A cousin forwarded me what I thought was one of those ridiculous internet chain letters.  Instead of blogospheric claptrap, the letter contained a brilliant, graphic description of how almost insignificantly small the earth is compared to other stars and planets in the universe.  The earth’s sun – that thing we see every day that we might not realize is one million times the size of earth – is not even a pencil dot next to the massive supergiant, Antares.

“Humbling, isn’t it,” the letter smugly asks.  Ah, no.  Not humbling at all.  Quite the opposite:  It is exhilarating!  Despite our dinky size, we are alive compared to what we know – so far – of the rest of the universe, which appears to be generally a large empty, chilly, gaseous mass.

The chain letter arrived at about the same time one of those television news reports came on about a father just back from war.  We have seen them before.  The soldier arrives at a school to surprise his son, who in this case is working at a little table with three other classmates.  His classmates see his father first, and one of them gasps.  The boy swirls around, and at his recognition of his father – teacher be darned – he defies physics and flies across the classroom, his little black and white sneakers hardly touching the floor.  The power of those moments levels me.  Against it, the size of a universal superstructure and the mysteries of billions of galaxies pale.

Next to the presumably lifeless behemoth Antares, we are huge.

Recent discoveries suggest that some kind of life exists in the most inhospitable places in the universe – fantastic!…but that it is not what we are.  It might be also true that human life on earth – to a more superior being somewhere out there – might be equivalent to the primordial little squiggly things from which we ourselves came.  Who cares?

Of course, in some human beings, their sense of worth is so huge as to produce egos larger than Antares.  These egos, too, can emit sulfurous gases.  Be they as they may, they do not reduce the truly incredible fact that we are part of a massively huge, brilliant experience that continues forever, whatever our own personal fate.

When much younger, I was caught in the crush of a dancing crowd in a nightclub in New York City at midnight as 1977 gave way to 1978.  Amid the ruckus of the crowd around them that stopped to blow horns and fling confetti into the air, a couple danced slowly in their own world and continued swaying slowly against the sea of heads that started bobbing up and down as the music restarted.

I looked at the couple and then around me, happy at being part of it all.

I wonder if the couple went on to marry and have kids and if they are prosperous, healthy and happy, I mean, what with Antares and all just a billion light years away.

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