Simply Stuff: Day 20

[S] And other such stuff (20,355 / 1,000,000)

Existence was really close to itself. All of its matter and energy was smooshed together, bouncing and vibrating against itself. Although to be honest, there wasn’t much use in trying to differentiate matter from energy at this point, as it was all just kind of there together. Some time passed in this state. Or no time. It was hard to tell when there was no frame of reference. Eventually - or immediately, but definitely suddenly, all the stuff in Existence started moving away from itself. This seemed odd for Existence, because before stuff started moving apart from itself, stuff was decidedly not doing that.

After stuff started moving apart from itself, a few useful things happened. First, stuff started changing from a soupy mess of stuff-ness all smooshed together in a mass, to lots of different stuffs, which had no stuff between them. The parts of Existence which now were stuff-less became space, and space continued to grow. Interestingly enough, space kept growing in the same direction - which is to say every direction, simultaneously. But since space was growing in the same all-direction, Existence now had a frame of reference in which time passed, which brings us to our second point.

Now that stuff decided to move away from itself, a particular stuff would be in a particular place, and then that same stuff would be in a different place. An interesting behavior was that when that particular stuff would be in the different place, it would stop being in the original place. The part of Existence that made it so the stuff was not in both of those places simultaneously, was time. Time moved continually in one direction, because Existence expanded continually. Or maybe vice versa. Or neither. Who knows? Anyway, between any two given instances of time in Existence, something would almost certainly be different.

So, after a while of stuff moving around, it started to fall into patterns that it seemed to really like. Material stuff attracted other material stuff, and formed bigger material stuffs. Stuff like energy started going crazy, especially stuff like light. But all in all, stuff got way more chill, which allowed for interesting stuff to form. Gigantic spheres of stuff formed; some of them were pretty similar to each other, but some of them were pretty unique. They had distinct parts of the all-stuff in certain quantities and ratios that made them different, we’ll call them planets. Existence seemed to have hit its stride.

Out of all of these unique stuff-spheres - er, planets, there were some even more special ones. Those planets had stuff on them that was unlike any other stuff in Existence. That stuff would do stuff that none of the other stuff in the entire history of stuff-ness ever did. The special stuff pushed the bounds of the rules that all of the other stuffs agreed to abide to. Eventually, that special stuff even realized that it was stuff, and that it was part of Existence. It was pretty neat, Existence loved that part. That special stuff spread a bit for some time, turning other, non-special stuff into special stuff; but eventually it returned to obeying those same rules that the law-abiding stuff did.

All stuff kept doing its thing, moving away from itself and changing in predictable ways. Always abiding by the same set of rules that it agreed upon in the beginning, when stuff started moving in the first place. But a huge eventually arrived, and stuff stopped moving apart from itself.

“Good, now hold for 4, 3, 2, 1. Now breathe out…”

All the stuff, which had previously been perfectly content to move away from and differentiate itself from other stuff, now came collapsing back together again. Lots of time had gone into making Existence the way that it was, and it had gotten used to stuff expanding away from itself. All the rules which had been established were totally useless, given that they were based off the stuff continually moving apart. The stuff was probably not pleased to have to be smooshed back into itself again, with no chance to differentiate itself into something cool or unique. However, the stuff did have a considerable amount of time - which, by the way was a little different now - before it really got smooshed.

In the meantime, all of Existence had a pretty novel experience. Like a bull in a china shop, as some stuff would say; as all the special, unique, and distinct stuff got all obliterated back to its constituent raw stuff-ness, and then coalesced back into its original stuff-soup. Some time passed like this. Or no time. Time again became a little meaningless, as the stuff had no discernable change from which to deduce a different state. All the stuff was in the same place, doing pretty much the same thing, and not really changing. Existence was, once again, back to square one.

“And now relax. You can continue breathing normally. How was that?”.

“Well, I do feel a little more relaxed, now that you mention it.”

“Excellent. I want you to remember how I walked you through those steps, and when you’re undergoing a stressful event in the future you can go through those steps on your own, just like I showed you. Can you do that?”

“Well, yes, I supposed I can.”

“Alright, well that’s our time. See you next time, and great job.”

“Thank you.”

“Oh, one more thing. I’m upping my rates going forward, I’ve had too many clients. It’s going to be double from here on out.”

All of the stuff in Existence started moving away from itself.