Spending time in the garden means encountering a wide variety of tiny lives going about their tiny business activities. Birds and bees, ants and centipedes, worms and spiders. Even in Finland where there aren't "that many" relative different kinds, there are still so many that I still find new ones near daily that I don't remember seeing before. While I am gardening, I always think I should have my camera close by, but as of yet, never have. Instead, I just look for a moment, and then go on with my own business activities.
Which in the grand scheme of the universe, aren't much larger than that of an ant.
I feel small.
And maybe that is a good thing, as I feel that humanity has evolved with the trait that for some reason, we are larger and more important than we likely are. We have built delusions of grandeur into who we are at the core, separating ourselves from all other known life as something somehow greater. Even to the point where many believe we are the greatest the universe has to offer.
Hubris?
From what we know, no, it isn't. But as the phrase states,
The absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence.
Yet it is very easy to fall into the trap of our beliefs and argue from a place of ignorance, without even considering we are ignorant at all. The fact is that no matter how intelligent we become and how much information we gather, we will always be ignorant. The learning process needn't ever stop, because there is far too much to ever know and there is no way to collect it all. Even if we were able to have all possible current knowledge, an instant later we would already have a knowledge gap due the changing dynamics of reality.
On the scale of known (or assumed known) time, humans have barely existed for a blink. On a scale of the size of the known universe, earth is an atomic speck of dust. And even as individuals, no matter how great our lives might have been, none of us will leave much of a mark for any extended period of time.
We are small.
So is feeling small a bad thing? Probably not. But "feelings" themselves are overrated in my opinion anyway. All of them, not just the negative ones. It is not that they are completely irrelevant, it is just that they shouldn't dictate our lives and decisions at all times, because they are based on our perspectives, opinions, and understandings of the moment - making them often very wrong.
The problem with our feelings though, is that we feel them. Even if they aren't accurate, they manifest reactions in our body based on various assumptions that can be all kinds of wrong. They leverage the same networks that real fears use, and real pain travels, but it is all imaginary. They are indicators, not the actual thing, but our body struggles to tell the difference.
And it is perhaps because of this complex emotional layer that we confuse our place in the world, deeming ourselves larger than we actually are, because we feel larger. Reality doesn't come into it, especially when we are designed to process things relatively, and the size of the universe doesn't compute. We can't even understand units of measurement at large size that we have created, let alone comprehend that which is largely unknowable.
So we limit reality.
The best we can do with what we don't understand, is redefine it as something we can understand, even if it reduces it. Or, ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist. It is very hard for us just to come to terms with not knowing, without doing something with what we don't know to make it fell more certain.
We pretend to know, what we know we do not know.
But as uncomfortable as we are with it, certainty doesn't exist. Even death as we know it, which is considered a certainty, might not be quite as certain as we believe it to be. Even without believing in an afterlife. At some point, technology might allow us to live on indefinitely in some kind of substrate that is not our physical body. But even then, with infinite lives, not everything can be known.
We would still be small in comparison to all.
But feeling small or feeling like a giant, life continues on. If we are constantly holding back, waiting for better times, better feelings, we will end up doing nothing at all. We will become increasingly sensitive to things that can stop us from doing what we know we should, rather than becoming more capable of overcoming the hurdles that stop us. We will constantly be putting a proverbial twig across our own path, milling about, unsure about what to do next.
Big or small - Life goes on.
Taraz
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