundamental building blocks.

If that is true, then perhaps what is constantly changing is not those fundamental constituents themselves.

Perhaps what remains conserved is not only energy, but those fundamental building blocks as well. What continues to emerge are new arrangements, new structures, and new relationships between them.

Suddenly, the kaleidoscope in my hand no longer felt like a toy.

It felt more like a model for thinking about the universe.

Not because the universe is a giant kaleidoscope, but because it made me wonder whether the universe might also follow a similar principle.

If everything in the universe ultimately arises from the same fundamental building blocks, then are we truly creating something entirely new?

Or are finite ingredients continually giving rise to new possibilities?

I don’t know.

But every time I turn a kaleidoscope, I find myself returning to the same thought.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the universe is not how much it contains.

But how such a finite beginning, governed by the same laws of physics, can give rise to one unrepeatable moment after another.

And somehow, so am I.

Perhaps the dust was never outside us to begin.

There is a Buddhist verse that has stayed with me for as long as I can remember:

Originally there was not a single thing — where could dust ever settle?

I cannot remember exactly when I first came across it. I only know that it found its way into my life long before I was old enough to understand what it meant.

Whenever life becomes complicated, I seem to return to these words.

I have always loved them.

Not because I fully understand them.

But perhaps because I don’t.

Recently, I found myself reflecting on a relationship that had left me quietly unsettled. There had been no betrayal, no dramatic conflict, and no obvious right or wrong. Yet somehow, another person’s presence — or absence — could occupy my thoughts so effortlessly.

Eventually, I began to wonder if I had been asking the wrong question all along.

Perhaps the question was never whether another person truly understood me.

Perhaps the more unsettling question is this:

Can we ever truly understand another consciousness at all?

The universe, despite its vastness, often feels easier to understand than people.

The movement of planets can be predicted. The speed of light can be measured. Even the age of distant stars can be estimated through mathematics.

The universe follows patterns.

People do not.

Each of us carries invisible histories, private fears, unspoken longings, and contradictions that even we may struggle to understand within ourselves.

If so, how can we expect to fully comprehend another consciousness from the outside?

We spend our lives surrounded by other minds, yet never truly step inside them. We observe behaviour. We interpret words. We construct stories about who we think others are.

And still, how much do we actually know?

How much of our understanding is genuine insight?

And how much is simply our own projection?

Lately, I have started to wonder whether relationships are not really about understanding another person completely.

Perhaps they are about discovering ourselves through the attempt. The people who enter our lives may not always be there to provide answers.

Sometimes, they simply illuminate the parts of ourselves we have yet to see clearly — our fears, our expectations, our longing for certainty, and our desire to be chosen even in a world that offers very little certainty at all.

From this perspective, I wonder whether relationships might be one of the ways consciousness comes to know itself.

For a long time, I believed that simplicity meant avoiding complexity.

I am no longer so sure.

Perhaps simplicity is not the absence of difficulty. Perhaps it is what remains when we choose, again and again, to return to what truly matters after becoming entangled in what does not.

I sometimes wonder whether the relationships worth cherishing are not necessarily the ones that remove all uncertainty, but the ones that allow us to remain connected to ourselves despite it.

The ones in which we do not become smaller.

The ones in which we do not need to perform.

The ones in which we can simply breathe.

I used to think that maturity meant becoming better at understanding other people. The older I become, the less certain I am.

Perhaps maturity has more to do with recognising the limits of what we can know.

Perhaps wisdom lies not in certainty, but in humility — in accepting that another consciousness will always remain, to some extent, mysterious.

And perhaps that mystery is not a failure of human connection.

Perhaps it is precisely what gives connection its meaning.

After all, if another person could be fully predicted and entirely understood, would wonder still exist?

Would curiosity?

Would compassion?

I still find myself returning to that Buddhist verse:

“Originally there was not a single thing — where could dust ever settle?”

If there was originally nothing, where does the dust come from?

Does it arise from the world around us?

Or does it emerge quietly within us — from fear, expectation, attachment, and our longing for certainty in an uncertain existence?

I do not know.

