Absolutely

My Mum always says that there's no such thing as can't. But there is - I found it in the dictionary, just after canopy and slightly before cantaloupe. We don't like Can't. Nor do we like Impossible. We like 'can-do' morale-boosters and a hoo-hah mentality. It's a shame, really. And things like this confuse me. We obsess over death, for instance. We fight to stop it. We want forever, infinity, endless anything. In Physics, there is a search for the Theory Of Everything. That name seems to grand to me. They aren't looking for something to govern everything - the Theory won't explain the best way to spread marmalade on toast or pilot a jet fighter. But it links the foundation of Physics together and forges an idol that we can all worship. That's all we want, really. God. The Theory Of Everything. Something Infinite. Contingency and causality is what our world runs on. Causes which spawn effects which themselves become causes. All we need - all we search for - is that one constant that would prove, secure and ground our shaky societies, philosophies and ways of life. I haven't thought this out fully, and I don't pretend to be a philosopher or a scientist, but I don't believe we have any absolutes. I think it scares us. The fact that there is nothing impossible, the fact that there is nothing that does not have an end. We want something to cling to, something to hammer a guyrope into so that if all else fails in our life, at least we have that as a failsafe. But the simple fact is, I believe, that we don't have anything. There is no absolute. Admittedly, it would be unusual if I was drafted into the English rugby team tomorrow morning. But not out of the question. Is it scary? Of course it isn't. Randomness, perhaps, is the only reason why we're here. Once you accept that anything will happen, you live a little differently. The first rule in the Code of the Samurai is to always keep death in mind at all times. I burst out laughing the first time I read that - how morbid and depressing it all seemed - but their reasoning was perfect. If you always believe you are about to die, you will work harder, love truer, act more virtuous and live more carefully than you have ever done so before. That's the kind of difference that can be made, if you realise that nothing in life is permanent, and all that you have could be whisked from under you in a moment. In the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, the heroes of the novel are travelling to a planet when it launches two missiles at them. After working with their spaceship's special features, the missiles unexpectedly turn into a pot of flowers and a surprised-looking blue whale. 'That's impossible,' one of the protagonists claims. 'No', he is corrected. 'Just very, very improbable.'