Daily Cascade

--Existence,-- He Said?

Prompt:
"Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity."
Democritus
Is existence as simple as the result of chance and necessity? What do you think?

----------

I don't know why but the word fruit first got my attention when I first saw this quote. Not that I'm hungry either

Why fruit, I ask myself, was so suggestive? After a thought or two, I came to the conclusion that fruit implies growth, development, and unfolding. It hints at process rather than being static. Even if chance and necessity are the soil and sunlight of existence, what grows from them is always iffy.. Ask me! I've tried to propagate new rosebushes, but only at times with success, from cuttings when I had a rose garden, a few decades ago. No rosebush that grew was 100% like its parent bush.

As such, there is always novelty in the world. Even our children are rarely like us. This means future is not fully scripted, and so unlike playing a role on stage.

Yet, this is only in one sense. This is because existence is not so simple as if it happens from a chance of physical processes that we all live through. It contains consciousness, moral awareness, creativity, longing, suffering, love and loss.

Our existence, it seems to me, is in our interpretation of it, mostly. It is in the stories we tell to ourselves and others, the values we hold openly or hidden, and the love and other emotions we feel. For example, a chance meeting between two people, sometimes, might lead to a lifelong bond. Chemistry and probability may describe how it happened, but do those fully explain what it means to the two people involved? I don't think so.

I think this may be because complex systems like human beings often have many sides to them, properties you may say, that are different than their components. It is so in nature, too. Water is a very different thing from the hydrogen and oxygen that makes it. In the same way with us humans, our lives, cultures we come in contact with, and our individual experiences make us grow in different directions from our parents.

So, even though the quote sounds correct at first glance, I must question its simplicity. This is because I also think there are factors for existence, other than chance and necessity, we may not be truly aware of; huge factors like a higher being or a higher order that we cannot wrap our little minds around.

Now that I've sounded like my philosophy teacher in high school, I think, I'll go get a piece of fruit from the fridge. An apple, maybe.