What I do know is that, despite witnessing the complexity of human nature, I still choose simplicity. Not because simplicity is easy. But because I have come to believe that gentleness is a choice worth making.

Perhaps this is what going with the flow means to me.

Not giving up.

Not becoming indifferent.

But offering wholeheartedly what we are able to offer, while making peace with the parts of life that remain beyond our control.

As for what we should hold on to, and what we should let go of…

That, too, may be one of the lessons we spend a lifetime learning.

We may share the same universe, but not the same world.

Like any other day, I sat down at my desk, ready to begin my work.

My hand rested on the surface. It felt cold, solid, as familiar as ever.

For some reason, I paused.

I have always known that my body and the desk are ultimately made of the same fundamental particles. I also knew that an atom is almost entirely empty space. But I had never truly put those two thoughts together.

If neither the desk nor I are as solid as we seem, then what is it that keeps us apart? Why can’t my hand simply pass through the desk?

I looked down at my hand, then back at the desk. I had always assumed that objects naturally possess clear shapes and clear boundaries. That day, I began to wonder whether many of the things I had always taken for granted were not as simple as they seemed.

I looked around the room.

Then a strange thought came to me.

If a dog, a bee and a fly were all here with me right now, would we really be experiencing the same room?

A dog might not encounter the furniture first. Instead, it would enter a landscape built from scent, where the air is layered with invisible traces left behind by every living thing that has passed through.

A bee would not see the same flowers that I do. Petals that appear plain to me are covered with ultraviolet patterns, revealing patterns that have always existed, but that I have never been able to see.

A fly may not experience movement as I do. What feels like one smooth motion to me could unfold as a series of separate moments, as though time itself moved to a different rhythm.

We stand in the same room. We breathe the same air.

The room has not changed.

Only the eyes looking at it have.

What struck me most was not that different creatures perceive differently. It was the realisation that these realities are not hidden somewhere at the edge of the universe.

I had simply spent my whole life believing that I had already seen everything there was to see.

I looked around the room once more.

Nothing had changed.

Except me.

If even the realities we already know extend far beyond what my senses can perceive, then how much of reality do I actually experience?

We spend so much time searching for the mysteries of the distant universe. Perhaps the first thing we have underestimated is not the universe itself, but the ordinary room standing quietly in front of us. Not because it is small, but because it is far richer and more complex than anything my senses allow me to experience.

I never found an answer.

Instead, I was left with a deep sense of humility.

Since that day, every time I walk into a room, I find myself wondering the same thing.

Is this really all there is to see?

Perhaps I will never know.

But I do know this:

from that day onwards, I could no longer take for granted that I had truly seen everything before my eyes.

On memory, identity, and the stories we tell ourselves.

I have been afraid of water for as long as I can remember.

Even today, I still cannot swim.

My family once told me that when I was very young, I nearly drowned. I accidentally fell into the water and almost lost my life. I was too young to remember the incident itself.

And yet, as I heard this story repeated over the years, something strange began to happen.

I started to “remember” it.

I could almost picture certain scenes: the coldness of the water, the feeling of struggling, the fear and helplessness. But I have never been able to tell whether these are genuine memories or images I gradually constructed from other people’s descriptions.

What fascinates me is that, regardless of whether the memory is real or not, my fear of water is undeniably real.

Even now, if I close my eyes and imagine myself floating alone in the middle of the sea, I feel an overwhelming sense of unease.

It is not simply fear.

It feels more like an alarm rising from somewhere deep within my body. My heart begins to race. My breathing becomes shallow. There is an almost instinctive sense that I am no longer safe.

Rationally, I know that I am sitting comfortably in my room.

And yet, my body seems convinced that danger is right in front of me.

It made me wonder: what exactly is memory?

For a long time, I assumed that memory functioned like a storage system. We experience something, save it somewhere inside the mind, and retrieve it whenever we need it.

But perhaps it is not that simple.

The most remarkable thing about memory may not be its ability to preserve the past.

It may be the fact that every act of remembering allows us to experience the past once again.

Sometimes, the same event carries entirely different meanings at different stages of life. Things that once caused pain may eventually bring peace. Decisions we once struggled to understand may, with age, become easier to forgive.

