If I were a being only slightly lighter I could lift myself above the earth and run my hands over the froth of the stratus clouds covering this country as running my fingers across the surface of a lake.  And if I were a being only slightly heavier I could descend into the sun and wrap myself in the deepest eddies and currents of its nuclear heart and let out a relaxing sigh as a man in a hot tub.  But I am a being neither heavy nor light; for I should pass through the clouds and the weight of the sun should crush me, and only water is my domain.

I cannot comprehend a bounded universe.  I am told it has an age, of a certain number of billion years.  I am told it has a width, of a certain number of billion light-years.  But I am small and long before a billion has any meaning it becomes infinite.  I cannot spread my arms and measure a billion anymore than I can spread my life and measure a billion.  I may believe in these numbers and figures, the way a man believes in the god of his father, but my heart tells me the universe is infinite.

What does it mean to me that the universe is infinite?  I am of a people and in a technological society that I might expect to live for eighty years.  If time is infinite, what are eighty years compared to two or to eighty-thousand?  Any life is only a breath in the crisp air, which is emitted as a formless fog, and perhaps if it is clever it begins to come together to make a shape, but in the end it must come apart and vanish.  But my heart knows it is better to live to be eighty than to live to be two.  How does it know this?  At two I have known so little of life.  I am nothing much more than the repository of what my environment has put into me.  I am still a child.  But I am twenty-two and think I only began to be an adult at twenty-one.  And it is still new to me, with a wide and an open domain still to be explored and understood.  What is sixty years of knowing, and ten in the prime, or perhaps twenty if I am strong?  But still it is better than only living to two, or to twenty-two.  If time stretches on and on, what does it mean to live for eighty-thousand years, and is it better than eighty?  In eighty years, most of it not at my prime, I can never truly understand what the best choice is.  Because of the shortness of it, most opportunities come only once.  Little is grasped, little is explored, only a series of baffling selections that must be made and lay incomparable one to the other: what is behind the one is left unknown and what is behind the other is a mystery only unwrapped after I choose it.  The soul may grow tired of life given long enough, and eighty-thousand years may be too long, but only those living in the harshest times – or those bitter and feeling trapped – have grown tired of life, and no one has lived enough to see if there is a limit upon the possibilities of its freshness.  But eighty is short.  Ten, or twenty, in the prime is even shorter.

What is the meaning of a person?  Meaning is all a matter of scope.  In my immediate social circle I may have some meaning, because I have some impact on the ones around me, something that is that would not be if I had not been there.  But pushed out beyond that circle to a national or international realm, my change and my impact are lost.  And so also in the scale of time, past one hundred years where I may still have some effect on to a scale of a thousand or ten thousand.  If I become a political leader or a military commander or a writer who affects the world visibly and greatly past my death, what then does that mean?  The scope may have been increased, but it is still nothing, for beyond the world to the solar system and that on one arm of one galaxy in a cluster of galaxies in a countless myriad of clusters, which acts in time-frames not of thousands or tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions of years, and more still.  Push the scope of meaning out far enough and even the greatest any person could ever aspire to be is no more significant than the reflection of a dust mote in the eye of a flea.

The religious person may be forgiven if at first blush it seems to him that God solves this problem of his meaning.  But this is only an illusion.  For regardless of how personal his God is, the believer is still a speck among the billions of souls damned to hell or blessed to heaven.  There was a time when she was not, and her impact is still nothing: push the matter out from herself and the few souls she knows to the many and then to the incomprehensibly infinite God, and we see very clearly that the matter of eternity has not been changed one iota through her.

But the call to existence is irrevocable.  I can no more undo my own creation than make two and two equal to seventeen.  And to attempt it is to despise the call and the existence.

What is there for me in a universe whose physical and temporal size dwarfs me to nothing, or where I find myself, constituted as I am, neither heavy nor light, and have no say in the matter?  I can no more change any of this than I can become God.  I can no more make my existence less fleeting, less a breath, than I can undo the Big Bang.  I must do what I can with what I have, and be the best that I can be.  One of the most wondrous things about sentience (to me) is not the capacity to ponder one’s own existence – that just leads to existentialism (the end of all philosophy, as nothingness is the end of any system too near a black hole) and, excepting cases of extraordinary courage, it leads to despair.  But rather the greatest thing is the capacity to choose.  I can choose whether to serve the poor or not, whether to attempt to increase the amount of good in the human experience in general and that of the people around me in particular, or whether to increase the amount of bad – be it because I don’t like them, or they believe something different than me, or they vote Republican, or whatever it may be.  This mystery of choice is the heart of all morality.  It is not sad that my life is (inevitably) meaningless in the scope of the universe – there is nothing that can be done about that – but the real tragedy is if my life is meaningless in every scope other than my own.  If the meaning is there in the scope of my friends, of those close to me, then it is beautiful.  And it can be a terrible beauty, like a well-evolved virus or parasite, if I make it a terrible life and destroy the meaning and happiness of others; and it can be a glorious beauty if I increase the meaning and happiness of others.  I cannot say that I am particularly exhilarated by the thought of snuffing out like the flame on a candle after eighty years.  I am not.  Nor am I convinced that there is any God watching over this to appreciate the art of my life (for whatever skill or beauty I can imbue it with), or who will extend it in an afterlife.  But this is what I have, and I aim to do well by it, both for myself and those around me.