The best bite of oatmeal I've ever had
I was sitting on a cushioned barstool with my elbows on the granite countertop in the kitchen, eating my breakfast—hot oatmeal with diced apples, dates, and walnuts.
I don’t remember what I was thinking about before, but the next thoughts that crossed my mind were about dying and how it could all go black in an instant. And those, as it turned out, were only the first two stops on my train of thought’s journey down a deep, dark tunnel.
What if the blackness in the beginning had never changed colors? What if there were never anything? Not us or any of the rest of it. No big bang. No human evolution. No life at all. Not even planets or stars. Not even space.
Because space is still something, isn’t it? Can our sensory-dependent human minds even conceive of true nothingness? Actually, it wouldn’t even be black, but then what would it look like? What does nothing look like?
Then I looked outside, through the glass door. I saw the branches of our oak tree waggling. Sunshine dodging around the edges of the leaves and alighting on the deck, filling in the spaces left vacant by the trunk-branch-and-leaf-shaped spots of shade.
I was grateful to see anything, at that moment, let alone a scene so fresh and full of bright morning newness. In an instant, I shot up from the cavernous depths of existential depression to the light of a world reminding me of its realness.
I sighed, shook my head, raised my spoon to my mouth, and took another bite of my breakfast—and that was the best bite of oatmeal I’ve ever had.