💾 Archived View for tilde.team › ~aprilnightk › gemlog › 2022 › 08 › 27-could-have-been.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 03:37:29. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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There's something about the fact that the most brutal, incredible, unprecedented irony in the entire universe was pulled off without prior thought, without any thought at all, by the universe itself.
Neil deGrasse Tyson claims that the most astounding fact about the universe is the knowledge, that the atoms that make up the human body were once in the stars. Galaxies. These atoms are traceable to the very beginnings of all and everything.
And by all means he's right. There's so much inspiration, so much reassurance to be gathered from pausing once in a while to think - man, I'm a part of the universe. From a certain point of view, I _am_ the universe.
I share origins with the constellations, and the supernovas are my cradle. Isn't that a breathtaking heritage?
But here's the catch. We, the numerous children of the vast cosmos, are fleeting. Inconcievable eternity gave birth to a tiny creation. A conscious creation. Aware of it being tiny, limited and impermanent.
Being self-aware is a viscious gift given to us by our giant progenitor who himself does not possess it. Isn't it ironic that we are self-aware? Isn't consciousness the most evil prank ever pulled off?
Take a look into the night sky, into the myriads of potential worlds. We are a creative lot, we wrote thousands of books depicting the worlds that never were. In them, uncountable stories of joy, love, adventure, bravery and exploration. Stories we would want to be true, stories we crave to be a part of.
What is the origin of this nostalgia for the places we have never seen, for the times we will never live?
Look.
We could have been anything.
Our human condition stems from a mixture of the physical setup of our universe and the fact that it is not self-aware. The laws of physics provide us with limitations which we want - but will likely never manage to - overcome.
Could it have been different? We could have been created by a unverse that cares, if such a universe existed. We could have been designed. We could have not been brought into existence at all. Had any of these been true, how much suffering could have been averted? How much more fruitful, delightful, rich could our lives be if we were born in circumstances that actually favor conscious life?
It is not accidental that we are taught to never think about what could have been. It's not something that we could change. We have one time to live in, and a really short one at that, and we will miss the rest of the story. We have only one place to live in.
We have only one body to live with, and then it'll decay, and it's a much less inspiring side of the very same most astounding fact about the universe.
And during this short lifespan, we will suffer. Our bodies will be hit by illness, which is part of how the universe operates. Our souls will be damaged by loss, unfairness and vice inflicted by other humans, who endure the same struggle with the human condition.
Our struggle is not against other people, we're all in this together, in this struggle against the universe.
And it is a struggle _against_ the universe. The more we research the universe, the harder it gets. The more we want to bend it to our will, the more it resists. Why is it so that throughout our history we talk about _conquering_ nature? Conquest is something to be done to an enemy.
We could live in peace, we could emit and receive love, we could achieve justice and defeat suffering. But all of these are only possible if we were what we are not.
Our art is inspired by the longing for what could have been. Not only art: our collective understanding of where we as the people should be headed is informed by the same longing. It might not be obvious, we might not _want_ to pay attention to it, but that's where a lot of what we do in life comes from.
And this longing is, at its core, regret that we are not what we could have been.
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Keith Aprilnight (aprilnightk@tilde.team)