Butterflies and Hurricanes

I recently read something that makes me feel so much better about life. After you read it, you feel your shoulders relaxing, your breathing evening out, and a faint smile spreading across your face. Here it is:

“It’s messing people up, this social pressure to ‘find your passion’ and ‘know what it is you want to do.’ It’s perfectly fine to just live your moments fully, and marvel as many small and large passions, many small and large purposes enter and leave your life. For many people there is no realization, no bliss to follow, no discovery of your life’s purpose. This isn’t sad, it’s just the way things are. Stop trying to find the forest and just enjoy the trees.” —Sally Coulter

I’m so done trying to figure out what it is that I “really” want to do. How the hell am I supposed to know that? And why is it such a big deal? Sure, I like, even love, doing certain things, but it’s a rarity to ever end up doing what you’re actually passionate about. I’ve been living my life on a trial and error basis, and I’m absolutely fine with it. I’ll figure it out eventually. I don’t want to worry about something that may or may not happen and spoil what are supposedly “the best years of my life.”

I’ve been reading ‘Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space’ by Carl Sagan, gifted to me by one of my closest friends, and I love the way it’s changing my perception about my existence. The book talks about how humans are a mere cosmic accident. We happened to spring to life on a planet that favours organic life to thrive. We are not ‘special’ or crafted by the hand of God to fulfill a special purpose. We are just like any other animal, only, that we have evolved to become a little more complex.

This reminds me of something I had read somewhere recently. “Life on Earth is the cosmic equivalent of what happens when you don’t store things in a cool, dry place.”  😀

As humans, we walk around with bloated egos, behaving as if the world was built for us to satisfy our pithy needs. We live in denial and delusion. We are not ready to accept the fact that there really isn’t no point to our existence, no “meaning” of life, apart from what we attribute to it. Like David Lynch once said, “I don’t think that people accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.”

We assume that because we seem to be the only planet that has life in our solar system, maybe we do have a special place in the cosmos. To get rid of this feeling of desperation and fear, we have spun imaginary stories around us. We believe there is someone who created not only us, but also the universe, and who is always looking down upon us, ready to save us in times of need.

Consider this extract of the book:

Considering the sheer size of the universe, the chances that intelligent life exists only on our planet are very, very low. We don’t need nature to pander to us. We need to pander to it, and protect it and nurture it if we ever want to save our species. All these ideologies and rules and standards that we have built around us. For what? How hard is it to treat each other equally and kindly? How messed up are we that a thing like genocide exists in our lives? And we are okay with it? Immune, even, to the daily atrocities and gross injustices that take place every single day.

Anyway, the purpose of the book is to make you understand the true purpose of life. And that is, there isn’t any. We just happen to be a species living on a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny planet in an average-sized galaxy that is not even in the center of the universe. We have begun to understand our cosmos, but we are still very limited in our knowledge and discoveries.

The aim of the book is not to discourage you from feeling good about your existence, but it is to shake you out of your reveries and illusions. Once we understand what our place in the cosmos really is, only then would we be able to progress, come out of our differences and treat each other better. Live better.

Read this book. Please. And watch The Theory of Everything. Stephen Hawking was paralyzed, and yet his ‘purpose’ in life was to understand the universe better. The least we could do is acknowledge and understand the life and works of those who spent their entire lives making sense of what the world is really made of. And not blindly following stories written in books shoved into out faces when we were kids and didn’t know any better.

And now, back to reading. I will be back, soon. There is more I need to share.

P.S. Read what’s written on the picture. Tell me that doesn’t change the way you’ve looked at everything in life.

P.P.S. Thank you. You know who you are 🙂 I hope you manage to do everything you had written in your To-Do list.