pluriverses

The streets were silent as I walked back home, and my footsteps echoed like a small frail heartbeat on the concrete. Due to not feeling perfectly well, greatly due to tiredness, I resorted to what I usually do on that occasion: putting one foot ahead of the next steadily and only cross streets when the light is green for me (something, I shamefully must admit, am accounted guilty for not doing so often).

However, my focus was robbed in a few moments and my eyes fled away from the course I had set briefly upon encountering from the corner of my eye a bright star that accompanied me to my left, but I just let it be, there in the sky. It was only upon the comfort of arriving to my street I granted my dizzy self the right to look up - after all, I was nearly home.

I looked up to find that there were several little bits and pieces of archaic light shining back at me, forgotten up in the sky. As I arrived in front of my flat, I forgot all about my concerns, about the numbing cold, about everything. I took my hat off - in a practical sense, it improved my view, but my more poetical self says it might have been in some sort of reverence to the largeness of the universe, to the ancient light shining testimony to our own little entropy coming down upon us from stars, reflected off of planets, travelling through the vastness of the cosmos, into earth’s atmosphere, through the lens of my glasses to hit my retina where my specialised neurones quickly collected this processing it abstractly through electrical impulses which traveled across my brain all the way to my occipital lobe, from where the information would be silently distributed to millions and millions of neurones in different regions causing me to consider and think of what I saw.

My mind went in a million directions, maybe as numerous as the stars itself.

I thought of it rationally, the rudimentary and self taught astronomy and astrophysics I have had access to in recent years. I thought of a metaphor I once came up with and thought was wonderfully creative - and maybe it was so for an 8 year old - that ‘friends are like stars, even if you could see them, they were always there’. I thought of how funny it is that we are stardust which can, ultimately, appreciate itself whenever appreciating the night sky. I thought of how maybe, just maybe if even for just a bit we all took a moment to reverently take our hats of, strip ourselves of little daily concerns that seem so extraordinarily troublesome, forget things that seem vastly important in our lives and just looked up to see how small we are - both before space and time - we would realise how very small both ourselves and our concerns are. But, at the same time, see that we are also gloriously significant: able to translate all these dots of light into metaphors, mathematical formulations, poems, songs, and beautiful words to one another.

Looking up reminded me of our paradox as humans: we are surprisingly intricate and complex - holding within us each a unique entire universe - and yet, we can also be extraordinarily futile and useless to the universe: if we cease to exist, it will carry on perfectly fine. We think we are part of the beauty, of the view - but we are just silent spectators in awe, given a chance to see beauty and love in a world we will never, ultimately, belong to. At the end of the day, in an equally glorious and fearsome way, we are everything, and we are nothing.



I heard some footsteps approaching, and suddenly became aware of the fact I had no idea how long I stood by the river looking up at the ancient skies: the world swallowed me up once again into it’s cares, but with a certain sense of wonder and of peace. Maybe the world, cosmos, beauty will carry on even in my absence - but none of that harsh reality can erase the wonder and exquisite honour we have in being a little piece assisting in the functioning in this vastly complex organic, ever changing machinery that is the universe. Due to this ultimate dynamic in it’s functioning, we are comforted knowing, that even if this machinery continues to work, we have a chance to allow it to never work in the exact same way - but it’s in our hands the choice as to the changes we leave, if we break other pieces, or if we help fix them.

Or, then again, I may just be spending FAR too much time with Anne of Green Gables.