There are countless specks of dust floating around this whole planet, tiny little flecks of matter traveling through the air you are breathing right now. Unbeknownst to you or me, these insignificant pinprick particles glide along with neither implication nor import. Or maybe this was beknownst. Maybe you are some sort of science buff who is all read up on motes and scintillas. Good for you. Either way, I’ll bet I can tell you something you really didn’t know. Something about these little iotas, something quite miraculous indeed. You find these specks to be rather insignificant, dull, prosaic-- don’t you? There was one time-- one brief little blip on this vast continuum-- when two tiny specks of dust were not very insignificant at all. In fact, they were rather extraordinary. And here we have our story.
“Wait up! You’re floating way too fast right now!” It was not uncommon for our heroine #1-- we’ll call her Little Speck-- to be lost far behind the rest of the particle horde she rolled with. Little Speck’s head was much too busy in the clouds to bother with the mundane specks of dust she unfortunately coexisted with. Some specks might call her dazed, but me, I think she’s magical. Then again, I’m just your narrator. What do I know? As Little Speck floated on, she camouflaged herself as just another one of the simple little specks alongside her. She pretended to enjoy just gliding with the wind heading for no particular destination, pretended to accept her fate of finding the closest possible and most unexceptional looking speck to “settle float” with for the rest of time (as all specks must do!). But inside she had a nagging feeling that there was more-- there had to be more. More of the world out there, things bigger than her or any simple speck. There was more. But for now this was all, and this would do. That was until the wind.
It’s high time for another introduction, so that’s just what we’ll do. Coincidentally-- or by no coincidence at all, really-- our heroine #2 (who we shall call Tiny Speck) was floating along an adjacent windpath to that of Little Speck. Although, to call it floating would be a bit of a stretch. A better word to describe Tiny Speck’s gait would be sulking. You see, Tiny Speck felt the same way that our Little Speck did back on windpath 1. The only difference being that Tiny Speck couldn’t fake it as well as Little Speck could. Tiny Speck saw the insignificance and uniformity of a speck’s “journey” and this distanced herself from most of the other specks around her. Not that this bothered her, though. She preferred silence to meaningless jabber, preferred alone time to feigning interest in another boring speck’s boring story about the boring wind. Pessimistic as she may seem-- nihilistic, even-- our Tiny Speck was simply painfully aware and painfully alone in this awareness. Can you blame her? Try to put yourself in her dust-- every day it was the same routine, the same humdrum, monotonous landscape before her, with only the endless capacities of her mind providing refuge from the otherwise inescapable conformity surrounding her until one day….
The Wind.
This was strange. This wasn’t the typical shuffling around that comes with a small gust of wind, thought Tiny Speck. No, this was much bigger. She felt her entire particle horde shift around her as the air practically did a somersault-- landing her upright in an entirely new and bizarre environment. Tiny Speck frantically looked around, in a state of shock, for other specks-- but what she found was not a speck at all. What she found was much more than a speck, though it had the outward camouflage of one. Tiny Speck could not believe her eyes. A ray of light like she had never seen-- almost a sunbeam-- was extending down and illuminating one specific speck out of the thousands of others. She was looking at an explosion of light, a kaleidoscopic eos, an atmospheric phenomenon; an aurora. A sunrise. In this moment she thought of words she had never heard before, songs that had never been sung. All of the unanswered questions that had narrated her whole goddamn pointless life up until this point were suddenly answered. In this entity she could see an entire journey, and a destination worth reaching. Tiny Speck and Little Speck were suspended in time, like this, for quite some time-- looking at one another and taking in the other’s grandiosity.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“I’m Little Speck… but call me Little,” Little nudged even closer as if magnetized by the other speck’s presence.
“Little...” Tiny Speck smiled shyly. “I’m Tiny Speck,” Her voice shook and wavered at the sheer beauty in front of her.
Little laughed. “I think I’ll call you Tiny.”
And all at once the wind swept them back into reality and there they were, two specks once again but not quite specks at all; headed towards nothing but headed together.
On Valentine’s Day in 1990, the NASA space probe Voyager 1 took a single picture of Earth from 4 billion miles away-- the farthest distance the Earth has ever been photographed from to this day-- before switching off its camera forever. In this image, according to astronomer Carl Sagan, Earth was merely “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”.
I thought that was interesting.
So maybe we are simply pieces of nothingness, floating around on a tiny orb. Maybe there are much greater things out there in the vastness. Maybe all of this is true. But maybe-- just maybe-- our wonderful messes of lives are just insignificant enough to be beautiful. Our loves, our triumphs, our imperfections and our fights to make something matter out of all our time here-- this matters. When we learn that it is possible for something to matter, even when we know it is going to end, we will be free to love as hard, cry as hard, and be as hard as we possibly can. That is the insignificant significance of our stay here on planet Earth.
