The Eternal First Layer
Sometimes, I like to travel in space.
I still remember the very first time I took that journey. I must have been around fifteen years old, sitting on the beach at night alongside a close friend. Together, we looked up at the vast, black sky stretching above us, completely captivated by the brilliance of the stars. In the quiet of that night, we found ourselves talking about the infinite. We questioned where the universe truly ended, what lay beyond the edges of what we could see, and what, if anything, constituted the final boundary of space. It was the first time I experienced what you might call an existential "trip," a sudden, overwhelming expansion of my own consciousness.
Ever since that night, I have often returned to a similar mental exercise. I close my eyes and imagine looking back at the Earth from a great cosmic distance, watching it float in the void just like the rest of the planets. Viewed from afar, it is a magnificent, isolated sphere, rotating silently on its axis within its thin blanket of atmosphere. It is breathtaking to consider how many billions of things are simultaneously happening on that spinning globe. Yet, looking at the grand design of it all, you realize that nothing on Earth ever truly disappears. Nothing dissolves into absolute nothingness. Instead, everything continuously evolves, breaking down and changing its form to birth something new, over and over again in an endless loop.
When I was younger, concepts like absolute beginnings and definitive endings weren't things I considered much, apart from the small, ephemeral losses of everyday life. I suppose when you are young, with a wealth of unspent time stretching out ahead of you, the heavy weight of mortality simply doesn’t concern you. But as we grow up and begin to grasp the rigid, linear timeline of life that society prepares us for, our reality shifts. We start to look at time through a completely different lens, valuing it with an almost urgent precision. Age transforms from a number into an undeniable fact of existence, a daily reminder that our presence here is not permanent. Lately, I find myself thinking about the physical and mental tasks I can still effortlessly handle today, anchored by the awareness that in just a few short years, things will inevitably look and feel different.
To protect myself from the weight of that reality, I choose to think about it differently. As a form of psychological self-defense, I allow myself to doubt the linear finality of life. Just as traditional religions offer hope by promising that the soul's journey does not end at death, my own personal beliefs help me approach the concepts of life and mortality with far less drama and fear.
It is entirely clear to me that my mind is in a state of confusion right now; I know I am rambling, scattering thoughts and words into the wind. But I take comfort in knowing that I am certainly not the only one who gets lost in these mental labyrinths, and I am entirely at peace with the fact that I will never reach a definitive conclusion.
Instead, let us look at it through the lens of a personal fantasy I hold about our existence on Earth: a belief that there are no true beginnings and no absolute endings. Rather, our lives are part of a grand, unbroken cosmic cycle. We are constantly transitioning from one physical expression to another, from the tiniest microscopic cell to the grandest, most complex organisms. We are never static, never remaining entirely the same. Instead, we are constantly evolving, adapting, and transforming across an infinity of beautiful mutations.
After many years of practicing arts and paintings, I could see this transformation happening right before my eyes. On the canvas, a first layer is never truly erased; it is simply buried beneath the next, giving texture, depth, and history to the forms that follow. Every color blended, every shape altered, and every stroke repurposed is proof that nothing is ever wasted. Painting taught me that creation is not about making something out of nothing, but about taking what already exists and constantly shifting it into a new state of being.
