I questioned my own existence the other day. It was a quiet drive home, accompanied by the 
usual mix of comforting tunes and familiar roads. My mind wandered onto an age-old philosophical 
problem I had read of recently questioning the consciousness of others and their ability to think, their 
rational independence as opposed to the mindless slaves they always seem to be. Can I be sure they 
aren't all just faking signs of intelligence, that they aren't all just empty in the noggin, I asked myself. 
Suddenly an inexplicable thought shot across my own noggin – am I just empty on the inside? If they 
don't exist, who's to say that I do? Am I... real?
	I lost control of it all, if only for a fraction of second. My weary eyes that forever looped 
between the tachometer, windshield, and speedometer paused, setting themselves in an infinite stare 
past the soaring birds above. My consciousness, which seems to always sit just behind those same eyes, 
suddenly lost itself.  Thank goodness for empty country roads otherwise I would have ended my own 
questioned existence right then and there. 
	And yet, the inquiry stuck with me – how can I be sure that I exist? I don't ponder in a false-
reality sense, where my surroundings are mere inputs and my brain is all that is physically present. 
What I really mean to question is my own consciousness, the thing I have consistently taken for granted 
since my lackluster emergence into this pitiful world. Of everything I study and question, my very 
mental awareness is obscenely absent. Never before have I brought my thoughts to bear upon the 
depths of my own mind. 
	A glass wall – that's all there is. I try, again and again, to honestly question my existence and 
nothing results. It is as if my inner voice is suddenly speechless, incapacitated in silence, leaving 
nothing but a blurred vision of something in the distance. Something is there. I know it because I can 
sense it. It only leaves me in a stupor, a series of moments in which I am lost to this vision of 
philosophical grandeur that I cannot achieve. One day, soon, when another thought streaks across my 
mind like a brilliant comet, I will break through that glass wall to explore the pastures on the other side.

(Ian Gibson)