It is as though each recollection invites us to reread our own history.

Yet memory is not a replay.

New understanding, present emotions, and even other people’s accounts can quietly find their way into what we remember. By the time a memory is stored again, it may already have become a slightly different version of itself.

If my family had never told me about the near-drowning incident, would I still be afraid of water? Did I truly remember it, or did I slowly accept a story told by others and mistake it for my own experience?

If memories can change without us noticing, what allows us to trust that the life we remember is the life that actually happened?

I found myself dwelling on this question for a long time.

And perhaps the uncertainty of memory does not end there.

Whenever I try to revisit the past, I realise that I can never relive an entire day.

Memory always arrives in fragments.

A single moment.

A familiar scent.

A melody that suddenly resurfaces in the mind.

A sentence someone once said.

An emotion too difficult to describe.

Or perhaps the way afternoon sunlight once fell across the floor.

These fragments appear without warning, yet they resist becoming a complete story.

What happened in the spaces between them has often been lost.

If existence itself unfolds continuously, why does memory seem so fragmented?

Is the life we understand merely a narrative assembled from scattered pieces of remembrance?

And yet, perhaps this is precisely why memory is so precious.

It does more than preserve the past.

It allows us to revisit it, reinterpret it, and assign new meaning to experiences that have already passed.

But if the past can only survive as fragmented memories that continue to change over time, then what allows us to believe that we remain the same person?

Is the child I once was, the person I was yesterday, and the person reflecting on these questions now truly the same “self”?

If the past no longer exists, and all we can touch are memories that are constantly being reconstructed, then what is it that holds these fragments together as “me”?

If every act of remembering subtly alters what is remembered, are we encountering the past itself, or merely our present consciousness interpreting the past once again?

If the past can only be reached through memories that are forever changing, then what truly exists:

the person I once was,

or the consciousness that remembers?

On mirrors, consciousness, and the limits of self-understanding.

One day, I found myself standing in front of a mirror, just as I always did.

I can no longer remember whether I was fixing my hair, checking my clothes, or simply staring absentmindedly at my reflection. But in that perfectly ordinary moment, a strange thought suddenly crossed my mind.

I have never truly seen myself.

The thought stopped me in my tracks.

When I really think about it, I have seen many things. I have seen the sky, the sea, and strangers passing by on the street. I have witnessed the smiles and tears of the people around me. I can observe the expressions on others’ faces, sense their emotions, and sometimes even infer their inner struggles from the smallest gestures.

Yet when it comes to myself, I have never been able to see with the same clarity.

The person in the mirror is only a reflection. The version of me in photographs is merely an image captured in a particular instant. The version of me that exists in other people’s eyes occupies a place I can never stand.

And the impression I have of myself may already have been quietly shaped by memory, familiarity, and expectation.

So I began to wonder:

If I have never truly seen myself, what makes me so certain that I know who I am?

As a child, I often wondered whether there might be another world hidden behind the mirror. If I could somehow step through it, would I finally be able to stand where that other person stood and truly see myself?

Of course, I know that is impossible.

And yet, even now, I still find the idea strangely captivating.

Modern physics occasionally touches upon concepts such as symmetry and mirror structures. Some theories have even proposed that the universe might possess a kind of mirrored counterpart corresponding to our own.

I am not suggesting that the world inside the mirror actually exists.

Still, I cannot help but wonder: if the universe itself allows for certain forms of symmetry, could that “other self” in the mirror — so familiar, yet forever beyond reach — serve as a metaphor for something deeper?

After all, the true barrier has never been the mirror itself.

It is the limitation of the observer.

I am both the observer and the one being observed.

Yet when faced with myself, I cannot fully become both at once.

Perhaps this is why self-understanding is so difficult.

I can try to understand other people, analyse the world around me, and even question the nature of time and reality. Yet I can never step outside myself and look back with complete objectivity.

Just as the eye cannot directly see itself, perhaps consciousness, too, can never fully comprehend its own nature.

And this leads me to another question:

If consciousness cannot completely understand itself, is our understanding of who we are destined to remain incomplete?

