Welcome To My World

I'm not sure what motivated me to take a trip around the world. I wasn't particularly young or old or interested in travel per se. I think I was driven more by a confluence of rather undramatic events. I'd won a small lottery, broken up with my latest girlfriend, and wasn't finding much in common with my current boss. Whatever modest career goals I still possessed could be easily put on hold, since there'll always be a need for guys who can tinker with the innards of big ships. So I broke my lease and put my meager possessions in storage.

My years working in the world of oceangoing transport had netted me enough contacts and favors to make traveling the seas a fairly inexpensive and comfortable experience. Now I figured that, with the extra money from the lottery, I could use that advantage to take more of a look at the landlubbing side of things, worldwide.

After several months of the usual dull mishaps and almost-exciting encounters, I reached the underbelly of Asia, where I disembarked and began to walk -- in the vernacular of my own typically stark, mechanical way of viewing things -- up. I made my way through the crowds of Calcutta and so forth, always heading vaguely north and east. Whereever there was a hill, if I could I climbed it.

I think my main goal at that point was not to return home from my trip just as bored with everything as when I left, only tireder. I'd heard other people speak of all the wonderful, exhilarating things that travel could bring a person, but it was beginning to look like none of these things was going to happen to me. For some reason, I thought that maybe the higher up I climbed, the more likely something adventurous would occur.Unfortunately, all that happened was the food got less edible, the air got thinner, and the temperature colder.

Gradually, I drifted into the mountains of Nepal. I hired a succession of guides, who at least provided me with a variety of new personalities to add to my catalog of memories. Problem was, once you got beyond whatever act they put on to intrigue or entertain potential Western tourists, most turned out to be just as bored with their lives as I had been with mine back in the States.

As I continued on upward into the mountains, however, one thing that did increasingly seem to be a topic of some interest and excitement among the natives was that of a very old man who lived, yep, in a cave somewhere near the top of a very large mountain. I asked if he was a holy man, since this part of the world is known for its holy men. About this, people seemed somewhat split. Oh yes, one guy swore, this old man knew everything, right down to the very last secret of the universe. But others just laughed and assured me the man didn't know much of anything, at least not the usual kind of holy man stuff.

Still, I got curious. Here was an adventure, no matter how it turned out. How old was the guy? Apparently he was Caucasian, and living more or less on his own, even though, and they all agreed on this point, he was a lot older than anyone else they knew. So whatever else he might be, he wasn't just kicking back in some esoteric version of a Florida condo

He actually lived in a cave, no less.

I became determined to find him. Finally, I would have something to tell people when I returned, different from all the usual boring stuff.

Or so I hoped.

Actually, finding him wasn't that hard. He wasn't hiding. And it turned out that he welcomed the occasional visitor from the outside. He had decided to live up high enough so as not to be constantly bugged by outsiders, but on the other hand he figured that anyone intrepid (his word) enough to come all the way up there was probably sufficiently interesting to provide some decent company. I was somewhat flattered when he told me this, since I usually think I'm not the least bit interesting.

No matter. He was.

Looks-wise, indeed, you could tell he was old. But in a way that's hard to describe. He never really went into the details of his aging process, and I was too shy to ask. But he looked like someone who had aged right up to a certain point, and then started getting young again. For example, he was mostly bald, but certain areas of his head were covered with light blonde peach fuzz. Almost like baby hair.

And his skin. It looked like it had once been really wrinkled, but then started to unwrinkle. As I say, he was hard to describe. For the first time since I left home, I wished I had a camera, but then I figure that might've been an invasion of his privacy or something.

He was dressed like a native, but nothing showy. The cave was furnished only with the bare essentials. He prepared some tea for us, served it himself, and all the while he moved fine. Yet his movements had this ... well, very old vibe to them, not just because they were creaky, but because the way he moved just made you feel like he had made those same movements a lot more times than you or I have.

But the biggest surprise was still to come, in how he explained himself, and the way that re-explained ... well, everything.

My guide had brought me to the cave entrance. I could see the old man seated comfortably in a low chair by the opposite wall. He had been reading something by a small standing lamp and looked up. He smiled.

"Welcome to my world."

There was something in the way he said it that sent chills up me. I didn't realize it at the time, but in those four words he had already given me the short version of everything that was to follow.

We exchanged pleasantries. I sat in the guest chair, sipped the tea he so hospitably brought me. While he did elicit some help from the local people, which he bartered for with his simple yet somehow vast knowledge of practical things, he preferred to do whatever he could for himself.

Of course I wanted to ask him all sorts of questions but for a while was too embarrassed to ask him anything too personal, so I skirted around the edges of it.

"How do you like it here?" "Where are you from?"

Stuff like that. All pretty silly and inane, considering where we were, and how damn old he obviously was.

He finally just helped me out. "I bet you are dying to discover just how old I am and what the heck I'm doing way up here, right?"

