We Are So Small

We are small, really small, in the grand scheme of things. We are small in terms of physical size, but also in terms of our total time of existence. The entire existence of humanity, compared to how long the universe has been a thing, is so infinitesimal as not to have happened at all! Let alone the lifespan of an individual.

I try not to think about it much since it may lead one to become apathetic about life, amongst other things. One the plus side, it may help one stop taking life way too seriously and encourage one to enjoy the short time one has on this planet more.

Even when I'm trying not to think about such things, and just minding my business going for a walk and being in the moment, I'm often confronted with a monumental display of nature's power and the sheer colossal size of some things. I walked past a block of flats yesterday during my exercise. That block is pretty much the largest one in my neighbourhood and dwarfs all other buildings in the area. It's a large structure. Hovering over it, in the sky, was this cloud that absolutely recalibrated my sense of "large" in this case.

From the distance of the cloud, it was probably about the size of London, yet, it wasn't even the largest cloud in the sky. Clouds can be absolutely huge and, measured from base to tip, often dwarf even Mount Everest. Looking down at them from the air on a recent flight filled me with amazement about how large clouds can really be.

Now, standing far away enough, say from the moon or even Mars, these clouds would be too small to see. Not individually anyway. As far away as Saturn and even Earth herself would become nearly impossible to see with then naked eye. From Pluto, forget about it - and we're still in our solar system. From the edge of our Milky Way Galaxy, looking in, it would be trying to locate a bacterium in a pot of soup trying to locate even our sun.

BUT! Somehow we are sentient, and are able to observe all this stuff. If we are truly the only planet out here with "life", then we're truly special. The odds involved in our existing at all is just unfathomable, yet here we are. We are experiencing time at our own pace. All the history of humanity; Mesopotamia, Moorish, Mongolia, Mali, all like less than the blink of an eye, as though none of it actually happened. Imagine watching a pot of boiling water. One of the bubbles popping up and vanishing within a few microseconds, would be the entire history of the existence of life on earth from the days of the hypothetical primordial soup, to the present day of space travel and DNA sequencing.

Another way of looking at it is that we have always been here since the start, and will always be here. Since we're made of the same material as the universe, we are an integral part of the fabric of reality. That is to say we are matter and energy, both of which have been shown to the one and the same, and since the total sum of both are neither ever created nor destroyed, we've can never leave. We can only be reconstituted/repurposed. We are stardust.

Peace & Love,

Adé