Be of good cheer.
"We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion-year-old carbon
And we got to get ourselves
Back to the garden."
Joni MItchell, Woodstock, 1970
We are a speck in the universe and everything ends.
The odd thing about existential nihilism is that it doesn't necessarily destroy meaning and purpose for our lives. It focuses it. It doesn't lead me to despair. It leads me to try to live well.
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| Red giant |
The Sun appears constant and dependable. That steadiness tempts us to imagine permanence in an eternal story with good guys and bad guys: conflicts that must be resolved now or never; a present moment that decides if things are going to plan; an arc leaning toward justice.
We read the news today, oh boy.
Astronomy reminds us to lengthen our perspective from the crowded today. In deep time, the Sun will swell into a red giant and erase Earth and everyone on it. Nothing in the news changes that. It ends, and everything is erased.
I have reconciled to understanding that we have a brief window of coherence in a vast, indifferent universe. We are all aboard the Titanic, and we know its fate. Meaning must be local: in kindness offered and the care we take with one another. I can live with that. Wasn't that Jesus' message, the one I grew up hearing?
I don't need the magic parts of the big stories that religions posit to make us feel better about the reality of an indifferent universe. I am OK with the here and now, because that is what there is, and it is on us.
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Jesus’ actual message? The universe is far from indifferent and impersonal. Meaning lies in spending eternity after individual Judgment either in the light or in the dark. Meantime, kindness during this brief passage on Earth.
ReplyDeleteThere is a spirit world that exists if one chooses to tap into it in my experience. It is difficult for many of my friends to believe or accept that so I am not overbearing in expressing that belief, but also do acknowledge my own experiences. Multiple universes, staggering life, incomprehensible numbers of planets just in our galaxy, it does seem overwhelming. Even our universe has an expiration date when light will cease to exist, but I don’t believe there is an end, just a transition for the universe and ourselves.
ReplyDeleteIt sure makes Trump seem irrelevant.
LD has a good point. Let's Make America Kind Again.
ReplyDeleteThis is why we need to become an interplanetary and then an intergalactic species. Why the hell not?
ReplyDeleteDr. Strange can do it, so why not the rest of us?
DeleteMT- “why the hell not?” I suppose because we haven’t found another place in our universe that has what is necessary to support human life. Remember our own Milky Way is 100,000 light years across. Voyagers 1 and 2 have been traveling for 40 years but have only travelled 13 billion miles…. or .0022 light years. I wouldn’t pin my hopes on intergalactic colonization.
ReplyDelete