We often think of self-knowledge as a destination.

But perhaps it is better understood as a journey that can never truly be finished.

We piece together an image of ourselves through reflections, memories, and the ways others perceive us. Yet the person we call “me” may always be more complex than those fragments can capture.

In the end, I found myself looking once more at the person in the mirror.

And I realised that perhaps the most remarkable thing about mirrors is not that they reflect our appearance, but that they remind us of something far more profound:

Throughout our lives, we can only ever understand ourselves indirectly.

We can observe the universe, the people around us, and the countless changes unfolding in the world.

Yet we can never truly stand before ourselves.

Perhaps we spend our entire lives trying to see ourselves clearly.

Only to discover that the truest version of who we are has always remained just beyond the reach of the observer.

On wishes, uncertainty, and why we continued to hope.

This year, my birthday wish was very simple.

After my follow-up appointment, I wanted to go to my favourite bakery and finally have the cruffin I had been thinking about for weeks.

A few days earlier, I had even messaged a friend:

“I’ve got a date with a cruffin afterwards, and honestly, I’ve been missing it ever since. It was so yummy! 😋🥐

My wish is really that simple ✨”

In the end, it didn’t happen.

The disappointment surprised me with how heavy it felt.

Not because a pastry matters that much, but because it suddenly hit me: even something this ordinary, this modest, isn’t guaranteed.

That realisation stayed with me.

When we talk about wishes, people usually think of big things — health, love, success, peace.

But mine was just a cruffin after an appointment.

And yet, even that could be taken away by my body, by the weather, by timing, or by something I couldn’t foresee.

It made me wonder:

What exactly is a wish?

More importantly,

if wishes do not always come true, why do we continue to make them?

If memory allows us to remain connected to the past, could wishes be one of the ways we establish a relationship with the future?

They seem to exist somewhere between reality and the unknown, belonging neither entirely to the present nor fully to tomorrow.

And yet, things that have not happened still manage to shape the choices we make and the feelings we carry today.

Wishing may be, in itself, an act of humility.

It reminds us that some things can only be waited for.

Some things can only be hoped for.

And some things, no matter how small they may seem, may never unfold as we imagined.

Over time, I’ve started to notice a difference between wishes and goals.

Goals are things we can plan for and work towards. We measure progress and tell ourselves that, with enough effort, we will eventually arrive.

Wishes feel different.

They often point towards things that cannot be achieved through effort alone.

Perhaps this is why wishing can feel strangely humbling.

It asks us to acknowledge that not everything can be solved, earned, or arranged according to our plans.

Sometimes, all we can do is wait.

Sometimes, all we can do is hope.

Hope may exist precisely because the future cannot be predicted.

If everything had already been decided, wishes would lose their meaning.

If everything could be controlled, perhaps there would be no need to make wishes at all.

Wishes are born from uncertainty.

They exist within the realm of perhaps.

I have also found myself wondering whether wishes truly change the future, or whether they quietly transform the person making them.

I never got that cruffin.

Yet during the days leading up to my appointment, the anticipation itself brought its own quiet joy.

For a while, I had something to look forward to.

Something ordinary.

Something good.

Maybe the value of a wish does not depend entirely on whether it comes true.

Perhaps it lies in what it does to us while we are waiting.

The way it gives shape to tomorrow.

The way it gently pulls us forward.

Wishing makes me feel small.

Because it requires acknowledging something difficult:

I do not have complete control over my life.

I can hope.

I can wait.

I can pray.

But I cannot decide.

When I think back to that birthday wish now, I still smile at how ordinary it was.

Just a cruffin.

Nothing grand.

But there seems to be something profoundly human about wanting small things.

A favourite pastry after an appointment.

A conversation that lasts a little longer.

A reunion.

Another spring.

A little more time.

If wishes may never come true, why do we continue to make them?

Why do we continue to place our hopes in tomorrow?

Maybe it is because wishes are not simply about the future.

They are consciousness reaching towards something that has not yet happened.

On dream, consciousness, and what we call reality.

I am someone who dreams almost every night.

