The Stars and Time

When you next have a moment, take a look up at the night's sky, when it is clear and you can see the stars. And then think on this: The stars that you gaze at, those spheres of fire now long dead that are now but signatures of light streaming to our planet—those are the very same stars that everyone who lives or who has ever lived has gazed at at one point in their lives. Imagine that. What you see in your view is the same image that someone millennia before you once saw. Such perpetuity. We are but a moment of a moment in the cosmic thread of time. And of this you might think: "How small I am! How meaningless!" Because in the face of such an incomprehensible amount of time that is what any finite, self-aware being would think! But maybe it shouldn't be so terrifying. Maybe all it is is a matter of perspective. Yes, we are here, for the shortest of times, but we are here nonetheless! We are real and we exist! We are a speck in the vastness of the universe, but we are the universe! The universe as we know it simply would not be without every single speck that makes it up. And we are not meaningless. We think we are meaningless because our definition of meaning is scaled up to the level of time entire. But that doesn't make a lot of sense when everything we are and everything we know or will ever know is at the same scale as the thread of our own existence! Our definition of meaning is not at the level of the universe or of the entirety of time—our meaning is defined by the time we are alive and existent. And in that respect I think we matter quite a whole lot!