There are things that can’t be known.
And I’m not talking about mystical forces or what happens after you die — though, sure, throw those in the mix too. I mean mundane, everyday things. Things that exist right in front of us and yet somehow remain beyond the reach of certainty.
Take grass.
How many blades of grass are there in the world right now? Not an estimate. Not some scientist’s guess with margins of error and a decimal point that implies confidence. I mean the actual number. The real-time, precisely accurate, blade-by-blade count.
No one knows.
And probably no one can know.
Then there are things no soul has ever seen — not because they’re hidden far away, but because no one’s looked yet. The inside of a particular apple, for example. You slice it open, and that’s the first time anyone has ever seen that particular pattern of seeds, that colour gradient, that tiny bruise in the flesh. Or the swirling chaos inside a freshly stirred cup of tea — unique, fleeting, unobserved. A private show for no audience.
We live surrounded by impossibly specific data points that simply drift past unnoticed. It’s not that they’re unimportant. It’s that they don’t care whether we’re counting or not. The world just does its thing. Quietly, endlessly, immeasurably.
Maybe that’s a good thing.
Maybe if we could know everything, down to the last digit, we’d go mad. Imagine being able to know exactly how many hairs are on your head — and then watching that number decrease every day. Or seeing how many minutes you’ve got left, ticking away like some grim countdown in the corner of your vision.
No thanks. I’ll take the fuzziness.
I’ll take the wonder. The uncertainty. The simple, head-scratching delight of not knowing, and never being able to know.
Some things are better left uncounted.