Stand in the place where you live Now face North Think about direction
In fact I would suggest that if you live in the Northern Hemisphere you face south. Go somewhere outdoors and quiet, face south, and plant your feet squarely on the ground. The bones of the earth are beneath you, and the soil, vegetation, air, and sunlight are all around. Stand still and feel them for a moment.
Think about the Earth, a great sphere turning in space. It spins to your left hand, and far away a shadow is travelling toward you as the earth carries you east. That’s night approaching, and you, the rocks and soil and air and all are moving inexorably on gravity’s carousel to face beyond the sun and into the depths of the universe.
With the sun gone from your eyes you can look out at infinity from your tiny blue pebble. In a truly dark sky, and you’ll need to go a way from city lights and choose a moonless night to see it, the milky way is revealed edge-on as a disk of dust and suns. Huge beyond belief but still tiny in the vastness of space and a million billion similar galaxies.
What’s that speck you’re standing on? There are 6 billion like you, eating, breathing, living thanks to a thin film of gas and soil and other struggling mewling suffering organisms on the surface of this fortunate lump of impure iron. It’s wet and warm in just about the right proportion. Most of all it has a history with each one of us. We’re each the result of untold billions of attempts, building success upon success, to find a genetic code which will express an organism which can find a niche amongst all the other organisms and all the other attempts to live and breed and re-attempt the trick of living and breathing in just this blue speck in the vasty darkness.
So stand, in the place where you live. Now face south. Think about where you came from and where you’re going. Think about direction. Think about what you find important in the great big scheme of things. You’re going to stuggle and breathe and live and die in a microsecond of cosmic time. The universe will go on around you, with you, and without you and meaning is something you make as you choose.
No one sees more than a tiny fraction of the whole, but each thing big or small is beautiful. Each other insignificant struggle is beautiful too. I believe we make meaning by appreciating this beauty in the world and lives around us. Stop and look. Breathe. Appreciate.
Love.