For some of us, living day-to-day is not hard, it comes by pretty easy. People get up, do their chores and leave for work, whatever their work may be. Ten hours at the workplace come and go, leaving for home, with plans for the night. A peaceful dinner with the family, a walk with the dog, some more work for the more unfortunate humans among us, and for some, an existential crisis that drowns them as soon as they find a moment alone.
Their entire being crashes down on their own selves. The purposeless of this life, maybe? The meaning behind the daily rut? Will all of this just vanish one day? What does their existence signify? What does existing mean? Do they even exist, or are they a figment of nature’s imagination? How does God feature so easily, so prominently in people’s minds when for them, it seems a hazy concept. Gazing at the stars, they observe how painfully tiny those gigantic balls of fire appear. And the magnitude of nothingness engulfs them whole. Their own minuteness, their microscopic existence seems to lose all meaning in the vast, dark ether. Whatever they may do, whatever they may achieve, however they lead their lives, those lives were just a story. With a beginning and an end. A story prone to being forgotten. Lost. Considered insignificant in a long run. Or even in a short run. Even if the page carrying their story was deleted from the billions of pages of the book listing the life of every human being ever, what difference would it ever make to the world, when all they are is nothing more than a grain of sand in this endless universe. That was how fickle their life was. How momentary, how impermanent, how very tiny, and how insignificant.
A gigantic black hole exists within each of them, eating them from within. An emptiness takes home in their very souls, which nothing can seemingly fill. Some of them try to fill this vacuum with distractions. Some with extreme emotion, such as anger or hurt. Some may just devote themselves so completely to their daily lives that they don’t get to feel the gaping hole in their soul.
Cosmos is where some find solace. The very Cosmos that evokes meaninglessness, is where a shift in perspective changes the game completely. This shift is all that matters.
The vastness of the billions of light years is all but quiet existence. A silent blackness, dotted with trillions of stars, planets, nebulae, asteroids, comets, moons and dust. All too quiet. All merely there. Till our conscious minds begin to appreciate it all. The magnitude of all of it, the intelligent design within all of it, the subtle laws of nature that govern all of it, the minuteness of quarks and bosons and tiny particles that constitutes all of it, while at the same time, the sheer colossality of black holes and galaxies that populate all of it. Our existence is the sound that resounds among it all. That grasps it all, that can appreciate it all, feel it all, give meaning to it all. It’s the human consciousness that brings it all alive, as alive as a beating human heart. To think of it, we are nothing but random particles of nature that have come together to a conscious state and have begun the journey of discovering our own selves. A journey which is unbearably long, and seemingly endless, yet one that needs to be made.
This is the purpose of every human being. Reason enough for us to go about our days and journeys, expanding the horizons of the known, pondering the nature of existence, and experiencing it on behalf of the billions of stars and trillions of tons of starstuff that exists without knowing what it is… Our lives are an ode to every star that gave birth to each atom in our bodies.
To all those with a hole in the soul, the universe lives within you. Lives through you. Make it count.
Image credits: NASA.gov
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