Universe.
I hope at least once in your life, you have been able to get away from the noise and chaos of the city, and find yourself out in the middle of nowhere as the sun sets, and the night awakens.
If you were, I hope you were able to look upwards and experience an overwhelming sense of wonder at the indescribable majesty of the stars in the sky.
And realized that what you can see is nothing.
The size of the universe is beyond our comprehension. There’s just no way for us to experience the depth and scope of the realm in which we live in a way that does it justice.
We can speak in distances, in years of light travel, in numbers of planets, moons, stars and nebulae. It doesn’t matter how we try, there’s never going to be a way for us to explain it to ourselves. We are the inhabitants of the infinite.
And the infinite defies a perception in our imagination.
Yet if we change our perspective, and focus inwards, we find that we are giants beyond understanding. The further you focus down, into the sub atomic and the quantum realms, you realize that we are immense and eternal.
The closer we stare into the heart of matter and life, we find that we understand less and less of what makes us ‘real’.
Whatever being ‘real’ means.
To an atom, we are the universe, while to our universe, we are smaller than an atom. We stand in the middle of two possibilities that we are unable to imagine, and we find ourselves lost as we try to fathom our place between two realities that defy our basic comprehension.
It’s easy to feel out of place, when you don’t know where that place really is.
Yet we don’t need to understand the universe or the atomic realm to marvel at their beauty and complexity. One look into the heavens on a starry night is enough to fill your soul with wonder and delight, while one look deep into the heart of matter is sufficient to instill within you a deep sense of gratitude for the blessing of existence, and the miracle of awareness that we share.
Our very being makes no sense, and yet it makes every sense in the world.
So the next time you find yourself feeling lost and overwhelmed, please understand that that’s ok. We don’t really know where we are, and it’s hard to discover when we are. The universe doesn’t give us direction, or answers. Those are for us to find, and to discover the questions behind them.
Just take a breath, and realize that you are you, you are here, and you are now.
That’s all that you can know for sure, and even that is up for debate :)
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings