Why

Why

You wake up and you look out your bedroom window and you see it’s another beautiful spring day. You hear the birds singing, you see the flowers opening in the sun, and you smell the fresh, clean spring breeze.

You see a deer peacefully eating a plant in a field, you see a bee hopping from flower to flower, and you see puffy, ephemeral white clouds, majestically floating in a bright, crystalline-blue springtime sky.

You think how wonderfully balanced nature is — the soil feeding the flower, the flower feeding the bee and the deer, the clouds floating above created from rain and rain created by clouds and the rain the formed the oceans, the lakes, the ponds, the rivers — and all of them full of life and all of them life sustaining.

You look up at the sun and you know that everything draws its power from it — the flowers, the oceans, the plants, the animals, even you — all solar powered.

You think how powerful the sun is and yet how significant it is. You realize if the sun would burn out right now all life on Earth would end and the world would be a barren, frozen wasteland.

And you ponder the sun’s insignificance. It’s just an ordinary star in an ordinary galaxy spinning around in space and traveling through the universe. The sun is just one of the trillions of stars in one of the billions of galaxies in an unfathomably big universe.

You marvel at how something so big and powerful — something that sustains all life on our tiny, insignificant world, can be so small and insignificant compared to the grandeur and the vastness of the universe.

As you pensively look out your window into the heart of this warm spring day, you realize how truly insignificant you are – and everyone else is. We are all made of stardust and every single living thing on Earth can thank the death of a star for its life.

You ponder that, you are stardust. Everyone you love is stardust. Everyone and everything that ever grew or walked or swam or crawled or slinked on this planet was born from the death of a star – and explosion neither you nor anyone you ever knew saw or heard. But as powerful and as silent as it might have been, its death and the death of other stars like it were all torches of life. 

The deer eats the plant that grows in the sun that shines on the Earth that spins around the sun which spins around the center of the galaxy which spins around the universe and you are just a passenger on a vessel too big to see ever en route on an incomprehensible journey.

You walk away from the beautiful picture of spring that nature has painted in your bedroom window, you sit down at your kitchen table, and you read the newspaper.

There’s a pandemic raging. There’s a mass shooting here.  There’s a war here, a tsunami there. A twister levels another town. Disasters all with thousands killed. Suicide bombers blow up a shopping center, dozens killed. A madman with a crazy automatic weapon steals so many years away from sons and daughters, and moms and dads, and grandmas, grandpas, husbands, and wives.

There’s too much hatred everywhere. And because of what? Ideology? Religion? Greed? You think. The world and the solar system and the galaxy and the universe are so balanced and so beautiful and so incomprehensible — and you and everyone else and everything else is so insignificant.

Even the greatest of us is insignificant. We are all insignificant. Rich and powerful, poor and sick, all grains of a sand on a tiny little corner of a tiny little beach in a tiny little corner of the vast ocean of the cosmos.

You think of how much humans have interfered with the natural course of the life and the peace and the balance of our planet. You think how petty our differences are and how grand and important our similarities are — we are all passengers on this tiny, pale blue ship sailing through a universe so huge it’s beyond our power to comprehend it.

We are all born, and we all die; we all share the same air and the same planet. And we are all as insignificant as a single grain of sand on some forgotten beach in the South Pacific. One grain of sand out of trillions and trillions and trillions of grains of sand.

Five-hundred people killed today in this war, two-hundred people killed today in a war, three hundred killed by a bomber, four thousand children starved to death – and millions more won’t have enough to eat.

You ponder all this and ask… Why?

Your thoughts float with the clouds but your heart is heavy. Our differences are tiny, and our similarities are overwhelming, yet the world is teeming with hate, greed, wars, suffering, hunger, desperation, and sickness.

You wonder why we have allowed the world to get so out-of-balance when the universe is so beautifully in balance. Everything that ever will be is already here. Everything that ever was is everything that is.

You look out your kitchen window and you see a beautiful spring day —

A butterfly floats by,
And you wonder…
Why.