Perspective

It has been a while, myself busy with sorting out my professional life, busy in shifting base and settling into the welcome inanity of a new life in a new city. Today, while I mark my return to my blog, I want to talk about perspective. The beauty of nature and life,the beauty of our fragility lies in us being a little perceptive and appreciative of our position in the grand scheme of things.

Whenever I lose sight of that, a quaint lil picture reminds me of who or what I am...

This is the famous Pale Blue Dot image taken by the Voyager 1 space probe showing, within a pixel and a half, our Earth and all that is within it. Our success as an individual and as a species, our magnanimity and our avarice, our industry and our boorish lethargy, our munificence and our indifference, all are contained within that pale blue dot we call home. Few images can be that powerful and even fewer can be more humbling.

The picture probably reminds us to not take ourselves too seriously.

Let me give you the complete picture. We are reduced to less than two pixels from a distance which is a tiny fraction, roughly 1/120th of the true extent of our Solar system (defined by the boundary of the heliosphere, or the area of influence of our star, the Sun).

Our Sun and the Solar System is but one of a hundred billion in our galaxy (the Milky Way galaxy) which is only but one in a hundred billion galaxies in the Universe, which may be but one of an insanely unknown number (probably nearing infinity) of Universes in a Multiversal reality. This mind-bending reality is humbling and a tad depressing.

What are we and what is our position in the grand scheme of things? Are we special or are we just a freak accident of nature? Is there a meaning to life and to all the rest of it? What is the significance, origin, purpose and ultimate fate of life? Can we ever understand life's relationship to existence, consciousness, conception of a God, soul or an afterlife? The biggest shocker of it all is:

Is it all real or is it just an illusion, a dream, a thought or an idea of us somewhere else?

These questions are real. There is proof leading to inescapable pertinence of these questions. I will elaborate on these in the future, to the best of my understanding and capabilities. Till then, I will just sit back, relax, breathe a little and be a little more appreciative of things around me, things that I love and things that love me back. Love is perhaps the only thing that has any meaning,if at all.

Image courtesy: Wikimedia Commons