Duality of the cosmos
Neil deGrasse Tyson talked of the beautiful duality of basking both in your relevance and irrelevance to the cosmos.
“When I look up in the universe, I know I’m small, but I’m also big. I’m big because I’m connected to the universe and the universe is connected to me,” he said.
Stargazing for me is the way I ponder this duplexity. Over the weekend I was in a rural part of Missouri and at night we’d lay in the grass and look at the stars. Each year my family goes to Big Bend in West Texas, the least light-polluted skies in the country, perfect for staring right into the heart of the Milky Way. I spend most of the year looking forward to locking eyes with those skies because it opens up those philosophical conversations with yourself about what it even means to be alive.
It’s a moment to think about how tiny and irrelevant you are in the grandness of the cosmos. But you also think about the odds you are even alive. The probability of you existing is 1 in 102,685,000 — yup, that's a 10 followed by 2,685,000 zeroes. So basically zero. So that to me means we each are entrusted with a unique mission. That we do add value to living, and that we do matter because we are here for a reason even if it’s unbeknown to us. The world is created by people just like us. By us.
If we look closer, the word universe is two-fold. “Uni” is the Latin root for one or single. “Vers” in Latin means to turn. In Latin, the original word for Universe is Universum which literally means all together turned into one. It means we are each one, but together we are also one.
It’s interesting to think about how we are small but also part of something bigger. It makes us realize that literally all our problems have been experienced by someone before. All our worries, our insecurities, our shadows, and our truths- someone has wrestled with them before too.
Like the universe, we are each uni to ourselves. We are individually unique, yet we are all united in one great cosmos. We are both past, future, and most importantly, present.
(Reminds me of the Beatles nonsensical song, I am the Walrus, which does have truth in the line, “I am he, as you are he, as you are me, and we are all together.”)
Wishing you all the kindness and light in the world. We are all unique, but we are all together. Go catch some star sightings.
Maria
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