Sometimes, all it takes is closing my eyes before I slip into another world. Even a brief nap on a bus can carry me into a dream.

What fascinates me is that the waking world does not disappear completely. The vibration of the bus engine, fragments of conversations from strangers, the automated voice announcing the next stop — all of these can quietly weave themselves into the dream, becoming part of a story that did not exist just moments before.

To this day, I have never learned how to control my dreams. Perhaps that is precisely what makes them so captivating. Like life itself, dreams unfold beyond our control. We never know whom we might encounter, where we might end up, or what version of ourselves we might become. It is this uncertainty that makes dreams both beautiful and mysterious.

There was a period in my life when I became deeply attached to dreaming. I did not look forward to sleep merely because I was tired. I looked forward to it because I wanted to dream.

My dreams are rarely connected by a continuous storyline, yet they often share remarkably similar settings. There are places I have visited repeatedly since childhood — buildings that do not exist in the waking world, yet feel profoundly familiar within dreams. I know where they are. I know how to move through them. Entering them feels less like discovery and more like returning somewhere I have been before.

Some details recur with striking consistency. The elevators inside these buildings do not move up or down. Instead, they travel horizontally, carrying people across different spaces. And I almost always find myself high above the ground, looking down upon cities and landscapes below, yet rarely feeling afraid.

Sometimes, I return to the clouds. There, I experience a sense of stillness and peace. I do not need to be seen, nor do I need to be found. I simply exist.

Even now, I cannot explain why these scenes continue to reappear throughout my life. They may be nothing more than the random creations of a dreaming brain. Or perhaps they are simply part of my own private language of dreams.

Whenever these places return, I am left with the same peculiar feeling:

I am not arriving somewhere new.

I am coming back to somewhere that has always existed.

I rarely have nightmares. More often, dreams offer me another way of experiencing life.

I have also noticed that my dreams are almost always experienced from a first-person perspective. Just as in waking life, I never actually see myself. I observe the dream world through my own eyes. I feel the wind, the warmth, the joy and sorrow within it. I know that I am there, yet I have never viewed myself as an outsider.

My dreams are in colour.

And the version of me that appears within them often seems freer than the person I am while awake. I frequently find myself flying, or leaping impossibly high and far, effortlessly overcoming distances that would be impossible in reality.

There is no fear.

No limitation.

No concern about falling.

I genuinely like the person I become in dreams.

Carefree. Unrestricted. At peace.

Sometimes, I cannot help but wonder which version of myself is the more authentic one. The person constrained by responsibilities, time, and the limitations of the body? Or the one who moves freely through dreamscapes, untouched by the rules of the waking world?

I couldn’t help thinking of Zhuang Zhou’s famous dream of the butterfly.

Zhuang Zhou dreamed that he was a butterfly, fluttering happily without any awareness that he had once been Zhuang Zhou. Upon waking, he found himself once again to be Zhuang Zhou. Yet a troubling question remained: was Zhuang Zhou dreaming that he was a butterfly, or was the butterfly dreaming that it was Zhuang Zhou?

More than two thousand years later, we still do not have an answer.

We naturally assume that the waking world is reality, while dreams belong to the realm of illusion. Yet the joy we feel in dreams is real.

So is fear.

So is grief.

And so is love.

While we are dreaming, we rarely question the reality of what we experience. What transforms a dream into “just a dream” is often nothing more than the act of waking up.

In Chinese culture, there is a saying: “What occupies the mind during the day will appear in dreams at night.”

Dreams therefore seem deeply connected to our daily thoughts and emotions. Modern psychology offers similar perspectives, suggesting that dreams may play a role in memory consolidation and emotional regulation. Feelings left unresolved during the day may re-emerge in another form at night.

Yet reality appears more complicated than that.

For a long period of my life, there was one person I thought about every single day. Someone who had already left. I assumed that if dreams truly reflected the contents of our minds, then eventually we would meet again there.

But we never did.

Not once.

In waking life, our paths had already diverged completely. I had imagined that dreams might offer one final place where reunion remained possible.

But even dreams remained silent.

