Questions are our most powerful intellectual tool. In fact, every invention is the result of someone formulating a question, and then wrestling with that question.

There are times I feel particularly contemplative, and I thus ponder questions that are deep, and strange, and peculiar. Sometimes I find myself staring at the ceiling at night, plagued by questions that seem to come from nowhere. They aren’t practical questions, nor even necessarily useful ones — but they carry a kind of weight, a strange gravity that pulls me deeper into wonder.

• For example, I look at the human body and I wonder whether there might be life forms on other planets outside our galaxy we have not yet discovered (and may never discover). Are those life-forms human, like us? And if so, are those life forms possessed of tangible bodies like ours? Let’s imagine for a moment that they are out there somewhere; do such people, if they can be called people, have two hands like us? Ten fingers like us? Two eyes? Two ears? One mouth? Do they look like us? Or is it possible they only faintly resemble us and have completely different functionalities than our physical bodies do – some elements of greater capability, and some elements of inferior capability? Would their appearance, if not identical to our own, freak us out (or freak them out) if we saw each other?
• I wonder, for instance, whether the memories I hold so tightly are truly mine. What if the fragments that shape my past are borrowed echoes, belonging to lives before me, simply passing through me until they find a place to settle?
• And what about time? We speak of it as flowing forward, as if we’re carried along by its current. But what if it is not moving at all? What if time itself is utterly still, and it is we who wander through its frozen expanse, travelers crossing a landscape that never shifts?
• Then there are my dreams. They often feel too vivid to be mere illusions. Could it be that each dream is a brief crossing — a visit to another version of myself, in a parallel life where different choices have written a different story?
• This next one is really strange – even to me. Sometimes during a hike I walk among trees in a forest and feel almost embarrassed, as though they know something I do not. What if the forests, the oceans, even the winds have always been conscious? Perhaps their language is so vast and so slow that we mistake their seeming silence for emptiness.
• And of course, there is the oldest question of all: what is death? I cannot help but wonder if it is less of an ending and more of a translation — the same soul, the same story, simply retold in a tongue we have not yet learned to understand.

Questions. At once powerful, strange, and peculiar. I do not pretend to know what to make of such questions, yet they manifest themselves to me here and there, stealing my attention for a few minutes until the necessities of life pull me back to reality, causing me to draft a speech, engage in the culinary arts, or make my bed.