Travelers

The year is approaching its end; depending on where you live, this post will be online right before or after the new year has begun. At this time many among us will reflect on the past year, as well as look forward to the year to come; we evaluate our path through life and try to determine where our travels will take us next...

"The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why." I saw that quote at the beginning of a rather entertaining movie, The Equalizer with Denzel Washington. The quote, as well as an important theme in the film, is about finding your purpose in life. I don't really believe in that. Or I do, but differently. You see, as we travel along our personal path through life, we change, as does our purpose. There are precious few people who discover or make a single purpose for their existence on earth, and stick to it for their allotted time here. I believe we constantly create our own purpose in varying degrees of fluidity. The important thing is to remember that there is a purpose to your life, that the world without you would be different, that your presence changes the lifes of others; the only question or choice is how it changes.

In some ancient cultures your purpose in life was known since the day you were born; they had only one most important day in life. The day of birth, or the constellation under which you were born, determined your purpose. We've always looked up at the heavenly bodies to find answers to our earthly questions. And we found those answers to be very reliable. Tracking the movements of the Sun, Moon and stars has given us the answers to vital questions, like when to plant and when to harvest, how to navigate the land and the seas, how to tell the time. The Heavens have guided us through life since we stood upright, they've been our father and mother, giving us our life's advise. As the human brain is always on the lookout for patterns, we've discovered among the stars many earthly and mythological pictures called constellations. As the moving patterns in the sky gave shape to our travels on earth, we imbued the stars with the items we encountered on those travels; we communicated with the heavens while the heavens communicated with us.

As our knowledge about the heavens increased, we've gradually let go of this type of communication. As astrology was replaced with astronomy, we no longer let the moving constellations be the determinant factor for the direction of our lifes' travels. No longer is the purpose of our life dictated from up above and instead we are now the sole deciders and creators of that purpose. This is liberating on one hand, but brings with it great responsibility on the other. You see, we live in times of great uncertainty. Individually and collectively we find ourselves at perpetual crossroads; we choose a direction only to find ourselves at another fork in the road with either direction ending at yet another crossroads. The heavens have stopped talking to us in the most literal way as we can't even see most of the stars due to the light-pollution trapping us in an environment without a view into the third dimension. We've become two-dimensional creatures in a two-dimensional world, only concerned with ourselves and our immediate surrounding, consuming our way to the next flat plane of instant brief exaltation.

We may have asked the heavens too much, expected answers to questions that only we ourselves are able to answer. But when we stopped asking, we also gave up on the ways the heavens bound us together. As the heavens became obscured by our technical, scientific and cultural progression, we've lost sight of each other as well, lost sight of the way our lifes' paths bind us in a mutual journey throughout the expanse of an otherwise lifeless universe. We're still feeling like our lifes' paths are determined from up above, not by the heavens, but by the economical, political forces concentrated in a self-serving class of fellow humans who fancy themselves entitled demi-gods who hold the power of life and death for billions of people. The obscuring of the heavens and the knowledge of being left to the fickle will of a self-serving few conspire to throw us into a sense of powerlessness, loneliness and nihilism. We don't care anymore. The only purpose worth considering is that of pure personal bliss.

Not all is lost though. We're still travelers in the most literal way. For me it helps to zoom out to find my way back to a sense of connection. The earth revolves around its axis in 24 hours. It takes 365 of those for the earth to revolve around the Sun; that's when we celebrate the coming of a new year. But our Sun revolves around the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and that takes 225-250 million years. Since the formation of our planet, some 4.5 billion years ago, it has revolved around the galaxy approximately 20 times. It does so at a speed of approximately 230 km/s. We're not only travelers, we're extremely fast travelers. On a galactic time-scale we humans are still so young. We still have so much to learn. We haven't even reached puberty yet; looking at ourselves like that it's only natural to assume that we're temporarily confused and uncertain about which path to take, which direction to choose in our multi-dimensional individual and collective lifes. A date and time ultimately is nothing more than a label for our position in the immeasurable void that surrounds us. No one out there will come to our aid; on this tiny planet we only have each other. Help each other. Be there for each other. Make life better for each other.

That's it for me this year. I'm still feeling sick, so please forgive me if my ramblings are even less coherent than they normally are. Anyhow, I'll leave you with a video answering the question why you should be a socialist in 2023. The short answer is the same as how I ended my new year's rant; we only have each other, and our personal well being and happiness is dependent on how happy others are. I wish you all a very happy new year, dear readers, and I'll see you in 2023! ;-)

Thanks so much for visiting my blog and reading my posts dear reader, I appreciate that a lot :-) If you like my content, please consider leaving a comment, upvote or resteem. I'll be back here tomorrow and sincerely hope you'll join me. Until then, stay safe, stay healthy!