Why Do We Keep Looking for a Beginning?
NOTES & REFLECTIONS / ORIGINS, HISTORY & COSMOS
Sharad Chandel · 13 October 2026 · 8 min read
We ask where something began because we hope its origin will explain what it is. Sometimes it does. But a beginning can also become a story we use to settle questions about belonging, authority, and purpose that the past cannot settle for us.
“When did it start?” seems like a simple question. Ask it about a friendship and you might name the first meeting, the first honest conversation, or the moment you realised the person mattered. Each answer points to something real. Each makes a different event the beginning.
The question becomes harder when we ask it about a country, a tradition, or the universe. We may be looking for the earliest event, the cause of everything that followed, or an explanation of why any of it matters. Those are different enquiries, even when we give them the same name.
What interests me is how quickly we move between them. We find an origin, then ask it to tell us who belongs, what is legitimate, or how we ought to live.
01 / A creation hymn that leaves the question open
The Nāsadīya Sūkta, Rigveda 10.129, approaches creation through questions about existence, darkness, and what could have preceded the world. In Ralph T. H. Griffith’s translation, its final verses ask who can know the origin when even the gods came later. The ending leaves open whether the one overseeing creation knows.
Translations and interpretations differ. I would not turn this hymn into a single definitive statement about what an entire tradition believes. But its questioning is striking: a sacred text can approach origins without making certainty the reward.
I find that more interesting than trying to claim the hymn anticipated modern physics. Similar words do not establish the same explanation, and a poetic account is not evidence for a cosmological model.
What we can take seriously is the intellectual gesture. The question remains worth asking even when the speaker cannot establish an answer.
That changes what an origin story can do for a reader. It can give us something to think with, rather than a conclusion we must defend. Wonder survives the admission that we do not know.
02 / The beginning depends on what we are explaining
History introduces another difficulty. Even when events can be dated, choosing where to start an account is a judgement about what matters.
Consider India. An account of independence might begin with the transfer of power in 1947. An account of the republic might foreground the Constitution. An account of cultural life would have to reach much further back, following languages, communities, migrations, and traditions that do not fit neatly into either political milestone.
These are different subjects. Trouble begins when we treat a useful starting point for one as the complete origin of all the others.
The Constitution offers a particularly interesting kind of beginning. Its Preamble locates authority in the people and sets out commitments including justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity. It makes a claim about how the political community should govern itself. It does not need to establish the first appearance of every community within it.
The Constituent Assembly’s proceedings on 26 November 1949 also let us see the work behind the founding moment: discussion of the population, linguistic differences, and the challenge of framing a common Constitution. A date can mark a beginning without making the earlier work disappear.
This is where I think historical beginnings become consequential. Starting an account at a different point can change which causes we notice and whose experiences appear central. That does not make every starting point equally defensible. It means the choice needs an explanation.
“Where does this story begin?” should be followed by “What are we trying to understand by starting there?”
03 / The earliest light is already late
Science gives us ways to test accounts of the past against evidence. Its reconstruction of cosmic history is extraordinary partly because it does not depend on a human witness being present.
The universe has expanded and cooled from an early hot, dense state. One important record is the cosmic microwave background. NASA’s account of cosmic history describes how the universe became transparent around 380,000 years after the Big Bang, allowing light to travel freely. We can still detect that ancient radiation.
Even the oldest light we can observe comes from a universe that already had a history.
I like that detail because it interrupts the image of an observer watching the first instant. Scientific knowledge can reach beyond what we directly see through models and other evidence, but observing an ancient signal is different from witnessing an absolute beginning.
Inflation is a proposed early period of rapid expansion used to explain features of the universe. Questions about what powered it and what, if anything, preceded it remain unresolved. An account of the universe’s early development should not be mistaken for a demonstrated explanation of why existence itself began.
None of this makes cosmology merely another creation story. Scientific models are constrained by observations and exposed to testing. A satisfying narrative cannot substitute for that work.
But even a successful physical explanation may leave a reader asking a different question: why is there a universe at all? We should recognise when we have changed the question, rather than declare the previous answer inadequate.
04 / We ask origins to do too much
Suppose we could identify an absolute first event. What would follow from knowing it?
We might understand a causal history better. It would not automatically tell us what makes a life worthwhile. Nor would knowing that a custom is ancient establish whether we should preserve it. Age and justification are different things.
Origins can explain how a practice acquired authority without proving that the authority is deserved. They can reveal how a community formed without deciding whose voice should count within it today.
This matters because the search for beginnings can quietly become a search for permission. We ask what people originally intended because choosing for ourselves feels uncertain. We look for an earlier, purer version of a tradition because it promises a way out of present disagreement.
Sometimes that work is necessary. Recovering the history of an idea can expose an interpretation that was presented as inevitable but was actually a later choice. Evidence can correct a comforting account.
Yet finding an older version does not finish the judgement. We still have to explain why that version should guide us now.
I would be wary of any argument in which discovering the beginning removes the need to examine what followed. A practice can change. A community can admit new members. A commitment can acquire implications its founders did not fully anticipate.
05 / A beginning can be a commitment
There is another reason to care about beginnings: they let us mark a decision to proceed differently.
A constitutional founding, a new relationship, or a change in how we live can establish commitments without erasing earlier circumstances. We do not have to pretend there was nothing before the beginning we name.
This kind of beginning is less about finding the first cause and more about accepting responsibility for what happens next.
It also explains why evidence and meaning need not compete for the same job. A creation text can invite reflection. Historical enquiry can challenge an account of identity or power. Cosmology can test explanations of the universe’s development. Their questions sometimes meet, but their methods and claims remain different.
The connection I see between them is our willingness to keep asking what an origin can explain, and to notice when we are asking it for more than it can provide.
06 / What are we hoping to settle?
I would not want us to stop searching for beginnings. The search can uncover evidence, unsettle inherited certainty, and make the familiar world strange enough to notice again.
But I would want to know what answer we are expecting. Are we investigating a cause? Establishing a historical claim? Looking for a place to belong? Hoping that an original intention will spare us a difficult choice?
Those questions deserve different kinds of answers.
Perhaps the attraction of a beginning is that it promises a point beyond which we no longer have to ask why. Yet the creation hymn leaves us with uncertainty, history asks us to justify our framing, and cosmology continues to investigate beyond what is already understood.
We can value what each reveals without forcing any of them to settle our purpose.
If we finally knew exactly where everything began, what would we still have to decide for ourselves?
07 / References
Rigveda 10.129 — Griffith’s translation of the creation hymn
The Preamble — Government of India’s MyGov
Constituent Assembly proceedings, 26 November 1949
SHARAD CHANDEL
Engineering Lead · Platform, Data & ML