Defined

December 2025

August 22, 1963. 327,000 feet and climbing, Captain Walker checks his gauges, then radios his comms director. As he crosses 330,000 feet, base confirms it: Captain Joseph A. Walker just became Astronaut Joseph A. Walker. If you fly high enough, like Captain Walker, you'll find a line in the sky where the Earth stops and a vast void, you and I call space, begins. Ask any astrophysicist or aeronautical engineer about the Kármán line, and they'll confirm its immense importance. However, if you ask me, I'll tell you how it represents a simple yet profound reminder: the definitions you accept, knowingly or unknowingly, shape the world in which you live. Personally, I would like to be on the "knowingly" side of that equation.

When I first learned about the Kármán line, I became captivated by the idea that a boundary drawn by definition could fundamentally change how we see the world. Since learning about it, I have chased definitions. "Life," "truth," "freedom": each word carries invisible borders. I continuously lose all sense of time tracing how philosophers, scientists, and theologians draw those lines, because every border defines what is inevitable and what is impossible on either side.

When I heard that Charlie Kirk had been shot, the things inside me that were once something became nothing. Everything slowed to a simmer, and, for lack of better phrasing, the world I once knew had changed her hair and moved to LA. Emptiness is the best way to describe it. The vessel was still there, but there was certainly nothing in it. I questioned God, watched the news, scrolled through social media, and had a sudden realization. There's no such thing as an atheist. Everyone believes in something, even if that something is nothing. And just because something is signed Anonymous doesn't mean it has no author. That's why I chose the uphill battle to plan the trip, board the plane to Phoenix, and shake the hands of those who knew him well.

Growing up with a relentlessly logical and loving mother and father, and being raised in a church where right and wrong are always at battle, I found myself watching people and how they acted, reacted, and reasoned. I wondered if they were freely choosing their responses or living by the unseen definitions that they had inherited. The poem I wrote, Freedom, captured that thought: "In order to realize freedom, one must choose to think freely. Then, and only then, might one be considered free." It was through those words that I first recognized the purpose of a definition: clarity.

Archimedes said, "Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I will move the Earth." Funnily enough, a lever is only powerful because someone told it to be. Psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote that meaning is found when man defines suffering as purpose, not punishment, even quoting Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." Furthermore, Scripture shows that order begins when man stops defining himself as his own authority. Which is why I've come to believe in pursuing definitions through truth, and not the other way around. The things that remain, Christ's sacrifice, the reality of Scripture, and the existence of divine power, prove themselves by their endurance. These definitions shape not only what I believe, but how I live.

I conclude that if natural law can be superseded, it never existed. Nature is His faithfulness, and scientists study the repetitive input of God. In the absurd and urgent present, I would like to focus on defining my character over my career, as it is undoubtedly evident which matters most. And so, as the bird outside my window sings softly into the morning light, builds its nest, and one day flies away, I am reminded that the most important thing in life is, of course, life itself.