Give Me Something to Make Sense Of

A Walk, Some Trees, and an Unreasonable Demand..

We were walking back from the water to our towels on the sand during a high-dose psilocybin experience. Perception was clearly altered. Colours were richer, edges softer, and patterns repeated into themselves. The sand resembled a slow-moving ocean, with the wind pushing mesmerising ripples down the beach. The world felt active and dynamic. The beach was busy, and as we headed back toward our spot, my partner, half-laughing, said we should probably act normal.

I laughed and asked what that even meant. I gestured toward the trees lining the edge of the beach. Are these trees normal? And if they are, which ones? The tall, straight ones, or the bent and twisted ones shaped by years of wind and weather?

In an environment that regularly bends trees, the bent ones are the expected outcome. They are not damaged. They are shaped by conditions. A perfectly straight tree in that same environment could just as easily be the anomaly. Once the environment is accounted for, “normal” stops being a very useful label.

The same logic applies to people. Certain environments reliably produce certain kinds of people. Economic pressure, instability, and trauma do not generate random outcomes. They generate patterns. Generational trauma clusters where conditions make it likely. When you include the environment, a lot of behaviour becomes easier to understand.

After that, conversation dropped away. We kept walking, without trying to explain or extend the idea.

Then my mind, apparently unsatisfied, decided to raise the stakes and said it.

“Give me something to make sense of.”

It did not feel aimed at the beach, the trees, or even the experience itself. It felt more basic than that. The sentence did not seem to be responding to what I was seeing so much as to the fact that I was seeing anything at all.

It felt like a background pressure shaping experience. As if, even without scenery, story, or obvious meaning, the impulse would still be there. A quiet insistence that there must be something the mind can organise itself around.

In that moment, it felt as though the need to make sense of something came first, and whatever we call reality followed after. This phrase captures the intuition itself. The mind carries a standing demand for coherence that reality keeps answering, however imperfectly.

An ongoing, incomplete response to the persistent demand of the mind that something must exist which can be understood.

Seen that way, the humour was hard to miss. Standing on a beach, surrounded by ordinary things, my mind was quietly entertaining the idea that existence itself might simply be what happens when that demand is met often enough.

Even with nothing left, the mind still seems to expect an answer.