Celestial Contemplations

Ok, so the other day I was standing outside while collecting some more things, and I had this sudden thought to look up.

Not all that strange an urge, right?

Well it was a really clear night, surprisingly so considering that it's winter, and I was a good bit out of town. I had been picking up an old car tire and Coca Cola advertisement that I purchased from some old guy off in the countryside. I had parked my car next to a large pond (a rare sight out here) and was almost to it when I spied an abandoned canoe paddle resting on a wooden pier. Taking the opportunity to go home with more than planned, I wandered over to it. As I inspected the paddle, judging its quality and if it would fit in my car, I... I don't know the word for it, but I had this urge/inspiration/something to look up into the sky.

The water reflected the heavens above, and as I stood there gazing at the cosmos, I had this sensation of floating in space. Like I was drifting out in the void; alone but for the those massively tiny lights hovering around me.

It felt like they were staring at me, the stars, like I was this miniscule, insignificant thing compared to their vast and bright bodies.

Indifferent and inhuman.

And this epiphany washed over me:

We are so small.

We are so impossibly, unimaginably small compared to how big everything is out there. If you were to size up the earth to be equal to the size of the Milky Way, we wouldn't even be the particles that make up atoms.

And the Milky Way isn't even all that's out there; there's so much, so much more and it just keeps going and going and going. We won't ever, ever in our existence, be able to know its depth.

We won't even come anywhere close. Nothing we have done or ever could do will match to the size of it. And when we're dead and gone and dust, it'll still be there.



I shook myself from my thoughts and ran back to the car, ditching the paddle on the dock.

It took me almost half the drive back to realize that I wasn't shaking from the cold.

~Ji