Less Than One Pixel
Updated: Feb 6, 2022
I'm feeling the pressure. It's Friday and I don't have a blog idea. Sometimes I just start writing and stuff comes out. If you read my blog last week, you'll know that my muse is on a beach in Bermuda soaking up the rays. Although, joke's on her- it's kind of cold in Bermuda in January. So ... there's that.
I'm waiting for my online writing group to begin in a few minutes. The first class back after the holidays. It's the one true community of like-minded peeps I have at the moment. It's a good group - talented, honest, and forgiving. Which, if you think about, is pretty bottom line behaviour for decent human beings and yet, it's a hard combination to find. So, I am grateful.
My mind is a bit fractured these days. It feels like I am straddling two different time lines. The first one where my daily life chugs along as it should, i.e. it's January, the week has seven days, I go to bed in the dark and I wake up in the dark. It all feels very linear.
But then there is this second track where time has sloooooowed down and encompasses millenia (I'd typed milleniums. Oops! Thanks spell check!) Picture a two-levelled moving sidewalk like they have at the airport (maybe even the one my muse rode on, the traitor). Up top is the Bigger Picture track. Down below is the human-constructed measures of time.
Whilst I am going about my daily/monthly life - even my whole lifetime - I am also walking the Bigger Picture track where my tiny little self is a part of this endless, timeless, meaning-of-life track. I've never felt this one so keenly as I am now since the onset of Covid or what I like to call, rather unoriginally, The Great Pause. It's like time is standing still now on the human track so that we can finally acknowledge and ponder the cosmic Bigger Picture.
For some reason, the achingly beautiful, brilliant, and mesmerizing 1927 Fritz Lang film Metropolis comes to mind here. If nothing else (and there is so much!), the film reminds us that the human condition is as it is and ever will be and yet we continue to hold out hope for something more sustainable, more equitable, more soul-filled.
And, seriously, watch this movie.
You know those illustrated timelines of human evolution compared to that of Earth itself? No? Here's an example:
I love this kind of thing because ... perspective. Turns out we are not the be-all and end-all of existence no matter how hard we try to make it so. In fact, human beings are merely a blip, less than one pixel, apparently. There is no way we've got it all figured out as yet. We're just babies in the grand scheme of things. In fact, we may still be in the gestation period of our evolution.
It's good to be humbled. It's also good to be reminded that we are in a constant state of growth, learning, and understanding. Are we making a mess as we go? You bet we are! But, for me anyway, it helps to know that Earth is timeless. The cosmos is infinite. And we are a small but integral part of it all. We can ask the big questions like, Why?, but we may never know the answers.
In the mean time, I go about my day, my week, my years. I try to find meaning while grappling with the troubling comings and goings of my fellow persons. And I remind myself that I am a part of something SO much more grand than simply envying my muse on the beach.