Relativity

When I read Robert Thurman's book, Infinite Life, a word that stood out for me was relativity. Everything is relative. But it was one of those things where I understood it, yet experience is needed to fully grab ahold of it's meaning. And the other day, I caught a glimpse of that true meaning.

Sometimes I think of how small we are in our lives and the fact that we are just a blip on the radar. There is so much more that is bigger than me and I truly am inconsequential. And I thought the other day, I guess I wouldn't mind if I died because of the loss of ego involved in my new found tininess, and that's true, but only relative to the rest of the universe. But I had this image of Dr Manhattan from The Watchmen, and how he realized that even if human existence isn't important to him because he now exists far beyond the world of humans, he found out that it IS important to the humans, because they ARE human. So that's where relativity comes in, because me dying may not be important to the galaxy when you take into account how small we are, but relative to an ant, we are not small. And relative to other humans, we are perfectly in line, and we are important.

So I think to live a healthy life, I'm going to need to find a middle ground and alternate between different scopes of relativity, because I definitely know that I value both my small, grain of sand existence and also my wonderful, controlled, powerful existence here, right now, in this body. Relative to myself.

- Lee