A pebble is kicked across the ground, crackling and fizzing against the other stones. The kids are tired. It’s been a long walk. The heavy bags and the scorching sun beat down, melting resolve. For most of them, it’s their first time doing such a hike. My first time, I’d never walked that distance before, let alone with a heavy pack. Now we have canvasses, tins of ravioli, woolen sheets to lie on, all comfort for a later version of us, all discomfort for the current us, weighing down our heavy backpacks.

The path we’re on is uncertain. I’d done reconnaissance months ago on a different one, under fever, music blasting in my eardrums to push me forwards, while another leader, Bear, had reconned this one. The fever seemingly returned to attack him this time. After merely one hour of walking in the sun, his scarlet face spoke the words “I can’t keep going”. So now I’m alone, accompanied by 5 kids, and need to assuage their fear and discomfort and potential lack of will.

They’re good kids, though. They’re chatting to each other a bit, not enough to get a stitch. They aren’t poking holes in me with constant questions like the cub scouts would. I can hear them now: “Cosmos, where are we going?”, “Cosmos, are we there yet?”, “Cosmos, why are we walking so far?”

It’s understandable. For a kid as young as the cubs, everything seems new and nothing makes sense, but the promise of sense lurks behind the corner. Curiosity often seems to be their driving force. In addition, they couldn’t know if their questions were good or bad until they’d asked them and until I’d answered (or merely told them “keep walking”). In that way, I guess I am like a computer, just with “keep walking” instead of throwing errors. It’s one hell of a coincidence that I share a name with the supercomputer from those kids’ books by Stephen Hawking. I loved those at their age.

The funny thing is, to the children, I’m somewhat like a computer. I have answers they don’t have. I also have to be a constant distraction, like the black squares we all carry in our pockets, so as to prevent them from paying attention to the strenuous nature of the walk. So I look ahead. We’re walking on a fairly wide path. Nobody else is coming. On our right side, a small trickle of water is running down from the top of a hill, where a fountain is placed. I realise that if water’s flowing down this side, it may well be flowing down the other side. It’s clearly leaking from the fountain.

I say to the oldest one of the boys, Lumen, loud enough for the others to hear: “What do you think? Does that stream go left or right behind that hill?” Luckily, he responds without cynicism: “Left”, then quickly changes his answer: “No, Right.” I respond: “I think it goes left.” And we carry on.

Something changes in the air as we approach the hill. There’s now an atom of expectation, of being right or wrong, even of challenging authority. Although, it may just also be that the boys are thirsty, looking to refill their bottles. So when we reach the top of the hill and see the water flowing along the right side of the path, then making an abrupt turn left along an inbuilt gully in the path, then disappearing down the left side of the path, he looks a little defeated. Not much, though; his consolation prize is water from the fountain.

The boys fill their bottles up. They’re small, despite having been told to take large ones. I realised this too late along the path, all I could do was tell them off for bringing the wrong one, and telling them to do better next time. I refill my first bottle, drink half in one big gulp, then refill again. The two litres on my back should be plenty. We sit down on benches next to the path to take a short break. From the four other kids, I hear an echo of “told you so”, and one of them hands them a small pack of Smarties to another.

“What’s going on?”, I ask them. One of them responds: “We bet on whether that power line would go to the left or to the right.” I glance back up. Funny, I hadn’t even spotted that on the way up. Both the human and and the natural objects moved unpredictably, randomly behind the hill. Although, not wholly unpredictably. I grab the map from my pocket, a printout with our path highlighted. We’re just on the edge of the first map. Had I looked at it first, I would’ve known where both the power lines and the small stream went.

I flip through the paper looking for the second page, with our destination on it. No luck. Only timetables. What? They must have forgotten to give me the second page of the map. This isn’t good. Should we keep going? We’re well beyond the halfway mark and it’s our duty as scouts to continue until the end. I have the timetable, which has points and bearings. That’s plenty. I whip out my compass to set the next azimuth, estimating how the path will continue.

The kids have returned to the hill and are pouring out their water bottles, refilling them and pouring them out again. They form a chorus of “left”-“right”. One boy, Arctos, seemingly has a lucky streak, and I hear “cheat”. I walk up to them and say: “Hey, what’s wrong?”. I get: “Arctos is cheating!”, so I ask “How?” I’m met with blank looks. I glance over to the hill. Various water streams run down the edges of the path, with dark-grey streaks running across the gravel and dust from their previous attempts. I assert: “It’s impossible to cheat.” They look at me incredulously. I grab a Landjäger.

I break the Landjäger into two halves with a sharp satisfying snapping sound. The halves I break into quarters. I get my knife and I slice the quarters into eighths. I ask: “How long do you think I can do this for?” Various guesses come from the kids – ranging from “eight times” to “forever”. Lumen says: “It depends on how sharp the knife is.”

I say: “Yeah, fair.” I chop up the eighths into slices and give them to the kids. I explain: “Well, it’s not forever. Eventually, you’ll reach something that can’t be divided with a knife, no matter how sharp it is. The ancient Greeks called this ‘indivisible piece’ an atom.”

The kids seem interested, though perhaps they’re just deferring to my authority, or perhaps they just want Landjäger. Whichever is the case, I carry on. “These atoms are so small that in a speck of dust, there’s more atoms than there are people on the planet. So if you want to calculate how water will flow down a hill, you have to calculate the movement of every atom of water against every atom of the rocks on the hill. Not even the best supercomputer in the world can do that.”

“It’s completely impossible?”

I realise now what it means. There’s no such thing as the stream, there are only the individual atoms, moving at random. We just give it the name stream because it seems like a sensible way to group together all the atoms, which all move according to simple laws.

“Well, we can say what it can’t do. It still has to follow the laws of physics. If you roll your backpack down the hill – don’t, it’ll get all wet and dusty – it won’t fly away into the sky, so we know the water won’t do that either. We also know that the water won’t just disappear and reappear. That’s all we can do.”

They seem satisfied with this answer, and I return to my backpack, compass and timetable lying on top.

How can there be no such thing as the water? When I touched the bottle to my lips, what I felt was the water flowing down my throat and quenching my thirst. That’s real. The problem is that the atoms of water have been divided beyond their meaning. But our atoms of meaning, the ones we use in our everyday lives – water, rock, path, fire, soul, meaning itself – are too big to “do” anything with. They’re to complex to calculate with and predict. All we can do with them is compose. Perhaps that’s what it means to be human – to compose, to slot all these atoms of objects into the objects themselves, meaningful yet unpredictable, composing these objects into, well, the world.

All these atoms of meaning have something in common: They’re persistent. A flowing stream of water doesn’t disappear and reappear, doesn’t stop then start at will. The world doesn’t stop. We shouldn’t either.

I grab my compass and point it towards the horizon to estimate our direction. Then I rally the kids.

“From here on out, we follow one rule. We keep going.”