The Boulder and the Echo

The Boulder and the Echo

(A Reflection on Life’s Absurdity)

There are moments, in the unnerving quiet, when the entire architecture of reality begins to tremble. We are thrown into this beautiful, violent chaos, commanded by some silent instinct to scramble for meaning, only to have it all extinguished in the end. And in the brief, frantic space between our first breath and our last, we spin dizzying tales of purpose, of love, of legacy—anything to muffle the sound of the void.

The hardest part is not the chaos. It is the perfect, chilling silence that answers you when you scream into it. It is the final admission of a truth that hums beneath everything: the universe does not notice our caring. It never did.

And yet, how fiercely we care.

It feels as if we are all actors in a cosmic play with no script, no director, and an empty house. Billions of us, performing our roles with a desperate, heartbreaking conviction on a stage of spinning rock. We build entire worlds—our gods, our economies, our philosophies—as magnificent sets to distract from the terrifying emptiness of the backstage. We do it all to convince ourselves we are more than just an accidental confluence of atoms.

But what if the punchline to the great cosmic joke is that we are the only ones who believe it’s supposed to be serious? My mind, this relentless engine of meaning-making, is both my gift and my curse. It cannot simply exist; it must seek to understand. But the universe offers no syllabus. So I have learned to chase shadows, telling myself that love or success is the key, only to find the lock was an illusion all along. The search for meaning, I’ve realized, is what makes life so heavy. It is a thirst for a water that is not there.

But what if the void is not an enemy? What if it is simply a canvas?

In this, there is a terrifying and exhilarating freedom. If nothing inherently matters, then I am free—free from the crushing weight of a purpose I was never assigned, free from the scorecard of success and failure. The game was unwinnable from the start, which means I can finally stop playing.

It was Camus who offered a strange, defiant comfort. He asked us to imagine Sisyphus, damned to his meaningless task, as happy. Not because he reached the summit, but because he found meaning in the strain against the stone, in the defiant breath he took before walking back down the hill. To laugh in the face of absurdity. To dance with the emptiness. That is the ultimate rebellion.

So I am learning to stop demanding answers from the silence. Instead, I listen for the small, genuine echoes within it: the warmth of sun on skin, the shared laughter that hangs in the air, the taste of a simple meal. They are not the reason for living, but they are the feeling of it.

The universe owes me nothing. And so I turn to my boulder. I push, not with the hope of victory, but with the quiet dignity of the struggle itself.