I stared. "Well... oh... yep."

"Are you ready to be startled?" He asked, not unkindly.

Was I ready? I couldn't have been more ready. I could hardly refrain from blurting out, "You bet, please startle me. Startle the hell out of me!"

In fact, he couldn't have been more accommodating.

When he saw my face, he smiled and nodded. "Well, I lost the exact count a long time ago, but I figure I'm roughly somewhere between eight and nine hundred."

"Years?...old?"

"Certainly." And here he quickly pointed his finger at me, as though to head off what he figured would be a tiresome and predictable rejoinder. "And yes, it is possible."

And then he sighed and smiled, as if inwardly experiencing a feeling he had relished many times before and would many times again, a moment that would never lose its pizzazz for him.

"It's possible because this is my world."

That  phrase again, said with the same weird inflection. Like from some bad movie, or an overproduced Mickey Mouse Club dance number.

I said nothing. I didn't have to. My expression, I'm sure, said it all.

 He continued to smile, his eyes gleaming. Sure, he looked old. But at that moment, with me just staring into his eyes, he also looked young. He could've been any age, every age... age in fact seemed irrelevant to the way he looked.

"If you like, I can explain how I am so old. But I don't force the story on anyone. It doesn't matter to me whether I tell it or not. But if you wish I would be happy to.

"You should understand, though, that I can't tell it without re-explaining some of the things that inevitably relate to you as well."

And this meant... what? Completely mystified, I just nodded, eagerly. I couldn't wait to hear. The weirder the better, so far as I was concerned. He didn't disappoint.

His demeanor turned a bit more serious, as though taking the time to put on his thinking cap.

"Okey-doke. Well as I said, I'm very old, compared to what we usually think of as old. But what you need to understand right up front is that, to the extent I've come to see reality as it truly is, I'm not really very old at all. True, some physical limits do apply. I will probably not be running a marathon anytime soon. But otherwise, age really has ceased to apply as an important fact of my being. And this is because"...

Here he stopped and peered at me for second, as if to check out how I was taking it all in so far. Undaunted, I just nodded again. I still wasn't sure what was going on here, but I didn't want to do anything that might make him clam up.

"... Because in fact I'll probably live forever."

I took a sip of tea. Okay, so he was nuts. Still, it might make a good story. Just so he kept going' til I had it all.

"Um... okay... so, how does that work?"

Unfazed by what he likely perceived to be my obvious duplicity, he said, "Actually, it hasn't been that easy to figure out. It took several hundred years, and I tell you, until I understood it right, life wasn't all that pleasant." He smiled. "Ever since, however, it's been great. Couldn't be better, in fact.

"More tea?"

"No thanks. So, um, what did you figure out?"

"Well, in a nutshell, here's what happened. A very long time ago, I had my near-miss. For me it was a skiing accident..."

"Near- miss?...

"Yes, that's how it starts. Your own world, that is. With a near-death experience. By the way, I'm not talking about the bit with the past flashing before your eyes, or the bright light, or the dead relatives waving at you down the long tunnel. I just mean that in your own world, you nearly die from something... could be anything, doesn't matter what it is... an accident, as in my case, disease, violent attack, whatever."

"But... you don't really die?"

"Nope. Nor are you in any way maimed. Not in your own world. If you've wound up losing a limb or chronically ill or something, then it happened in some other world than yours. That doesn't necessarily mean it was someone else's world; it just means it wasn't yours.

"It took me quite a while to understand that whether a world is someone else's or simply just not yours is actually irrelevant, but anyhow"...

I raised my hand in protest. This was getting too confusing. "Okay, I give. Ya lost me."

He smiled. "Yep, that usually happens right about now. Okay, let's take it from the top. In general, people usually do better at understanding all this when I show them the big picture. Remember though, I didn't start out with the big picture myself. It's taken me, well, let's just say, a long time to figure out as much as I have. Hopefully, at some point later on you'll thank me for having spared you several hundred years, at least, of coming to all kinds of the wrong conclusions about everything. I was not so lucky to have someone like me to talk to before I personally became aware of my own world."

"Hmm..." I was beginning to worry that, once again, I would be returning home with nothing but a bunch of boring stories, with this one distinguished only by being the most boring.

He laughed. "This is also about when people's eyes start glazing over. Look. Here's how it works. You almost die, but you escape, miraculously, into, let's call it  ‘a single universe with your name on it.’ There are many ways of explaining all this, but one way is just about as good as another. Suffice to say that reality is actually made up of infinite worlds, or universes, one for every life in it."

"Animals, too? Protoplasm?" Here my cynicism had kicked in, and with me sarcasm and cynicism are second cousins.

