Solipsistic Sonder
I’ve always understood my own cosmic insignificance;
As a child I thought that each subatomic particle was a world,
That Earth was just an electron in some greater atomic galaxy,
That even that galaxy was just a speck in an even higher plane,
And on and on ad infinitum.
To the younger me, there was no beginning and no end;
I’ve had too many science courses to still believe that.
Everything comes to an end in its own time,
Even if the number of years is so large as to be meaningless,
Everything goes on and on ad finitum.
Maybe God is just a wide-eyed child,
Peering at a mote of dust in the living room sunbeam,
Imagining our whole world.
Our billions of years are his mere moments,
The rise and fall of civilizations his mere half-formed musings.
He’s done this five times since lunch
So I have a bit of a hunch
You’re not so important as you think you are.
None of us are.
sonder
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
-Definition from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
April 18, 2018 at 3:07 am
Not if we only see the bubbles we keep ourselves locked into. So here’s a thought. What if each bubble could master heuristics and complement (not compliment) the others?
By becoming more than a part of the whole, but a functionality of it. Then we wouldn’t be insignificant all. We would be the 7 billion children of God.
Looking forward to some of your thoughts, because we don’t just age daily, we learn as well.
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April 18, 2018 at 3:11 am
Aren’t we all just cogs in the machine of life? Wouldn’t that already make us all functionalities of the whole? Hardly insignificant, but what if our God is just one of infinite? We may be significant relative to what we know, but relative to what we don’t yet know? I think not.
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April 4, 2019 at 9:19 pm
Hello shinyobjectssite AJ..
I nominate your for Mystery Blogger Award. ☺
https://florabino.wordpress.com/2019/04/04/mystery-blogger-award/
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