أول ما نفعل مذ ولدنا العبث.
نعبث بأقدامنا أول ما لحظنا وجودها؛ نستكشف أطرافنا.
نعبث بأصواتنا حتى قوّمها أهلنا لغة.
عبثًا زحفنا ثم حبونا نعبث بكل ما تطاله يدانا؛ ترانا نضع حشرة بأفواهنا، عبثًا واستكشافًا.
عبثنا بأقلام فرسمنا بيوتًا ووجوهًا وقصصًا لا يراها غيرنا.
عبثنا بأخشاب فبنينا زوارق ولعب نخلّقها بعقولنا.

فمتى استعصى علينا أن حياتنا عبث بعبث؟
علام يثقل قلوبنا أن نعبث حتى نموت خالقين قصصا وملاحم تخصنا؟
أنى لنا استبدال هبة الإنسان الخالدة، الخلق من عبث، بأساطير غيرنا وقصصهم؟

Agency

I find it interesting to consider the question of agency when we think of the Coronavirus. To begin with, humans tend to assign a certain degree of ‘free-will’ to things, even inanimate objects. Chemists specifically love to do that all the time! We talk about the needs and wants of molecules, as if they are willingly choosing to behave the way they do.

For simple phenomena, it‘s easy to bring to mind the forces which actually result in the observed behavior – things fall due to gravity, not because they have an innate desire to be closer to earth. Now, with something complex enough like a virus (which on the scale of life may be argued to be the simplest life-form), it’s much easier to think of it as an independent agent that is self-interested in annihilating us so it reproduces.

But it’s just a bit of floating genetic code that fools the body of a host so it assembles more of that code. And unlike bacteria, the virus doesn’t even attack, eat, or reproduce. It just hits a cell in the right way, and the cell mindlessly starts making copies of it. In a sense, it’s a coding error that just happens to be self-replicating.