Orbital
“Inexpressibly trivial and momentous”
The ocean is boundless, its surface hazy and smooth, shimmering blue far beyond my sight. The sun pierces through gathering clouds. It reflects through the sand off the pieces of infinitesimal glass permeating, amongst rocks, debris, shells, creatures shuffling. A continuous, faint hum. The waves fold in on each other. They taper into the background until there’s this imperceivable nothing. Somewhere in between the silence and noise, I sat, holding and flipping a flimsy copy of Orbital in my hands as its pages spoke about space: six astronauts looking down on humanity, so seemingly insignificant from their vantage point.
I don’t know what it was about that moment that has stayed with me till this day. Was it the way I lost track of time, so immersed and lost in those words, detailing a perspective so far beyond my reach? Or, was it simply the way that the dusk stole the day, a beautiful orange and pink flooding the sky? Whatever it was, I can’t remember. But, there was this feeling I couldn’t place; this gnawing feeling that consumed me so. At that point, I thought it was an overwhelming realization of meaninglessness.
Because the fact of it is, we are living on a mere floating rock amongst other planets, amongst moons, amongst stars, amongst suns, amongst galaxies, endlessly expanding and collapsing onto each other, all in the vessel of ubiquitous, inescapable, inexhaustible vacantness, nothingness, space; a universe created in a millisecond, in a string of coincidences and sequences that somehow eventually led to life, to breath, to thought, and, just as easily and rapidly could be all taken away, returning to its origin of pervasive, nagging emptiness; I, you, we are a mere speck in a fleeting timeline, that stretches so inexpressibly trivial in the context of being.
All for what? What does it all matter?
I look down at my own life, approaching the end of adolescence, released from the childlessness of my youth and beguiled into the maturity of my near adulthood. My coming of age, my background, my story, my personality, my interests, my stresses, my conflicts, my anxiety, my sadness, my inexplicable pain, my overwhelming happiness, my curated identity, my life, my being, all of it should amount to total and utter insignificance.
But, strangely, that gnawing feeling wasn’t that; it wasn’t this crushing desolation of my own inconsequentiality.
Rather, it was an acknowledgement.
Because if we were created in the most arbitrary, improbable manner, being a momentary blip in a greater solar system makes it meaningless, then by its very same nature, it makes it meaningful. By the very same logic, it makes our lives important in a way beyond comprehension, a fateful inconceivability that has found its way to surviving. Everything I do matters; that memory on the beach wasn’t one of melancholy, it was one of comfort that has carried with me throughout hardships: the myriad of emotions I felt during my 18th birthday, throughout the stress I kept feeling looking at disastrous New York Time headlines, throughout the pain I felt falling out with a close friend.
In the perspective of the universe, my life on earth is so brief that it’s beautiful; I’m trying to make sense of my world, focusing so much on the little details and yet, I keep forgetting the miracle of my very existence.
In that sense, I am inevitably significant; we are inevitably significant.
