The clock is ticking. Time is always ticking. It's not exactly constant (according to the theory of relativity in a quirky little thing known as time dilation), but forever moving and never stopping. But it is only now when the new year is fogging up our windows that we are truly paying attention to its flow. In less than 24 hours, 2017 will be replaced by 2018. Beyond having to remember to pencil in "2018" instead of "2017" on our assignments and replacing our calendars, the passing of years represents the finality of the past and the unpredictability of the future. Though a vast majority of lives will not be affected by the arrival of 2018 beyond the changes stated above, its arrival is, after all, a drastic and irreversible change in general.

But humans don’t like change. It’s why we get sentimental and have a tendency to hold onto things far too tightly than what’s considered healthy. Without consistency, constants, routines and traditions, we often find ourselves lost in chaos.

Who are we without structure?

There is no answer for this or for everything we do, including our existence and how it was structured. Our earliest stages of life are all thoroughly examined by scientists – meiosis, embryonic development, birth – and these bits of information are those very stages diluted, picked apart and repackaged for the schooling of all children, another structured pattern.

We are nothing without structure, as everything we’ve ever felt and will ever feel is as result of the chemicals in our brain. Any thought or action of ours is caused by a dictated structure of neurons that starts milliseconds before, but these reactions are also caused by a mixture of the chemicals in our brain, our recent (or long ago) experiences, and mother nature. If everything we do is a reaction to everything around us, what we do will also cause an equal reaction – or lack thereof – to those surrounding us. It’s not unreasonable to conclude that everything happens as a result of everything else.

Everything happens in a series of consequences.

If everything we feel and do is pre-structured by what situates itself around us and our reactions to everything, we might not have free will at all.

We may feel in control, and we may think we’re in control, but we may simply be slaves to the chemicals in our brains, the chemicals in everyone else’s and mother nature. We might all just be biological machines, doing our parts within an infinite series of other parts, like puppets on infinite strings, to reach a predestined future.

As time goes marching on, stopping for no one, here’s a thought for the last night of 2017.