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. 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 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.

We are all actors in a cosmic play with no script, no director, and an empty house. Billions of us, performing our roles with 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 backstage.

We do it all to convince ourselves we are more than an accidental confluence of atoms dancing in the dark.

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 gift and curse. It cannot simply exist; it must seek to understand. But the universe offers no syllabus, no teacher’s guide to existence.

So I chase shadows, telling myself that love or success holds 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 water that was never there.

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

In this recognition lies a terrifying and exhilarating freedom. If nothing inherently matters, then I am free—liberated from the crushing weight of a purpose I was never assigned, released from the scorecard of cosmic success and failure. The game was unwinnable from the start, which means I can finally stop keeping score.

Camus offered a strange, defiant comfort in his myth of Sisyphus. He asked us to imagine the condemned king, 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 like incense, the taste of a simple meal shared with someone who sees you clearly.

These moments are not the reason for living, but they are the feeling of it. They are enough.

The universe owes me nothing, and this debt I will never collect becomes the foundation of my freedom. So I turn to my boulder—not with hope of victory, but with the quiet dignity of the struggle itself. I push because the pushing is mine to do, and in that choice, I am finally, fully human.