I'm a bit down. That's a very understated truth and more of a far fetched lie.
In dedication to Carl Sagan.
I breathe in, and breathe out. Somehow, this sole act combined with the compression of my heart are a warm reminder - reminder of my mortality. I look up at the sky when I feel alone, the stars, the incomprehensible vastness of the universe amazes me to no end but also reminds me every time that in this vast ocean of space - I'm just a humble bit of carbon. Human beings are not designed to live long you see, we have a very (and I cannot stress this word enough) short lifespan - not even worth a second on the current cosmic timeline.
Every other day, I wake up wondering if anything important will happen today - but the skeptic in me always reminds me that no matter what happens, it won't show up on the timeline of the species. Sure you can argue that events add up, that, the infinite probabilities existing for the next second or even the next year take a hit for every action we perform now and finally collapse into a single future - which we experience then. I wish this made me feel any better about the future, if anything, this makes me feel paranoid for the present.
We are a young species, barely into the third day of the cosmic timeline. We have inter-earth politics, wars, disasters, crimes, religions, race and what not. I feel sad for the slow human conscious, we don't constitute a second ourselves but still we are pretty bent upon petty issues. I can only wish someday, in a distant future, a man will wake in world free of the shackles which bind his conscious to the materialistic world and he would then finally understand his role in the overall scheme of things.
But why, of a sudden, have I taken such a sad direction for my life?
Well, in my opinion, the emotion of sadness is pretty subjective. You can say I have more feet resting on the planet which borne me. I understand that even though I will not live to see the next century, I know somehow, our species will endure.
Sure, a century seems like a long enough time - maybe twice the lifespan of an average man in the 1800's but when we look at it on a broader scale, it represents merely a second on the cosmic timeline. I guess this is why our species is so slow on waking up and lacks the wisdom to make an impact on the universal scale. It's just like an unstable particle in a lab, short lifespan - lots of potential. This is why most of the population of our planet is happy letting things slide, this is how they justify their greed and agenda. They simply lack the vision and the patience.
We have grown up listening to tales and watching media which popularizes the idea of Humans surviving against all odds. Well, as much as I like to say that I believe in the idea, there's a small part of me that keeps me skeptic. I ask this very simple question: What exactly do we have to offer the universe?
We just are. The sooner we confront the truth that we are just a product of a very lucky set of circumstances and that we are not special in any regard than any other life form which evolved during the same time as ours, perhaps in another sol system, we archive a state of belonging and togetherness. We begin to think just how alone we are and how we have been wasting what little we have - both time of the universe and our planet.
The global conscious is slowly waking, the last century saw remarkable leaps in our understanding of the universe. That will keep me going for now but I still feel bad for our species, we have such short lifespans that we cannot even begin to comprehend the mysteries that lie out there.
I know my eventual fate as a sole human, but my faith in the future of humanity remains unshaken.
©2012 Aman Gupta
Author Note: This article actually started out to describe all the troubles I have in my world right now and how the circumstances are testing my resistance to bow before them (and how I will not) but ended up being something else entirely. A somber reminder that we all have far more to worry about.
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