Eventually, I realised that perhaps some forms of longing cannot be fulfilled through dreaming. Instead, it was insignificant people and forgotten fragments of memory that appeared unexpectedly in my dreams.

This led me to wonder: are dreams really extensions of our waking thoughts? If dreaming is part of the brain’s process of organising information, then who determines what remains and what disappears? What role does consciousness play within this process?

Whether it is joy, grief, fear, or longing, the emotions experienced in dreams are often impossible to ignore. The details of a dream may fade quickly, yet the feelings can linger long after waking. A beautiful dream can shape my mood for the entire day; a distressing one can leave behind unease that lingers for hours.

If dreams are merely illusions, why do the emotions they evoke feel so undeniably real?

There are moments when I struggle to distinguish whether something truly happened or existed only within a dream. Occasionally, I experience déjà vu — a place, a conversation, a fleeting moment that feels strangely familiar. I do not know whether such experiences arise from errors of memory or from traces left behind by dreams.

Sleep itself is a curious phenomenon.

We accept it so naturally: closing our eyes, surrendering our awareness of the world, and returning to consciousness several hours later. Yet the more I think about it, the stranger it becomes.

In the space between closing and opening our eyes, hours disappear.

Our bodies remain here, lying quietly within this world.

Yet consciousness seems to journey elsewhere.

In waking life, we experience reality through the body. We walk, touch, observe, and remain bound by distance and time. Much of our understanding of reality is built upon bodily perception. Dreams, however, appear to follow a different set of rules. The body lies still, yet consciousness travels through cities, revisits childhood memories, encounters people who have long since gone, and sometimes lives entirely different lives.

If consciousness can only exist within the familiar structure of space and time, why do dreams present such radically different modes of experience? Could dreams be reminding us that our understanding of dimensions arises primarily from the body rather than from consciousness itself?

Of course, I cannot prove that dreams originate from another dimension, nor can I prove the existence of parallel universes.

Still, I cannot help but ask:

If all experiences of reality ultimately depend upon consciousness, what allows us to assume with such certainty that waking life is more real than dreaming?

Is reality an inherent property of the external world? Or does it emerge through conscious participation? If no consciousness existed to perceive, remember, or observe, would what we call “reality” still retain its meaning?

Perhaps dreams prove nothing at all.

But they may remind us that our understanding of reality is far more limited than we tend to believe.

Zhuang Zhou left us no answer.

He left us only with a question.

And even now, we continue to stand at the boundary between dreams and waking life, wondering:

Are we the ones experiencing dreams,

or are dreams, in some way, experiencing us?

On second chances, unexpected journeys, and learning to taste the life we already have.

I sometimes wonder what would happen if life came with a second chance.

Not the big dramatic kind where you get to rewrite history or fix all your mistakes. Just something small. Like getting to relive an ordinary afternoon.

Walk into the same bakery.

Order the same cruffin.

Sit by the same window, watching people rush by outside.

The film <About Time> made me think that maybe the secret to happiness is living each day twice. The first time you’re usually distracted — worrying about this and that, annoyed by things that didn’t go as planned. The second time, you already know how it ends, so you finally notice all the little things that were there all along.

Sunlight on the pavement.

A stranger smiling.

The taste of a pastry.

Just… being alive.

A cruffin is such a small thing compared to everything else in life. It’s literally just flour, butter, sugar, and some mystery filling. Pistachio cream, chocolate, fruit compote — you never really know until you bite into it. Sometimes it disappoints you. Sometimes it surprises you in the best way.

Life feels kind of the same.

I’ve spent a lot of time waiting for things to feel more manageable. Waiting until I’m “ready.” Maybe after the next hospital appointment. Or after this transplant that is, once again, quietly making its way into my story. There are journeys you choose, and others that choose you. This one, it seems, chose me.

Life doesn’t seem very interested in waiting for me though. The river in Durham keeps flowing no matter what kind of news I get. Ducks drift past like hospital appointments don’t exist. Bakeries keep selling cruffins. People still complain about the weather, miss buses, and fall in love.

Life just… carries on. Which feels incredibly rude sometimes. Or maybe that’s exactly how it’s supposed to be.

