But a Speck

The following is a rough essay I wrote after some heavy listening to This American Life.  I'd spent the summer before at a camp in the mountains, and sat for hours staring at the stars and discussing the wonders of the universe with a close friend.  During our talks, she and I mused about the wonders and horrors of life.  It is out of all this that the essay below evolved.

When the moon is new or only a sliver in the sky and no city stands to white wash the view, I frequently find myself gazing heavenward and marveling at the simultaneous futility and miracle of my existence. The Milky-way, the opposite side of our galaxy, stretching from the horizon and countless galaxies hiding behind each point of light, some so distant their image has yet to reach us, stars born and dying every moment, spewing from them the building blocks of the future, eons passing before a cloud of dust and gasses form into anything corporeal, and here I sit on my porch smoking cigarettes and listening to music, one of billions of specks on a tiny blue planet in a small solar system around a small yellow sun in one of a billion galaxies, many much larger, in an ever-expanding universe whose edges we will likely never know. And yet, nowhere in this vast expanse is there any creature exactly like me. None shares my exact combination of acids and proteins and synapses and memories and emotions and talents and skills and relationships and hopes and fears and dreams. Science tells us to respect tiny specks, because within them lies the potential for boundless wonders. We don't always know exactly why, but they tend to explode and rapidly expand until they are so great that their origins are infinitesimal, incomprehensible, and it is anyone's guess as to their true origin. By the time we are cognizant of the sheer magnitude of that former singularity, we are left grasping at our incomplete understanding of its nature to try and guess its origin. Right now, I am 25, single and barely scraping by on the meager wages of three part-time jobs in a city thousands of miles from the place I used to call home. Each day brings new fears and challenges. But I know it is only a matter of time before I will reach my critical mass and begin my own expansion. Its anyone's guess what will happen, and just as it is impossible to understand the true nature of the beginning looking back from a point so distant, so too, one cannot imagine the outcome while still sitting as a solitary speck. One day, I will look back and wonder how I ever came to be the world famous actor or the brilliant politician or the influential scientist or the beloved father and teacher, and this cramped little moment of my existence will seem impossible to reconstruct. Those who come after me, whose lives have been shaped by the precedent set at this primordial state, will never know for certain how they came to be the marvelous, singular specks they are. So for now, I smoke another cigarette, play another song, sit back and stare off into the night sky.