The universe has multiple tabs open
Join me in this conversation with my late cocker spaniel, who still has questions - and opinions.
Me: It fascinates me how many things can happen at once.
Cookie: The universe has always worked in parallel.
Me: Yet we experience life one moment at a time.
Somebody somewhere is getting life-changing news. A student sits outside an exam hall, notes clutched in a final, breathless review. A surgeon scrubbed in for a long operation. One family sits down to dinner while another says goodbye for the last time. A child takes tentative first steps. Rain hammers one city while another watches parched and waiting. Birds trace ancient routes across continents, obeying instincts older than any human map.
And countless other stories unfold beyond my field of view.
What fascinates is not the drama of each scene, but the fact that all of it is happening at once.
We experience life as a single line because our minds can look through only one window at a time. Truth is, stories run in parallel. The universe does not wait for us to finish noticing one before beginning another.
Because so much of modern life now arrives through screens, the closest image that comes to mind is a browser with dozens of tabs open. Some are active. Some remain quietly in the background. Some are relics we forgot to close. While a few silently eat memory even as others wait patiently for attention.
People are like that too.
Over the course of a single afternoon, we slip between roles - colleague, parent, child, partner, friend, planner, worrier, dreamer. We carry unfinished dialogues, small wins, private anxieties, and unresolved grief into rooms where only one version of ourselves is visible.
The person replying casually to a meeting invite may simultaneously be worrying about a parent’s health. The delivery rider waiting at a traffic signal might be mentally calculating school fees. The friend laughing over dinner could be carrying a grief they have never spoken aloud.
We meet only the active tabs people choose to show us.
And still, life keeps a rhythm.
Cities rise with the sun. Commuters form patterns out of chaos. Flights lift into the sky with mechanical grace. Street vendors rehearse familiar routines. Trees shift with the seasons without confusion. Our bodies perform countless invisible functions every second without asking for our permission.
Life keeps moving through an extraordinary balance of disorder and coordination.
Even the universe itself seems to operate this way. Stars ignite while others fade. Oceans swell and recede. Species disappear while new life emerges elsewhere. Galaxies collide over timescales our life clocks cannot fully comprehend. Entropy nudges systems toward disorder - and yet structure, pattern, and rhythm continue to emerge.
Maybe that is the miracle.
Not perfect order, but functional order born from overlapping, noisy complexity.
Meaning seems to exist because life happens in parallel. Joy matters because sorrow exists elsewhere at the same time. Beginnings feel urgent because endings are already unfolding. Rhythm emerge because of complexity.
Life was never meant to feel fully settled.
Maybe the skill worth learning is not how to close every tab, but how to choose which ones deserve our attention - and to recognise that the rest can remain quietly open without consuming us.
There is something comforting about this realisation. And it is that no single moment carries the burden of being the entire story. While we stare at one tab, countless other lives continue unfolding around us - ordinary and extraordinary, fragile and fierce.
The universe has always had multiple tabs open.
And somehow, despite everything, it continues to work.
🐾 Barking Truth: The miracle of life is not that everything fits together perfectly. It is that so many different stories can unfold at once and still create rhythm.
If these Conversations with Cookie resonate, you might want to stay for the next one—and share it with someone who might need to hear it.
Relatable maxxx