He didn't miss a beat. "Details, details, details. Did I say I knew everything? Come back in a few hundred years." He laughed. "Oh, that's right. You will be dead. In my world, anyway. But," he added brightly, "still alive in yours, and more likely a wise old guy, just like me. Even wiser, perhaps, for having met me when you did."

"Okay, so when I have my big accident, according to you, I'm going to die in everyone else's world, but go on living, forever, in my own?"

"Correctomongo! Give the boy a gold star!"

"But that I die in everyone else's world is still just pure speculation on your part, since I can't know that firsthand. So far as I'm concerned, I... or uh, you, uh, just keep on living. Uh, this is getting confusing."

"Well," he offered, "as I said, it's a moot point, which we can infer from the fact that other people do die all the time, even as we go on living. See, being the egocentric bloke that I was -- aren't we all, necessarily, to some degree? -- the natural assumption after a couple hundred years of me not dying was that I was a god, or some other kind of special supernatural being unlike any in the universe.

"After a while, though, the fun faded from that ego trip, and all I was left with was a lot of grief and guilt as I watched everyone else continually die off.

"Finally, more out of desperation than anything else, I resolved there must be some other explanation, and set myself to collecting every book on religion, metaphysics, physics, mythology, the occult, and so forth I could find.

"Pretty much all I did for hundreds of years was read, think, ponder and finally, I also began to pray and meditate, big-time, and I might add, nondenominationally. The universe itself no longer made any sense to me, and so I looked to every source, human and divine, that might exist, for a sensible answer to any or all of it.

"And, just like in the best works of literature, for me the breakthrough came in the form of an epiphany -- that is to say a moment of extreme clarity -- brought about by the simplest and most common of observations. One day snow was falling onto my porch rail, and with nothing else to do, I peered closely at the point where the snowflakes were falling and saw that, just before they melted, each one looked utterly different from the previous one, and the next one. These tiny differences were most apparent, strangely, at the very moment of their evaporation.

"Just like human beings, a seemingly endless succession of distinctly beautiful intricate forms, so much alike and yet, well, not. Impossible but true.

"And then I had the answer. If existence could contain an infinite number of snowflakes and people, why couldn't it also contain an infinite number of worlds? What's the difference, really? Scientists will forever struggle and fail to explain definitively how even one universe was created. Or, more importantly, why such a thing as a universe even exists at all.

"Given that, how are a billion or trillion or an infinite number of universes any more improbable than one?"

For the first time the old guy was starting to make a kind of sense. At least to me. Probably because he was sort of putting the whole thing in terms of numbers now, something I'm relatively comfortable with. "So, everyone born winds up getting their own world, and living forever? But they have to die, sometimes painful deaths, billions of times in other people's worlds? Not sure if that sounds like a great trade-off. Especially since, well, how much fun could it be living forever while everyone else just dies off? That sounds kind of lonely to me."

"You're still missing some key points which, granted, only become clear later.

"First, while in terms of uh, well, we said we would call them universes, while there are an infinite number of you in actual reality, in terms of your personal reality, you are never you more than once. In all those other worlds, whether you choose to call them other people' s or not, when you die you die. But in your own world, you miraculously survive, and after that you go on forever. You personally never experience death, though other people obviously experience your death,  just as you experience theirs.

"One of the best things about this realization is the knowledge that, in actual fact, no one ever really dies"...

"You'd think someone could've let us in on that," I retorted. "Could've saved us a lot of grief."

"Not really, if you think about it. Fact is, we don't usually grieve for the deceased, we grieve for our loss of them. I admit, though, that sometimes people do feel the suffering of others, and knowing about all this  might take some of the sting out of that. But the more I study, the less I think reality was meant to be perfect, particularly when it comes to human emotions. I think reality just works as well as it can, which you've got to admit works a lot better than we might have thought it did. If this isn't exactly heaven, it's much better than a pine box, a lot better than nothing...ness.

"Which brings me to your second point. Take a good look at me." He got up and strode across the room.

I did, again. He looked quite spry. No, spry wasn't the word. He looked, well, fully intact.

"See. Part of the reason I live up here is that, apart from some obvious health benefits, I'm still recovering from the guilt, remorse and so forth that built up during my hundreds of years of ignorant ego-tripping and... well, you get the idea. Point is, I'm not up here because I'm incapable of going anywhere in the world and still doing pretty much what I want.

"Sure, I'm old, but I'm in darn good shape. With a little care and some help from nature and modern technology, I can stay that way forever. And don't think there' s not still a ton of fun to be had."

At this point, I swear, he grinned mischievously.

I got up. "Well, that's quite a story...hmm, but it's not really a story, is it?"

"Nope. It's more like an explanation. You asked how old I was, remember? And then, naturally you wanted to know how I got to be that old. Well, I’m this old ... because you're in my world now."

He grabbed my hand in a strong, firm grip.

"The very best of luck in yours. And don't forget to have fun."

by Lee Strauss                                                                   (Copyright© 2011)