After a simple dinner I go out on the porch and gaze up at the stars twinkling above, the random scattering of millions of stars. Even in a planetarium you wouldn't find this many. Some of them look really big and distinct, like if you reached your hand out intently you could touch them. The whole thing is breathtaking.
Not just beautiful, though—the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they're watching me. What I've done up till now, what I'm going to do—they know it all. Nothing gets past their watchful eyes. As I sit there under the shining night sky, again a violent fear takes hold of me. My heart's pounding a mile a minute, and I can barely breathe. All these millions of stars looking down on me, and I've never given them more than a passing thought before. Not just stars—how many other things haven't I noticed in the world, things I know nothing about? I suddenly feel helpless, completely powerless. And I know I'll never outrun that awful feeling.
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, 135
I think sometimes (often too much) about how small we as humans are in respect to the "Big Picture," and it is absolutely, terrifyingly mind-boggling . It's a sad thought that we and everything we've miraculously accomplished (all thanks to one gene mutation, imagine) could hypothetically be extinguished in the blink of an eye, indispensable in the hands of Nature.
