Just Thinking
The Hidden Wisdom in a Bowl of Popcorn
September, 2024
Kam Zarrabi

Mutch to my surprise, I saw in the cable TV the horrible news of mass starvation, disease and slaughter that has been taking place for a long time in the Northeast African Republic of the Sudan. We are talking about, not thousands, not even hundreds of thousands, but millions of fellow humans already gone, or at the verge of what the UN calls the largest human catastrophe going on in our planet.

But these "fellow humans" speak the wrong language, are the wrong color, and pray to a wrong god; and that's obviously why their prayers are never answered! Besides, their suffering doesn't really affect us here in any real sense. It isn't like the recently discovered dead body of a dual Israeli-American citizen who was one of the hostages taken ten months ago by Hamas. According to the media, our President was heartbroken and devastated after hearing the news: Oh, he is such a gentle, sensitive man! It makes one wonder why Mr. Biden is never heartbroken and devastated by the far greater tragedies in the Sudan or elsewhere in the world! But, please don't get me wrong; I do understand: I am quite familiar with the world of political expediencies!

But, instead of worrying about things like that, and boring my readers with writing about such things, I am going to concentrate on popcorn! Next to the invention of the sliced bread, I think the biggest invention of the past two centuries was the microwavable popcorn.

Two or three times a week, I throw a bag in my microwave, and within a couple of minutes, I have a bowl of white, fluffy popcorn; a bit too salty perhaps, but who cares; I love it.

Yesterday's bowl of popcorn intrigued me. I began to examine the popped kernels, and a thought occurred to me: each kernel pops in its own unique way; and no matter how many times you make popcorn, you will never replicate the shapes or configurations of the pieces in exactly the same way. Trying to replicate a large bowl of popcorn in exactly the same configuration of each popped kernel is, in my opinion, and I am not naïve about mathematics, not just improbable, it is literally impossible.

One piece was quite interesting; it actually looked a bit like a tiny figure of a person. I let my imagination soar, and in a flight of fancy, I saw that popcorn transfigure into me. There I was, breathing, thinking, looking around and watching other pieces gradually transmute into various other familiar things. Soon I forgot I was pretending: I was looking at myself, marveling at the peculiar specialness of my very existence. Surely, I thought, I couldn't have happened as some random accident in an indifferent nature, like so many other random occurrences: I was too damn special! I was convinced that there had to have been some design, some architecture, behind the scheme of things, so finely tuned for such an infinitely unlikely event to have taken place.

But there was a nagging suspicion in my mind: Wouldn't in any other randomly popped batch of popcorn, if some of the popped kernels had the ability to think, have thought the same way as I was thinking! They would also have concluded that they were special creations whose improbable existence must have been the end result of a purposeful design by some master architect; some divine unknown!

Besides, I thought, when some event happens at random for the first time, thinking of the probability factor of it having happened is a mathematical mistake: It has already happened. But we can try to calculate the probability factor of events only when we assign a set of expected results, which would take the randomness out of the equation.

However, in spite of all that, I remained content, convinced of my unique existence and proud of my specialness! To rationalize that, I concluded that the designer/creator must be there, somewhere, even if invisible and untouchable by me. But another thought began to bother me: If everything has a designer/creator, then who or what designed the creator?! Simple, I thought; the original designer is the kind of designer that does not require its own designer: and that must be that; otherwise, the chain becomes endlessly long, which is unacceptable when everything has a beginning!

A sudden thunderclap brought me out of my hallucinatory excursion. I was back in the real world, but with a new perspective of the reality of our existence.

It was comforting to read in the Google News on my computer that astrophysicists now believe that the Andromeda galaxy is not going to collide with our Milky Way galaxy, which was originally predicted to happen in eight or ten billion years from now. So, with a sigh of relief, I decided to go to bed.