Irreversible
Click to viewIn the beginning, the world was perfect, because there was no time. There was no loss, no death, no old age, no disease, no need for parting, no longing, no desires. Everything lasted forever, whatever a word like "forever" means in a world where time does not pass. There was only one creation, contained and perfect, like the pristine world inside a snowglobe.
There was not a lot of passion in the snowglobe. No creativity, no imagination, not a lot of what we would know as love. Imagination is a reshaping of the world through the power of the mind; there is no need to reshape perfection. Creativity requires a need for new creations, and any lacking in a perfect world means that it falls short of perfection. And love as most people experience it is a very individual, exclusive emotion, as anyone who has had a friend that fell in love and all but vanished from the face of the earth can tell you.
But it was happy. It was the sweet, unknowing contentment of the baby in the womb: all needs fulfilled without requiring even as much as the desire to fulfil them.
Since its inception, humanity has applied the larger portion of its energy to remain in stasis. Even things that are called risks--migrations, war, new careers, new relationships--are done in the hope that momentary risk will lead to a stronger future security: that the new land will have more and better food, that after the war will come a lasting peace, that the new love will be less prone to sudden upsets: just this once, and then things will stay the same, forever. All the stories we tell are stories about how something happened, and how the hero sought to restore order, and how he did or did not succeed. All the myths are about how something happened, and how we can even today see the changes those events left in the world: the shape of a certain stone, a pattern in the stars, How the Elephant Got His Trunk.
Humanity seeks stability in the face of a universe where the very passage of time is defined by increasing chaos.
Something set the pendulum to swinging, and we've all been working to turn back the clock ever since.