Oh, Stephen Hawking. Thou art.. the fucking best.

Fast Car

S. Hawking.
Watching his numerous documentaries and reading The Grand Design has helped me in more ways than I can name.

I've always taken care to remind myself of the words
'know thyself'.

Since last night though, when I sat for roughly five hours listening to the brilliant man's consumer-level explanation of what we are, where we're from and where we're headed, it's been
'know thyself, but know that life is much bigger'.

I'll repeat this every time I get that familiar, sharp, stinging pain in my chest, the one that comes back every day to destroy the very fabric of the sanity I've been trying to harvest since the morning. It only stays for a few seconds, long enough to say

- Beautiful day, no?/ Great supper, right?/ Got an A on your term paper, yes?/ Nice view eh?/ Cute baby, huh?/ What a wonderful evening, don't you agree?
-By the way, in sixty years or so, your consciousness will simply cease to be, and never again will it exist.

But its effects can be felt long after the blow, until I am once again distracted.

I've been coping unimaginably well since yesterday, now that I've got an antidote, not just some cheap numbing gel. I always knew I had to kill that ego o'mine. I just never knew why or how or exactly what it implied. What I really need to let go of is myself. Because life is not the individual. It isn't the human, or humans, it's humanity. It's nature. It's the process of evolution. It's the accident that started it all. It's the perfectly orchestrated imperfection in the cosmos from which it sprang. It's that ideal combination of atoms that had the ability to replicate itself. And it did so not to ensure it's own personal survival, but the continuity of life.

 Life is [quite possibly] the race of aliens living at the other end of the universe and the energy that we all share. And, if everything that is does once again reach the point of singularity, it's the accident that may repeat itself and get the ball rolling anew.

It is so much more than me. And yet here I've been, obsessing over my own mortality. Tsk tsk.

Peace of mind achieved.