The Speck in the Storm

Photo by Renee A. Pflughaupt

July 19, 2011.  I arrived home at that ambiguous hour between late at night and early in the morning as the winds were conjuring a thunderstorm across the horizon.  The clouds had yet to unleash their torrent upon the lands below, but the sky was already flooded with lightning; it was lit as much as not, and the echoing thunder of each bolt would still be rolling through the hills when the next struck.  At times, the lightning lit the heavens so brightly I could not help but shield my eyes, yet I found the beauty of the storm overwhelming, and neither could I look away.

Within the past month or so before that night, I had seen the end of a seven-year-long relationship, moved back into my parents' house, and received the offer to renew my graduate teaching assistantship in Morgantown only a week after I had left the city.  I wasn't even sure if I had lost my path in life, or if I had simply given it up.  I only knew whatever it was I lost, it was the result of having lost hope — I had over time grown increasingly disillusioned with society and humanity on a whole, and the turns my own life had taken did nothing to restore any hope to me.

Yet here I paused to simply watch the storm, its majesty overwhelming.  Its beauty and power left me in awe as I watched the immense force of lightning being tossed about whimsically by nature.  With each bolt burning hotter than the surface of the sun, unleashing thunder that shook the hills for miles, I came to realize how small and powerless I was compared to even a single lightning bolt, and here the sky swarmed with them.  How much more insignificant, then, is a single person when compared to the grandeur of the universe, when our planet is but a speck of mud orbiting one small star at the outer reaches of a galaxy so vast that it takes light hundreds of thousands of years to cross it — a galaxy which in turn is just one of hundreds of billions in the observable universe.  And these stars that populate this immense universe live their life cycles over the course of millions if not billions of years, and each of these lives is but a tick of the clock that drives the galaxies.  We are but the tiniest of particles struggling in vain to leave an imperceptible mark on the universe within the briefest of fractions of a blink of the cosmological eye in which we live.  ...And here I was wasting time worrying about how I didn't have a job or a girlfriend.

A sense of absolute insignificance flooded over me.  Yet, in the midst of setbacks and stumbles, I didn't find it threatening or insulting.  I found myself neither disheartened nor defiant, but relieved if not liberated.  Everything I was — the music I had played, the pictures I had doodled, the programs I had coded, all my greatest accomplishments faded away into nothing amongst the echoing thunder, but so too did all my failures, my mistakes, my incomplete projects, student loans, and lost relationships.  The universe did not judge me, neither good nor bad.  In the end, whatever would be would be.

In retrospect, the difference between being at odds with this nearly nihilistic rumination and accepting it had nothing to do with how significant I previously thought I was, but how significant I thought I should be — how significant I thought I deserved to be.  When I lost hope, I had not found myself lamenting that I had neither found my place in the world nor left my mark upon it, but only the disparity between the actions of humanity and what little of the truth I had come to understand having pursued objectivity and reason for a number of years.  Still seeking the same objective truth, I found no reason to fight the truth I was now confronted with — even that of my own insignificance.

Yet as my mind wandered through these concepts, the storm raged on, still demanding my attention.  After all, why would I bother thinking about myself when I knew how small of a thing I was?  And so my thoughts continued to roam freely throughout the storm, until eventually I found myself contemplating the mechanisms underlying the formation of lightning — the tiny ice crystals that collide midair, exchanging even tinier electrons, until at last they push the electrical charge of the atmosphere far enough out of balance that it snaps back into place suddenly and violently — striking as a lightning bolt.  All the awesome power of lightning that inspired my feelings of insignificance had at its core insignificant specks of ice exchanging even more insignificant particles until enough of their efforts combined to shake both heaven and earth.

Why, then, could it not be true of people?  Surely I was still insignificant, but if I were to combine my efforts with other insignificant individuals, together we could achieve something truly significant.  And unlike the storm, my influence was not limited to immediate physical interactions — through language we are capable of communicating across expanses of both space and time.  Moreover, I realized I need not be an unaware pawn in a greater game of chess when the human capacity for abstraction should grant me the necessary tools to consider the whole that I was a part of.

I knew I had realized something significant, but it would take me years to begin to appreciate what in particular that was.  The most immediate truth of that night — that we should, whenever possible, aspire to combine with others into something greater than our individual selves, choosing whenever possible cooperation over conflict — has remained unchanged.  Yet as I set down that road, I never would have predicted how far it would lead, and I dare not speculate how much further I can wander down it.