When I look up in the night, and witness the beauty and distance of the stars, I am reminded of the words of H.P. Lovecraft, "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown", and in thinking of those words, I realize that they don't ressonate with me like they used to. When I was younger, and perhaps more naive, I saw the stars as the ultimate illustration of our insignificance to the cosmos; we are tiny little specks on a pale blue dot in the middle of a cosmic afterthought. Now, though, I see something else; a beauty in the immensity and distance of space, and time. Sure, we're barely larger than an atom on a cosmological scale, but why discount the atom? Every single particle carries with it such complexity and beauty; on the smallest level of matter and energy is a balance of chaos and order, where the tiniest of differences in the orderings of particles could mean existence or non-existence. Why concern ourselves with the scale of a star, if we even in our tiny forms can do so much?
Every second of every day, the plants that we burn as fuel within our bodies take the concentrated energy of the sun for fuel of their own; we are continually using the power of something so much more immense than we are for the simple act of continuing our existence, to say nothing of what we do with that existence. Sure, we don't have some greater purpose beyond what we desire for ourselves, but why does that matter? If a God does exist, why does her desire for us matter more than the desires we have for ourselves? We cannot force cosmic significance, it is granted to us by virtue of the breaths we take. We may be small, and we may be many, but we are equal. An alien in a far off world, looking up at the stars and pondering about their importance to the universe is no more or less important than we are. That importance may be arbitrary, and set by the observer, but if we know it is arbitrary, why not set it arbitrarily higher? Arbitary importance means importance viewing us as insignificant and significant are equally true, and thus we should care more about what makes us happy, and what makes that alien in the far off world happy.
I love you. I really, really do. If you are reading this, know that you are not alone. You are never alone. If you look up in the sky and wonder why go on, consider that I want you to. I know you can do it, I know you can get through this pain. I love you.
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