It’s incredible that everything I know, and by extension everything that I don’t know, can be fit inside a 3 pound organ, my brain. This organ is everything. It’s me, it’s you (or technically, my perception of you), and everything else I’ve ever observed or merely even had a thought about. Without it, the observable universe as I would know it, is nothing. There would be so much nothing I wouldn’t even know it was nothing because I wouldn’t be able to think, that’s how “nothing” it gets.

I’d like everyone to take a step back and imagine “everything.” Most people would imagine something grandiose, like, Earth, or the universe/multiverse. Others would even imagine atoms and other smaller building blocks. But to me, “everything” is all of my observations from the time I could form memories to now. The brain is an imperfect organ. It forgets things. As far as I’m concerned, memories I’ve lost have never happened. It’s only the things that I can remember, that I can think about, that are real.

Looking at the big picture, I’m incredibly young, but all of my memories, little thoughts, and as I’ve established before, everything can be condensed into my brain. Although I’m only through a fifth of my life, it already seems as if I’ve already lived two or three. I wonder how much more “everything” I’ll be exposed to in the remaining 4/5ths of my life.

I find writing about this subject extremely difficult. It’s already hard to put thoughts into words but once you add in subjects such as “everything” and “nothing” you start to sound like a crazy person. My only hope for this piece is that it makes you rethink what “everything” is to you. Every little detail, every insignificant memory, every random one-off thought, to me, that is “everything.”