There are two kinds of afternoon nap. One is the perfectly ordinary nap.

The other is the nap that switches you into another world and then switches you back. And it was a nap like that which finally got me writing again after a hundred and eighty days (not really).

(Five minutes of staring into space here, with no idea what to write next.)

Now that I have finally got started, let me just ramble.

Imagine a glass window as high up as the ninth floor, and below it a main road that is main and not quite main: by some cities' standards it is not main at all, by others' it is main enough. For convenience, let's just call it the main road.

There are traffic lights at the crossroads. This detail is not padding; I have seen crossroads without them. If you open the window you can hear the lights beeping out their state, probably for the sake of blind pedestrians. Shall we call it the blind tone? Depending on the state, it goes beep... beep, or beep-beep-beep. To most people it is nothing, but if you happen to suffer from nervous exhaustion, rest assured, God will bless you.

As for the traffic coming and going on the main road (yes, well over ninety-nine per cent of roads with crossroads and traffic lights must be for cars), I can't think of anything interesting to say about it. Only one thing might be of some interest: early in the morning, or after night falls, a car may swish past with an earth-shaking noise like a colossal nose being blown, which might make a good alarm tone if you recorded it (God bless you again).

The window is tall enough that you can look down at the crossroads just sitting in your chair. Straight ahead lies one arm of the crossroads. On one side of that arm is a small cluster of villas; on the other, a school. Follow the arm and you can see a line of low hills, and further off a bigger mountain with a beautiful shape: an obtuse isosceles triangle, its top angle close to a hundred and twenty degrees, with a very small bite taken out of the peak. Sometimes it reminds you of Mount Fuji. So let's call it Apple Mountain. And what is there above all the mountains? The sky, of course. There has to be a sky.

Look how the sky keeps changing: its colours, clouds and mist, light, smells, never ending, always gone in an instant. Probably because you can never count all the factors behind it: temperature, humidity, the make-up of the air, the position of the sun, the fuel burned by every car on the road, even the grade of the lenses in your eyes (genuine, or a good fake?), and so on. Which of them are decisive? Never mind the dynamics of how it all evolves. If identifying the factors is like getting your ingredients ready, then only by working out the mechanisms can you cook every dish just as you please. So next time the weather forecast is wrong, stop grumbling. Do you know how hard it is to get a prediction task this complex to the precision and accuracy it has now? And when you burn incense at the Qingming festival, don't forget to spare a thought for old Bayes, Markov and the rest. How uncertain the world is. May God of Probability stand by your side, and may you one day cook sweet and sour ribs that don't come out as a culinary disaster.

Now imagine the inside of the window (that's right, this glass window is the only window of a small room). There is a desk, and on the desk a glass tumbler, half full of tap water. Here comes the question: suppose we draw the curtain and push the window open. What is in the glass? Glass, water, air, the main road, the beeping, Apple Mountain, the sky, or the rose-coloured glow of a sunset that happens to be under way?

This is a question for a teenage philosopher, and perhaps the more you know, the harder it is to give an answer that only has to convince yourself. But since this piece is so obviously improvised, let me give an answer.

What the glass holds is the whole world. Reach out your hand now and touch it, and you touch the whole world. Here comes another question: if we don't draw the curtain and don't push the window open, is the answer any different? The answer is: no different.

However, what you touch is only one possibility among infinitely many, and only one point in that possibility, and you cannot say exactly which point it is. If you say you don't need to be that precise, that everything described above can shrink into a single point, well, one n-th of infinity is still infinity.

All this infinity back and forth is tiresome. Let's think of a simpler, more commanding word to replace it. How about ten trillion? Simple, commanding. So the paragraph above becomes:

However, what you touch is only one possibility among ten trillion, and only one point in that possibility, and you cannot say exactly which point it is. If you say you don't need to be that precise, that everything described above can shrink into a single point, well, one n-th of ten trillion is still ten trillion.

Excellent. No problem at all.

Sure enough, I have rambled out a great heap of nonsense. Let me go back to being an arty youth, sum up my year, and then get back to my Philippine golden pineapple fruit platter (price fifteen dollars ninety, HKD). It is the 29th of December, after all:

2015: nothing special happened. Of the ten trillion possibilities of this year, I managed not to fail my charge and lived out one of them. Yet the me that ten trillion people saw is, in each of those ten trillion worlds, the only me there, and I have only had the fortune to see the one me in my own world and say goodbye to it. Since I cannot even say goodbye to every me myself, we need not feel regret about anything, just as I feel no regret at being unable to see all ten trillion views in that glass of water. After all, each view holds a whole world; see one, and you know ten trillion. If only I have had the fortune to see the one you in my world, I know ten trillion of you.

2015.12.29