10.30 pm. Thunderstorm.
I drive through an empty highway. Just me and not another soul till the farthest my eyesight could reach. Maybe it was just me driving at a mere 60 kilometers an hour. But with the rain splashing at my face and the impact it had, me being barely able to keep my eyes open, I should say, the speed might have just been a 200 kilometers an hour in the reality that exists in my mind.
The rain hadn't stopped for hours and it wouldnt for at least another couple hours. I slowly pull down to a tree by the road and get a bit warmed by the engine. Rubbing my hands, trying to warm myself even a little bit as my breath begins to get frosty. What I was looking at was a nightmare. From being terrified of thunder to standing under a tree in the midst of the storm and a rain so furious that it seemed like an angry women expressing her sadness and disappointment. Like the woman was nature. There is a sudden hit of lightning at a spot about 300 feet to my left and my heart almost stops at the reality in standing there. I revel and repent at my aloneness and fear. The true fear of being alone strikes hard. But that scene in my eyes, through my spectacled eyes ( I wear spectacles because i can observe the world like a movie through the frame it gives ), was so magnificent in the fear it conveyed. With the magnitude of standing stranded at midnight at a highway with rain pouring down and lightning hitting the ground and thunder blasting my ear drums, I finally could tap on to the feeling of being infinetesmally small. The humbleness I felt from that experience, the feeling of being a very tiny part of the huge spectrum of nature fully dawned the next Dawn.
What a tiny little lifetime this is, though significant. In this infinitesimally small planet in the hidden insignificant corner of the Universe. Does a lifetime really matter too big? Yes it's significant because of choices I make but is it really that big materially? No. N o p e. Not at all. At times it might look that way. And then I get it : it doesn't really matter so much, this lifetime. At least not in the big picture. But from the point of view of the storm created by the flap of wings of a tiny butterfly, it matters so much. And in between, finding a balance, I learn to exist.
That's when I fully begin to grasp what Carl Sagan meant by, the pale blue dot:
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known"
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