The Universe Has Terrible Manners

We talk about nature as though it has a personality. A cruel winter. An angry sea. A violent storm. Cancer attacks. Nature takes revenge. It makes sense. We understand the world through intention. If someone hurts you, you ask why. Then a tornado destroys a town and the same grammar stays with us. It struck. It claimed lives. It almost sounds guilty. But the atmosphere has no motive. The ocean is not angry. An asteroid is not cruel. That becomes harder to accept when something terrible happens. A child's death matters. Pain matters. Love matters. The fact that stars keep burning does not make grief less real. There is a kind of nihilism that mistakes scale for meaning. Your life does not become irrelevant because the universe is enormous. A song does not become meaningless because it ends. The stranger thought is that human meaning can be completely real to us while the universe remains indifferent to it. Both can be true. Maybe that is what bothers us most. We want reality itself to take a position. We want suffering to register somewhere. We want love to count beyond the people feeling it. At minimum, we would like the universe to acknowledge receipt of the complaint. It does not appear to have a customer service department.