I’m starting to realise that life rarely goes according to plan. We wait for the right time, for things to make sense, for the uncertainty to disappear. But while we’re waiting for life to “properly begin,” it’s already happening all around us.

On a walk through Durham.

In a random conversation.

Inside a cruffin you picked on a completely ordinary Tuesday.

You don’t actually get to choose the filling. You can stand there pointing at the pistachio one all you want, but life might still hand you something else.

Some days are sweet.

Some are bitter.

Sometimes what you hoped for just isn’t there.

I used to think wisdom was learning how to avoid disappointment. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe disappointment and gratitude can sit together. You can have a hard day and still think, “Huh, this cruffin is actually pretty good.”

Or maybe I’m just hungry and overthinking a pastry. Wouldn’t be the first time.

What I do know is this: there won’t always be second chances. No rewinding. No tasting the same cruffin for the very first time again.

There’s only the memory that, for a little while, we were here.

And maybe that — just having the chance to taste it — is enough.

At least… I hope so.

Even in uncertain seasons of life, consciousness seems strangely unwilling to surrender to chaos.

Lately, with the health stuff and everything shifting around me, I’ve found myself in a bit of an extreme vantage point. It’s made me look at things differently. I’ve been pondering the link between time, consciousness, and the universe —— I keep coming back to the idea that if the universe is naturally drifting toward entropy and chaos, then maybe all this pain and adversity are just physical ways of feeling that force.

But it struck me that the most extraordinary thing about consciousness is its negentropy —— or at least, that’s how it feels to me.

When I’m surrounded by uncertainty yet still try to keep my surroundings in order; when my vision is blurred but I’m still pushing on with my studies; when things feel like they’re crumbling yet I manage to stay steady —— every one of those moments feels like my consciousness pushing back against the mess.

I’m starting to feel that consciousness may not really be about reaching a destination at all, but more about the process of experiencing, reflecting, and changing through what we encounter.

I like to think that we’re just the universe’s way of perceiving itself. While the body inevitably moves toward its own heat death, sometimes I wonder whether consciousness is quietly shaped through all this thinking, struggling, and inner work.

As long as we’re trying to find some order in the chaos, our consciousness is being refined. Even though I’m just a speck of stardust, the moment I choose to grow upwards, it feels like I’ve achieved my own little evolution against entropy.

That’s just what’s been on my mind this morning, in the quiet and the haze.

An Association Born from Ripples on the River.

It was a bright afternoon.

I was walking along the riverbank while a gentle breeze moved across the water. Ripples spread outward in every direction, colliding, overlapping, and interfering with one another. Together, they formed countless intricate patterns across the surface of the river.

It was an ordinary sight, one most people would probably pass without a second thought.

Yet as I watched those ripples interacting with one another, a question emerged.

Could what is happening on the surface of the river also be happening within light?

If simple waves can create such complexity through continual interaction, then what about light?

We may understand how light behaves, but do we truly understand what it is?

At that moment, another question followed.

Could the world we perceive be, in some sense, the result of an immense pattern of optical interference?

Do We Truly Understand Light?

We know how light bends and refracts, yet we do not know why the universe requires light at all.

We have measured the speed of light with extraordinary precision, yet we cannot explain why it must be this particular value.

We can describe the behaviour of light through mathematics, yet that does not necessarily mean we understand its nature.

This is not a criticism of modern physics.

In fact, it is because physics has been so successful in describing light that another question becomes easy to overlook:

Does describing a phenomenon mean understanding its essence?

If one day we could predict every behaviour of light and calculate every path it takes through the universe, would that mean we truly understand it?

If Light Is Not the Final Destination

The more I followed this line of thought, the more I found myself asking what might lie beyond it.

If light is not the final destination, then what is?

Information? Mathematical structures? Or some form of existence that we have not yet learned how to recognise?

If seemingly complex structures can emerge from the interaction of countless simple waves, could reality itself arise in a similar way?

Could it be that light does more than merely reveal the world?

Could it also participate, in some way, in the process through which the world takes shape?

This is not a theory.

It is simply a question that continues to follow me.

Inspiration from Animal Crossing

These thoughts remind me of Animal Crossing.

