The Meaning of Random

There's a wall in my room covered with writing.

My desk at school lives underneath my lofted bed, in what I like to call my cave. It is home to an oddball collection of objects, photographs, and cards, including, but certainly not limited to: a teapot; a pair of devil horns; one woman's shoe containing (among other things) a fork, a clove of garlic, and an origami T-Rex head; what I can only describe as geometric magnets; twenty-odd pebbles found on the edge of the Pacific; a string of origami doves; a plastic geoduck (if you are from the East Coast, you will have to look this up); a crude music-box-without-a-box that plays “Here Comes the Sun”; and what I was told is some kind of traditional Japanese knot signifying long life.

Next to this...uh...collection is an exposed bit of wall that was once displeasingly white. I solved this problem by (of course) taping a whole lot of white printer paper to the wall, making sure the pieces were tilted at odd angles, overlapping in some places and leaving bits of the wall exposed. The wall was still white, but now it was blank page. (Let me tell you: writing on walls is one of the great overlooked pleasures in life.) This became my wall of quotes.

Whenever I read or hear a quote that grabs hold of my brain and twists it a bit, it goes on the wall. I try to keep it to quotes related to writing or life in general (these two subjects are almost the same as far as I'm concerned) but there are no ridged rules. Essentially, if I like it, it goes on the wall.

Recently I've started to see this wall as part of a deeper pattern in my thinking. I spend a lot of my time collecting things I love and surrounding myself with them. Objects, quotes, fictional characters, real characters. I take pleasure in the act of collecting, and in the random beauty of odd objects. It's as if randomness is a goal in and of itself. In my mind, randomness is beautiful and beauty is random.

These baby barnacles of thought were all swimming aimlessly around my mind looking for something to latch onto, when I happened to watch an episode of the BBC Sci-Fi series “Torchwood” titled “Random Shoes.” The episode centers on the ghost of a normal, kind of pathetic guy, who is simply trying to figure out what has happened to him. The only real clues are a few pictures of random shoes on his phone. I won't bore you with the details, but he eventually finds out how he's died and “moves on” to wherever he's going (don't ask me, I'm not dead). The thing that caught my attention was his closing voice-over:

“Life is full of near misses and absolute hits, of great love and small disasters. It's banana milkshakes and loft insulation and random shoes. It's dead ordinary and truly, truly amazing. What you've got to do is realize it's all here, now, so breathe deep and swallow it whole. Because take it from me—life just whizzes by and then all of a sudden it's—“

And that's it. The end of the episode.

So I thought, exactly. Life for me is random shoes. They may not always be the right size, and there may not always be two of them, and you may not always know why they're there, or whose they are, but they're still beautiful, and sure as hell still interesting.

I think this love of the random is related to my atheism. Existence may be random, but it's all the more beautiful for it. I've never felt the need for some deeper meaning or purpose in life; life is its own purpose, its own meaning. So, to end this post (and start a frightening pattern of taking my wisdom from TV) I'd like to leave you with the words of Joss Whedon, king of fantasy nerds everywhere:

“Well, I guess I kinda worked it out. If there's no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters...then all that matters is what we do. 'Cause that's all there is. What we do. Now. Today. I fought for so long, for redemption, for a reward, and finally just to beat the other guy, but I never got it. All I wanna do is help. I wanna help because I don't think people should suffer as they do. Because, if there's no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world.”