Loss

Information theory has many interesting shelves in its meandering libraries. One of those shelves is about data compression. It is a pivotal shelf in our understanding of human thought. In our daily endeavours, our daily walks through the galleries of our universe, we experience far more than we can process. If we were to have the awareness of God and see all things - even only all the things within reach of our simple senses - we would be drowned and paralysed by the abundance of data.

Hence we transform and encode, compress and reify, in an attempt to survive the onslaught of sensory input and make it into useful information. And so, the gateways of perception ensure that much our experience is lost forever. It is not possible to reconstitute a single day of our lives in its entirety - the deepest forms of memory retrieval cannot recover even one day because there is no space for such a recording.

And that is why a single day in the courts of God must be as a thousand ages to us. For the definition of God must include unlimited and lossless storage. For this reason alone (although it is not an explanation entire), He must be beyond the physical structure of the universe, for the universe cannot encode itself.

And it is also why we wake and walk and return to sleep with that vague sense of loss each day, every day - even if we do not at first realise that all our aspirations are afflicted by it. For we lose so much all the time that it is second nature to us. Perhaps, ignorance of loss is relative bliss. Or perhaps, letting go of it all and being satisfied with what we keep is the greatest blessing.