Space, Pride, and the Immeasurable
Relaxing into insignificance
I’m sitting on the hot steam radiator beneath my bedroom window. A folded towel protects me from the scorch.
The window looks out on a scrappy park — an unmaintained patch of wild with initials gouged in tree trunks and exhausted, trampled-down grass.
I’m ten years old. Gazing into the dark and crystalline winter sky, I’m calling to the aliens.
“Come, come, please come! Now!”
It’s the Cold War. My school runs duck-and-cover nuclear bomb drills. Sometimes in the night, when planes fly over our house, I burrow deeper into my blankets and get ready to die. Just in case.
Our neighborhood is a microcosm of the racial and economic tensions erupting on the nightly news in cities all over the U.S.
Neighbors are not friendly across these lines of difference, and behind closed doors, alcoholism and domestic violence collide.
The guy next door has built a bomb shelter. According to his daughter, a girl of my age, he is not intending to share.
I’m calling to the aliens because I want an upset of scale. I want us to be shocked out of life normal. I want our personal and geopolitical conflicts to be overwhelmed with insignificance.
If aliens arrived, we would forget about hurting each other.
Fast forward
Twenty-two finds me dancing with my father in a bar at the Jersey shore.
My father has a habit of speaking in a teacherly way regardless of his actual knowledge of a subject.
“You know,” he helpfully opines, “when we’re young, we think about infinity and space and such things. But when we get older, we realize what’s important, and we leave all that behind.”
“Mmn,” I reply. What more is there to say?
Does he know I’ve read every book on the Airforce’s investigation of UFO sitings? That I studied astronomy and exobiology in college? That I donate monthly to the SETI Institute? That I’m addicted to science fiction. That I’m addicted to space?
Pride is small
Pride is the dis-ease afflicting so many of us human beings.
It travels anxiously back and forth between hurt and puffed up.
Tucked away in the soft underbelly of pride is fear: fear of not measuring up, of lacking value, of being wrong, of failing, of insignificance.
Pride sustains itself by measuring. But before we can measure, we require a scale.
If we want to be smart, we need to know who is dumber.
If we want to be the best, we need to know who is falling short.
If we want to be important, we need to know who is insignificant.
Whether it’s a scale of intelligence or a scale of accomplishments or a scale of value, every scale has to define its terms and choose a beginning and an end. Especially an end, because we need to know when we win.
But what counts as smart? What is of value? What constitutes significance?
The contents, beginnings, and ends of our scales are totally conditioned by cultural biases and fear.
Every scale is an artifical subset of the immeasurable.
You might think that the antidote to pride and shame is to convince yourself that you are indeed accomplished and worthy in ordinary ways.
You have a great job. You are beautiful. You are so smart, creative, talented, and so forth.
But these kinds of reassurances and affirmations always fall short. They are based on the same limited concepts that feed the pride-shame continuum.
The message of such affirmation is: I have to be exceptional to be valuable.
And no matter how much money, or how many accolades or likes on social media we accumulate, not so deep down, we know it could all be gone in an instant.
The Drake Equation
We learned about the Drake equation in my undergraduate astronomy class.
It estimates how many planets in our galaxy — the Milky Way — might host intelligent, communicative life. Hint: there are an estimated 125 billion galaxies in the observable universe.
The original Drake equation guesstimated that there are anywhere from a thousand to a hundred million planets with intelligent life in our galaxy alone. Refinements to the equation have followed. But the preponderance of scientists in the field agree: we are not alone.
If we multiply the Drake estimates by the number of perceivable galaxies, well, seriously, where are your measurements now?
In the actual field of intelligent, communicative life, not the puny subsets we extract for the purposes of coming out on top, where do we actually stand?
Fact: We don’t know, and we can never know.
Relax into insignificance
Years ago in the graduate student lounge of the literature program I was attending, we talked about stars and planets and moons.
Suprisingly to me, no other students were exactly clear about the difference between these heavenly bodies.
A student interrupted the discussion: “Can we stop talking about space? It makes me feel small.”
Unwittingly, she was confirming that we can only feel large if we willfully forget 99.999999999% of the rest of existence.
But what she couldn’t fathom is that insignificance, the very thing we’ve been so desperately warding off, is actually relaxing.
I’m a spiritual teacher. When my students express anxiety about their supposed shortcomings or monomaniacally head for the goal of greatness, I sometimes tell them: “You are a fleck, a tiny molecule of a fleck in a vast universe. Relax.”
Instead of constructing scales and ladders that measure us against a relatively small field of competitors, blow it up. Blow it all up to the immeasurable.
You can’t rise to the top because there is no top. You can’t sink to the bottom because there is no bottom. There’s no measurement.
Your value is intrinsic
Sure, remembering where we really are won’t cure us of anxiety about ourselves or put an end to our over-efforting to accomplish.
But if you keep your view large, you might suffer less along the way. You’ll be able to laugh more at your earnestness. Big view = more self-irony. And that’s some good medicine.
The fact of our lives is that we are always in the middle of an immeasurable field.
As for value: the only certain value is intrinsic. We’re here. We have life. That’s our value, and in this way, all life is equally valuable. All other forms of valuation are aspects of impermanence and limited measurements.
So just do some things. Enjoy a bit. Express what you have to express. Relax about yourself.
And remember, you are literally made of stardust. Emphasis on the dust.
