Thinking too hard hurts

I was going to write a piece about the nature of reality. I didn't get more than two paragraphs before I had a major case of brain freeze. My mind hit a wall, and at forty miles an hour.

The question I asked you to consider was no less than, "Is the world around us real?"

I realized that there are some questions that just shouldn't be asked. That particular one doesn't have a proper answer. There are too many ways of seeing the nature of reality, most of them explored at one time or another in works of science fiction, "The Matrix" being one of the most famous.

I now understand how a young lad I use to tutor might have felt when hit with something for the first time. He would look at me as if I had demanded that he prove the special theory of relativity. It was something that I just couldn't quite get my head around.

I like to think of myself as something of a philosopher. The whole point of having a mind, is to be able to contemplate these deeper questions. Religion, art and science are the expressions of that thought. The problem comes when you try to discuss these things. How do you even write a paper proposing the subjectivity of reality without sounding nuts? The closest you can really get is a science fiction story.

Maybe it isn't so much the questions that I am having a problem with. Maybe it's about my own answers, and how inadequate they seem. Just because I believe something to be true, I don't see how I could ever prove it. I know in my own mind that there is a God (in a manner of speaking), but there is no way I could ever prove it in a definitive way.

Just because thinking is difficult, though, doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. It's not unlike exercise. Your muscles will ache, but when the ache is gone, you are stronger for it. As we stretch our minds a little bit, we may get a little confused, but often we come out a little bit wiser for the effort. There is truth in the old saying that the brain is the strongest muscle in the human body.

Just don't ask me to prove it.