In writing about myself as somehow “middle of the road” in life, I instantly become aware of the myriad different misconceptions there could be about me when I say this… To narrow it down a bit, I by no means think I think I am necessarily “average” or that my life is “boring.” I don’t think that I am of average intelligence – on the contrary, I think of myself as quite smart (most of the time) – whether or not this is true, entirely or even just a little, one would have to be one’s own judge.
Instead when I say “middle of the road experience,” I mean only that my experience of life has got to be, intuitively at least the way I perceive it, somewhere in the middle of all extremes available to all of human existence. And by that I mean that I am neither the most rich or the most poor, have had the most pain or the most joy, am the most fortunate or most unfortunate.
This was what was flashing through my mind when I was in this current state, the reflection of my own place in the relative middle of human existence.
This can be expanded further, when one considers historically where we are in the history of our own existence, and the existence that we share with the universe and everything in it.
First, as humans, we have come SO FAR as a species, from primitive beings similar to other animals, to developed primates who used tools and walked upright, beyond that to developing civilizations and cultures and religion and technology beyond what anyone could have possibly ever imagined at the dawn of time, in particular as imagination was not even yet a THING that people could do.
Now we are here, with imaginations which can produce things beyond our wildest expectations in terms of beauty, wonder, and awe. Yet, there are still LIMITS to that creation, just as there are limits to our own experience and ambition, such that my earlier reflection on the infinite possible iterations of human existence is very easily extrapolated to all of existence and matter that we are aware of, real, imagined or otherwise. Thus while we are to some degree limitless in our possibility in this or any version of existence, we are also limited in the possible scope and extreme values that those iterations might entail for us.
Not to mention that, historically speaking, we are sitting perched on a crossroads that certainly every being on earth has never experienced… essentially, we are aware of more of our surroundings (from this earth to the universe beyond), and our knowledge only continues to grow. And as that knowledge grows, so too does our responsibility to ourselves and our surroundings, such that how could we possibly take in so much, in so much detail, and build and grow to such a degree without in some way preserving this legacy, either with our own recorded histories which we preserve and protect, or through what we teach to those that go ahead of us, since so too is each of our existence limited to the confines of a mortal life…
All of this, which at the time felt both profound and beautiful, but also intensely overwhelming and impossibly terrible to comprehend or do something about – all of this rattled around my head in what felt like the most densely compacted instant that I have ever, and most likely will ever, experience.
It was in this moment that I felt a sort of divine beauty in what I was experiencing which could only be described as being so intensely close to the middle of something bigger than I could ever express in words… one thought or image that raced through my mind at the time, and has stayed with me ever since, was the notion that one atom of matter, the smallest unit of our known existence, were to suddenly wake up! And realize that it was located on the fuzzy, glowing edge of the sun, and that it was now aware of every other single atom of that seemingly infinite energy source, and that all of those atoms were so incredibly similar to itself and that they were all completely and unquestionably linked together, such that “his” own existence was so very, very similar to that of an atom on the other side of that glow, or perhaps in the inner most center of Center’s of that star…
I felt like that atom in that moment.
The Absolute Center of Everything 