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| Pale Blue Dot: Image of Earth taken by Voyager 1 on February 14 1990 |
Dear Void,
Hopelessness and hopefulness go hand-in-hand like optimism and pessimism, or like faith and faithlessness. The pendulum swing from one to the other makes for good drama, perhaps, but it makes for stress in our everyday lives.
There are those of us (I'm speaking for the human race, here) who are eternal hopefuls. We point to the sunny side of the street, we bask in the light of our own or others' or a higher power's approval, we trust ourselves, our families, we search for the good in all.
Then there are those of who are perennially hopeless. It need not be a the world is ending hopelessness, no. It need be only a sense that the world is not right, not going in the right direction, not a place we want to bring children into, not what was promised. And it may never be right, or that the chances of the world, the universe (that's you, dear void) ever turning in our favor are less than zilch.
Some say, that intelligence, as it exists in the universe, is the universe looking back at itself. Thus, I proclaim:
Who are you, void, to judge yourself at once both full of hope and utterly vacant of any hope? Who are you to be both so bounded and unbounded? Who are you to house both logical truth and unsolvable contradiction?
Or is it just us, this one intelligence which has just happened to develop out of no will of your (nor our) own? Is hope and hopelessness just a matter of our collective and/or individual viewpoint?
So what's the viewpoint? What's the vantage point? What's the platform upon which we view all the breathless void in both its macro and micro scale?
We stand on but a tiny blue dot in space. We are less than infinitesimal, from your viewpoint, dear void. We are here and gone again in a blip of cosmic time. You barely even noticed we were there. Pow, like a firework, and we're out.
Did you even notice us?
We noticed you, from our vantage point, small as it is. We noticed you.