You’re living in a block of flats directly opposite another block of flats. You’re making dinner and watching the kettle boil. Remarkably it takes a longer amount of time than it would normally, so upon looking out the window you become distracted by the saga of allegedly unconnected motion displayed in the opposite building. Simultaneously as a woman is rocking a baby, a woman above her closes the curtains in a state of half-undress, a man to the left of her sets a dinner table with a flowery apron on, and a couple a few floors down snuggle watching what looks to be an explosion filled Michael-Bay-feature. The kettle clicks at 96 degrees Celsius.
Or. You’re at a concert surrounded in swaying, bouncing bodies so thoroughly you can’t move at your own will, instead moving to the will and rhythm of those around you. Were the doors to lock and the stage to burst into flames you would trample people, they would trample you and you would all die.
Or. You’re sitting with friends at home, one of whom loves listening to the radio. It’s late and the news is playing in the tones of a stern voiced woman. She announces to you that your government is voting upon the principle that bombing people might create peace in their country halfway across the world. Disgustedly you and your logical friends wait to learn that they are going to do it and wholeheartedly think it will work.
——————————————————–
Just when a minimum wage paid life in a job no one could truly enjoy, but must dolefully find some worth and hilarity in to remain sane, starts to become an unbearable monotony something happens. You’ve had it before; it’s that feeling that you get when some aspect of the cosmos or symbiosis is revealed to you for the first time. The something that happens triggers it. Something similar to the scenarios given.
Most describe it as an understanding of your insignificance. There’s a feeling of being very small in a large world. Alternatively, of being very connected to something so large that your mind is incapable of describing it in meticulous enough a fashion that the resulting presentation is comprehensive. Distinctly put- we are all made of star dust.
Or star fart.
There is less expectation for greatness when you realise it’s like a star took in nutrients and shat out what it didn’t need, and that our world is made from that. These are the atoms that make everything- everything else and ourselves.
There’s a circle of life and a circle of the infinitesimally small. Rather than make you an insignificant part of something large or just another cog in the machine, you are more the singular event in a time-line that if it were replayed with the same external inputs would still have a different yet common result. Special in singularity and still entirely boring in familiarity.
——————————————————–
Feeling so much connected with everything else and yet ineffective in size can be overwhelming. That the hugeness of the universe can take your life and turn it entirely on its head in no time at all. At the same time the connection doesn’t run in the counter direction and you are unable to do a hell of a lot to give the universe what-for.
That feeling that the something happening gives you can be enlightening and wholesome. If you are in a darker state of mind it may lead instead to this, the trampled conundrum.
How do you help? Can you? If you can…
Do you even want to? Would the universe help you? Have you the compassion to transcend the need to always get something in return?
Or can you not even get to those questions? Instead left stuck in awe at devastating enormity, while monotony gives way to exhaustion.
OreoAnonymous 