Myself In The Universe
It started with Oscar Wilde. Namely this quote of his: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” When I first heard the quote, it felt fatalistic and somewhat existential while romantic. While I believe the original quote intended to prompt humanity to extend past the banality of their existence, Wilde’s focus on the stars served to spark not metaphor but actual practice when it came to confronting my anxiety in the quest for self-improvement.
Anxiety, as both a disease and state of being, took deep root in my personhood long before I could appreciate my own identity. I evolved around it but never strayed too far away from that constrictive core. I spent years exploring how to better live with my anxiety. This included medication, intensive therapy, being rendered helpless by panic attacks — the path to self-improvement, as it so often does, came with a rocky start. I found myself constantly living inwards. My dialogues spun around, over and over, with the same voices expressing repetitious pessimism and pain. Anxiety depends on the proclivity towards introversion. At the center of this chaotic, unyielding universe was me.
I needed to accept my microcosm and also my cosmos. So I looked to the stars.
In our galaxy alone, scientists believe there are anywhere between 200 to 400 billion stars. One hundred billion planets are confined to our galaxy alone. In the observable universe, there could be up to 100 billion galaxies. Each of those possess the capacity to be as intricate and designed as the world we know, if not completely expand upon our own understanding of the universe. It bears the designation of awesome to stand at the feet of space and find humility in its sheer enormity and limitless imagination.
We occupy one lifetime, on one planet, in one solar system.
My anxiety has not vanished but it embraced a new lens — one that facilitates the abandonment of self for the functional understanding of our vast potential and freedom as such incredibly minute contributions to the whole of time. Our existence bears little impact to whole of our Earth’s history. As such, feel the opportunity to unburden yourself in the face of mortality and appreciate the infinite number of universal causations that even allow you to exist.
Live your gutter; claim your stars.
