Cupcakes

            The world is full of people unaware of their connections with others. Somewhere a baker prepares a cupcake for a woman who intends to surprise her only son with it, after he came home with a black eye. The careful application of frosting, seemingly in the pursuit of the perfect miniature torte, actually holds a far more significant role, one whose part will be played on a stage beyond the imaginable intent of the baker. Is it so ridiculous to believe that such a cupcake, sprinkles and all, could change the world? Is any formative experience in history not premised on some random combination of events and circumstances, few to none of which were produced with the full intention of the role they came to play?

            For that matter, could not anything fundamentally alter the world? Does it not? If each and every encounter between beings generates some inextricably different experience, the realities of all involved have been irrevocably dented, morphed, warped. Is not the more important question: what does not change the world? If the alteration of this huge, shared reality is inevitable, it must then be everyone’s responsibility to correctly prioritize the kind of ripples they will unintentionally put forth into this pond, teeming with life. But how can anyone prepare, prioritize, and impose order on their link in a convoluted cluster of chains without a visible beginning or end? To consciously contribute to a system successfully, must its constituent parts and procedures not be first understood to the deepest possible degree?

            Maybe reality is the beauty that follows an earthquake at a paint production center. The frantic and barely voluntary responsive movement of everything, everywhere, generating a slick mess, the careless intertwining of self-centric existences whose purposes are never fulfilled to intention, but always fulfilled. At any given moment, the unique juxtaposition of that oily spectrum across the warehouse floor paints a mosaic simultaneously so existentially tragic, yet overwhelming in sensory catharsis, that its full corpus cannot quite be understood. Intentional purpose substituted for reactive motion, but always in creation of something communal and beyond the unit of one. Maybe the failure of this allegory is the temporal nature of an earthquake, as opposed to the timeless turmoil of the actuality it’s meant to represent. The earthquake, not an. 

            Where a cupcake can be frosted with the intent of exquisite presentation and flavor, or with the goal of deep self-development, can it realistically be created with conscious intent of a particular predicted outcome to create our shared existence, our mutual reality? Individual intention in the face of blatant chaos is in this light either a flagrant waste of precious energy, or a beautiful contribution of priceless time to the unintentional project of reality. To accept the former is to don a narcissistic mask of cynicism, where the latter demands only the rosiest of tinted glasses. The acknowledgement of their falsely dichotomous nature, however, demands the rejection of self in the identification of a greater network, being.