OPINION: My hopeful meditation

[Illustration by Chris Miller]

I think the greatest simplicity of complexity that I can hope to grasp is to gaze quietly at the night sky and ponder that humans throughout history have looked up at that same expansive sky and that long after my atoms return to Mother Earth, humans who don’t yet exist will look up at what I’m looking at right now and maybe think these very same thoughts.

That we, the players who presently strut and fret our hour upon the stage, are tethered by gravity to this rock that revolves around an ordinary sun that is just one of billions of suns in a galaxy that is just one of billions of galaxies. That’s more stars that exist than there are grains of sand that exist on our entire planet.

It’s an understatement to say that the Earth is to the universe as a single atom is to your body, but it’s a start. That’s the space we occupy.

As for the time, we live maybe 80 years on a 4.5-billion-year-old planet. That is, the time we exist here is a comparative blink of an eye in the age of our home. So, we exist for a blink on a grain of sand in the middle of conceptual infinity — and yet we still manage to get pissed about people in traffic.  Well, I do.

My point is that even though we want to understand and most people try to understand the big, heavy, basic questions of existence, the track record of human understanding ain’t great. Sun gods, Zeus, witch trials, and on and on…the parade of efforts by humans trying to figure out what this is, where it came from and why we’re here is as long as it is mistaken.

And even though people’s ego and understandable desperation for any life raft of stabilizing certitude will prompt them to push against the following premise, I feel it’s a healthy and necessary baseline to acknowledge and embrace that none of us really knows.

I’m an agnostic who leans toward atheism. But I don’t know.

I don’t think there’s a supreme being, but I don’t know.

I don’t think this is all an elaborate simulation constructed and studied by more advanced life forms.  But I don’t know.

I DO think the universe is 14 billion years old and that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. But I don’t know.

And while believers in an afterlife typically believe all those answers will be revealed in a hereafter, I believe I’ll just go back to not existing, just like I was for eternity until 1970.  But I don’t know.

And my long and labored point here is just that we’re all living beings that happen to be on the same speck of dust in the middle of infinity, and even atop that pretty remarkable togetherness in this small space, we are also joined by time — we are alive on this speck of dust at the SAME time.

And with as little as we know, as little as we can truly see, I think it’s that much more imperative that we understand that we are in many ways fumbling around in the dark and that it would benefit the greater good if rather than fueling up on the comorbidities of fear and anger, that we remember that the best existence we can make is dependent on our ability and willingness to be kind to one another.  That we seek with greater care how we’re alike rather than how we’re different.

Sometimes clothes accentuate a trait. Blue eyes may look bluer in a particular shirt, but they’re not bluer; the shirt just amplifies that trait. Similarly, I think sometimes people can magnify traits in others…some good, some bad. Not to sound facile or idiotic, but if you drink poison, you get sick. Or as my father-in-law would say in what I thought was a profoundly simple wisdom, “You plant corn, you get corn.”

Okay, I’m veering off into other terrain, so I’ll wrap up here: We’re here on this rock for two seconds in the middle of infinity and even 1,000 piddly years from now none of this will matter and no one will know the name of any of the people occupying your mind right now, so let’s try to focus on what’s in front of us…the easy breeze that rustles the trees, the moments we share with the ones we love and that big, endless sky. We’ll be gone soon enough, so let’s love what’s in front of us while we’re here.