To the residents of the island, sunlight, shadows, stars, and everything around them constitute a real world.

If they could observe, reflect, and develop their own science, they might gradually come to understand how their world works.

Yet from outside the game, the picture looks entirely different.

To the islanders, light is part of reality.

To the creator of the game, however, light is simply one of the ways in which that reality is rendered.

What, then, of our own universe?

Is the world we understand reality itself, or merely the way reality is presented to us?

Light, Information, and Consciousness

Following these questions inevitably leads me in another direction.

Not through logic. Through something quieter.

Consciousness.

Light carries information.

Through consciousness, we interpret information.

Could there be a connection between light, information, and consciousness that we have yet to recognise?

When we speak of light, are we also speaking about information? And when we speak about information, do we inevitably find ourselves approaching consciousness?

I have a sense that these three things may not be as separate as they appear.

The distance between them may be smaller than we imagine.

Conclusion

Perhaps the universe is made of particles.

Perhaps it is made of information.

Perhaps behind everything we currently understand lies a deeper layer of reality.

When I think back to those ripples on the river that day, I realise that what fascinates me most has never been the answers themselves.

It is the way seemingly ordinary phenomena can lead us, step by step, towards deeper questions.

And whether those questions will ever have definitive answers—

perhaps they are simply meant to keep the current moving.

Reflections unconsciousness, uncertainty, and the strange experience of being alive.

Sometimes, I wonder if human consciousness is less like something that is created inside the brain, and more like a signal being received through it.

Perhaps the human body is not the source of consciousness itself, but a highly sophisticated biological interface — something capable of tuning into a particular layer of reality, much like a receiver interpreting invisible frequencies that already exist around it.

I often find myself imagining reality not as something that is continuously being created moment by moment, but as a vast structure of possibilities that may already coexist somewhere beyond our perception. If that were true, then what we experience as “time” might simply be the gradual reading of those possibilities, frame by frame, through the narrow perspective of consciousness.

Yet even within such a universe, I do not believe human life becomes meaningless or predetermined.

Perhaps the most important thing about being alive is that we are still able to experience uncertainty. Every decision, every act of love, every fear, every attempt to reach toward another person may still shape the path we consciously experience, even if countless other possibilities exist beyond it.

And maybe that is where free will truly lives — not in absolute control, but in our ability to participate in reality while never fully seeing the whole of it.

I cannot help wondering whether thoughts, emotions, and memories are forms of information that do not simply vanish when the body fails. Not necessarily as an individual “self” preserved forever, but perhaps as something that returns to a larger system we barely understand.

If so, then the value of life may never have been measured by its length at all.

Maybe the purpose of existence is not to “win,” “last,” or even fully understand the universe, but simply to experience it — to move through uncertainty consciously, while leaving traces of perception, emotion, and meaning behind us.

And perhaps that is enough.

Have you ever been under general anaesthesia?

I was recently under general anaesthesia during an organ transplant surgery, and it made me realize something so strange. The weirdest part wasn't falling asleep; it was how a chunk of time felt completely sliced out of my universe. Between closing and opening my eyes, there was no darkness, no dreams, no waiting - not even the slightest feeling of time passing. To everyone else, hours had gone by. The surgery was finished, and the world had simply moved on without me. But to my own consciousness, that whole block of time was just... gone. It was never actually lived.

It really got me thinking: what if time, as we perceive it, is just the way our minds read the world? Maybe the universe itself isn’t actually moving forward from past to future. Maybe time only feels like a sequence because our consciousness can’t take in everything all at once, so we experience reality frame by frame.

What if, in a higher dimension, every possible state of being already coexists? What if there’s no true flowing time at all, only relationships between different states? It might simply be our limitations in this 3D world that force us to think in terms of “before” and “after” in order to make sense of reality.

I guess objective time is just a shared coordinate to keep the world in sync. But lived time can only ever be felt within our own minds. When my consciousness was temporarily switched off, time completely lost its meaning to me. The universe kept going, but that piece of the universe never truly reached me.

If consciousness disappears completely, what does ‘time’ even mean to the self?