On What Matters
By Alan Lightman, from the very lovely documentary A Trip to Infinity.
I fog up every time I start seeing this. His smile towards the end is an emotional nuke and I’m a blubbery teary happy mess. I think of the Love I have in my life and am so very grateful. Here’s a transcript.
I was looking up at the sky one night when I was about ten years old. And I felt like my life didn’t matter. And I guess it was converting large space to large time. One star after another star after another star and wondering whether that would keep going forever.
I had this sense that the universe existed a long time before I was born, and it would exist a long time after I was dead. And I was just a speck that didn’t matter. I don’t matter. My parents don’t matter. Nothing matters. We’re all just specks. We’re just living in this brief moment.
None of us were here a million years ago. None of us will be here a million years from now. And the Universe doesn’t care. It just goes on and on and on. So, why are we wasting time, you know, going to school, having dentist appointments? All of that.
Why are we wasting our time? Because none of it matters.
And then I fell in love. And that changed everything. That mattered. Even though we might both be specks in the cosmos.