When I was 5 years old, I had an existential crisis. You might think well this is crazy how can you have an existential crisis with 5 years? Well, I was not depressed, traumatized or anything. At that time, I was just living a normal live, but it happened… 

Back then, I was living in Colombia, where my family ran a lamp business, and our home was just upstairs from the shop. I can still picture my bedroom. Everything was pink (still today my favorite color ;)) and full of girly toys. My father used to bring me to bed and wake me up the next day to go to school. I was always very close to my father. He was loving and caring and very patient. I think a skill all parents need because kids ask a lot of questions. 😉 And I was no different. 

I remember one night when he was putting me to bed, and we started talking about the size of the universe. At the time, I didn’t really know what that meant, so I asked him what the universe was like. He told me it was filled with planets and stars and that it was Infinite. I could not grasp what infinity meant, and he explained to me that it simply means that it never ends. It goes on and on and on. If you zoom out, you will have no wall that ends the infinity of the universe. There are just more stars, planets and nothing else….

I remember that I could not sleep that night. I tried to grasp this in my head and imagine the infinity of the universe. I imagined a dark space with stars, planets and nothing else… I would zoom out and imagine more stars, planets and darkness, zoom out again and again and again. Suddenly my head started to spin. I was frustrated because I could not grasp infinity – every time I thought I could grasp it, there were more stars, planets and darkness in my head – because it never ends! I was trapped in a loop I could not get out of. I couldn´t take it anymore and had to stop the loop by putting a wall around the universe – and then I realized that I could not comprehend what supposed to be the world I was living in. How can something that I cannot grasp in my head even exist? 

I started to question if the universe was really infinite? I concluded that it must be infinite because if I put a wall around it, I would start to wonder what was beyond that wall…and then what was beyond that other wall? And so on and so forth – the story would never end. I remember that I was scared and amazed at the same time. I started to ask myself questions like who/what created it? What was there before? Is this all there is? What is the purpose of all this? Every time I tried to answer it, there were more questions… I was frightened because I could not find any answer. Finally, I think I fell asleep. I don´t think I remembered this the next morning because I did not continue the thought loop. I guess I was just too scared or simply suppressed this experience for a while.  

Today, I wonder if this was my dark night of the soul and I had some sort of awakening. I still get goosebumps thinking about that night because it felt like falling into a dark space without control. No foundation, nothing that I could hold on to. I was floating in space in my head or maybe for real. Who knows…Nevertheless, it was a special experience I will never forget.  

Looking back, I think I was just curious enough to ask questions we nowadays don´t ask anymore because we are so busy with what is going on in our small world that we don´t really wonder about those topics. The idea to make something graspable that is not graspable probably led me to ask myself if there was a God. I guess this is why people refer to the universe as God – because you cannot grasp it. It has no limits, no boundaries, nothing, it is free. 

Nowadays, I wonder a lot about those deep questions. I don´t know why but when my head starts to question life, it brings me back to my bedroom above the lamp business and it lights me up.