A Consider Able Speck

To misquote Carl Sagan, there are billions and billions of stars out there. Looking up at the sky, we can see them painted across our sky, millions of visible pinpoints of light that show us an infinitesimal piece of the universe’s beauty and fill us with awe.

Each star itself is something beautiful, each with its own story. Each shines out with its own light, some steadily, some barely, some blowing themselves up. Some we can’t see, because they’ve become monstrous gravity wells that tests the physical laws of our universe. Some create beams so intense they can kill even here on earth.

Despite there being so many, we consider each one uniquely beautiful and poignant.

There are billions of stars, and billions of people.
Why should we believe the uniqueness and beauty of each person to be any different than that we hold for the stars?

Whenever I see butterflies, it’s always on similar days, in similar circumstances. Fluttering on a flower, flapping lightly through a clear blue sky that’s not too hot, not too cold. Every spring, millions of butterflies fly all over the world, to live for one day, then to die away.

Each day a butterfly sees is unique. And yet, the billions of springs that our planet has spun through…the fact that a butterfly was able to experience only briefly a small part of the continuum of the seasons…

They’ve had the chance to taste briefly the bittersweetness of forever.