Explorer Blog - Abandoned Mine Exploration

The End of the World

By:E.C.

When the end of the world came, it came quietly. There were no preacher's shouting at passers by to atone, there was no ancient prophecy, no untoward marks on any calendar.

By:E.C.

In fact when the end came only a few even noticed at all. On the last day it was business as usual. on the last night families ate, laughed, and fought.

In our arrogance every person, every generation sees itself positioned so prominently in the universe. Things have never been worse, the stakes had never been higher, our time must be the end of times...

And yet two days after the world was supposed to end I sat in the deepest chamber of an abandoned mine, a hundred feet below the surface and read a newspaper written decades before I was born. Nothing had changed; wars raged across the world, our enemies gathered against us, at home we struggled against the demons of our own nature.

It is comforting to think that someday our world will be swept clean, our embaressments, our shame, all forgotten with no one left to remember. But the end never comes that easily and the day after each of us wakes up and the world has not changed. On those nights I dream of the world we could ahve made for ourselves, if only we had another chance.

On those mornings haunting memories of the past and the present seem mocking. But maybe one day the end could come, to a single person; a personal apocalypse whose fires could cleanse the shame and regret. Perhaps after the end of the world came and went that person could start again, if only for themselves. Instead of waiting for judgement as we have always done, we could start again from here, we could take what was left of the world and shape the paradise we dreamed of, from the hell we feared it had become.