THE LINEAGES UPON WHOSE FOUNDATION WE STAND
Space may be vast and beautiful, but we are the crown jewels of the universe.
When you return home to that familiar place you know oh so well, the place of your youth, the sounds and the sights and the unexplainable smells (that you can’t quite describe or put your finger on but that if you were to ask your siblings they’d know just what you’re talking about), when you see the fields you ran in or the streets you logged hundreds of miles on while peddling your bicycle, you instantly have a million memories wash over you and the nostalgia comes alive as if it were a living thing.
The interesting thing though is that the home you return to is never really at a fixed location. Its location in time and space are ever changing. I mean the earth is traveling at a thousand miles per hour as it rotates around the sun and at the same time the galaxy is rotating and moving all the time. If you wanted to traverse time (assuming that were possible) and go back to re-experience the days from which you recall this nostalgia, you’d have to know exactly where the place was located in the universe at that exact moment or else you might go back and find yourself surrounded by empty space or worse, at the event horizon of a black hole.
But imagine you could literally trace your path from birth to death across time as you traverse the planet, the solar system, the universe and you would have what is called your individual “world line.” Now imagine every human being who ever existed and how vast their world lines would be, all of us intersecting, entangling, in a beautiful dance across time and space surging forth from some point in a very distant past. You would see that we are incredibly huge in time but relatively small in space on this little planet which just happens to have the perfect conditions needed for us to be.
As three dimensional beings, we are bound by time: inching forward one second after another. Into the future we are thrust as the past closes off to us forever. We exist as the sum of literally billions of years of time, where processes and interactions had to occur just as they did in order for you to exist. Each individual of our lineages lived, discovered, dreamed, and made indelable marks in their day which echoed through time and then eventually passed on, but they left us with an inheritance that persists beyond their finite years to this day. You see, none of us exists in a vacuum. As we build our future on the established efforts of the past, just as our children and children’s children, and so forth will build things we cannot even imagine from the foundations we are laying at this very moment. We take for granted the on demand electricity, and our clean, running water, and the freedom afforded us via a giant network of traversible roads and multiple modes of transportation. Inventing the next great technologies doesn’t require us to start at building the first wheel - we build upon those before us who built upon the work of those before them and so on.
For whatever reason, we constantly try to search for meaning and fulfillment outside of ourselves among the stars, asking where there may be others like us. Not realizing that they may not exist. And we have been looking intently for a while now. But we, in fact do exist and we must stop and realize that we are incredibly special. As of this moment, we know of no other place among the millions of stars and galaxies our technologies have allowed us to view quite like us. Imagine for a moment that you were able to step outside of our world and see it from above for the very first time - how indescribably fascinating humanity would appear! In all of our goodness and imaginations as well as our heartaches and horrors, we generate so much information every second it’s mind blowing.
Now by all means, continue searching the heavens, embrace that spirit of adventure and exploring the unknown, because that too is the culmination of huge amounts of established ingenuity from our past that gave us the blessing of the Webb telescope today; whose images it bestows upon us are breathtakingly beautiful. But also remind yourself daily how special you are. Although we are far more than just physical beings, looking from that physical perspective only: of the trillions of combinations that DNA could express itself, most have never existed and will never exist - but yours does. You are alive and you have lived, and no one can take that away! Your experience in this world is one that has never been nor ever will be after you are gone. You forge through the cosmos with eons of distinctive history and experiences that all had to precisely occur so that you would be here at this moment, both equal parts unique individual and component of a collective of humanity that has the privilege of experiencing life right here and right now. Let it truly sink in how many things had to line up across the ages for you to be here now. When you stop to consider it all, it’s difficult not to be overwhelmed with gratitude. You must realize that all of that time and miraculous effort should not result in a being that lives out its days in service to that which is outside of itself, who is not nor ever will be the one of a kind person that is you. We each have to search for the truth, finding our purpose and passions that the rest of the world desperately needs. No one will spoon feed you your reason for existence, and those who attempt to should be scrutinized. The truth doesn’t care about the scrutiny because it comes out the same at the end.
The take away here is don’t just exist and feel like you’re just another cog in the wheel of the machine that trudges forward aimlessly. Because you are a part of a giant miracle transversing the galaxy made literally of star dust who happened to become physical and alive. And what a star does best is shine light across the darkness. From a grateful heart, comes creative imagination and you are experiencing the rarity of life as well as leaving your own indelible mark within the entirety of the largest framework of this incredibly rare human experience that thus far has not been found anywhere else in the cosmos. Remember your novelty, be grateful for this life, and you’ll naturally leave a legacy reaching far beyond the brevity of the time you’re allowed.
Footnotes:
Check out Sara Imari Walker’s work on Assembly Theory and Emergence
And the new release, “Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence”
