This is us

  The conversation in A&P took a pleasantly unexpected turn yesterday when I was asked what had led me to my view that humanity is not so insignificantly minuscule after all, in the ever-expanding vastness of space-time. "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us..."

 

The question was pleasant to me because I never get asked it, though I've endlessly shared the observation every semester when speaking of "cosmic philosophy" and recalling my adolescent delight in first discovering Carl Sagan's Cosmic Connection back in the day. 

We are a "transitional animal," I read, and that makes us part of something so much larger and potentially better than we've yet imagined. That's when I really began pondering the evolutionary epic that is everybody's story, and that led me eventually to philosophy.

"The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming part of it.” Right, I thought. We are it.

But that's not what I said in class yesterday. I surprised myself, pleasantly again, by citing a later moment of clarity when I first encountered the Belle of Amherst's poem.

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—

For—put them side by side—

The one the other will contain

With ease—and You—beside—

... Emily Dickinson

 

I might also have mentioned Eric Idle's Mrs. Brown, who I discovered at about the same time in the '70s and who also helped clarify my peculiarly hybridized brand of humanism. Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving and revolving at 900 miles an hour... 

And hang on tight.