![The media file [Christian] is by CallahanFreet.](/artists/christian/christian_head_hu5cef231d8f4180b7a037182f38f41a4e_11594_800x0_resize_q82_h1_box_2.webp)
If you don’t define your existence, life will do it for you. That goes for anything. No subject is too basic for your contemplation — not even how you think of light and dark.
Even the meaning of the sun must be considered.
![The media file [Darkness] is by CallahanFreet.](/works/52weeks/2022/1029/20221029_hu14e9dd18fc8c3016d11a32bd3f966bb8_344230_800x0_resize_q82_h1_box_2.webp)
Youth is so judgmental. When facts often seem variable, especially if defined from another perspective, I wonder about the origin of my opinions. Age now emphasizes emptiness in everything except the beauty in front of my eyes, and it has taught me what I think if that is meaningless.
Our biology affirms its value. Life on this planet evolved in the presence of light and naturally devised methods to leverage it; that is its only meaning. The camouflage of darkness is only an equally potent tool for transporting the sun’s energy.
But just because our planet developed with a star in its vicinity doesn’t mean our nature is more significant than those evolved in the absence of similar light and heat. We only dismiss other life forms because we don’t understand them.
Confidence and fear, reason and chaos, freedom and imprisonment: all human metaphors for light can be reduced to the life-giving energy of our sun, and its deadly absence.
That we thrive in light and without it cower in the darkness does not prove the existence of good and evil: gods do not live in words. It was really the circumstances of earthly living that created the metaphor for us — without awareness, we treat the contrast as law when it is only a natural definition.
Light can only be good by concluding our provenance is the only one possible. If the development of life in darkness is viable, then what meaning do our metaphors hold?