You’ve probably been afraid at some point. I don’t claim to know you, but going on statistics, you probably have the part of the human brain that experiences fear, and it’s probably been active before. The part of the brain that when you’re hooked up to an MRI machine and they show you a picture of a skull or a big weird rat lights up, telling you “that’s some scary stuff, dude.” It’s hard to avoid feeling that about a lot of things. All things considered, we’re pretty fragile creatures. Even Vin Diesel would probably be pretty badly injured if he were hit by a car or a falling piece of cement. Probably.
For a moment, consider a mountain. The Blue Ridge range isn’t too far from here, so you’ve probably either been there or at least seen it. Looks pretty tall, right? Well it’s actually a pretty short mountain in the grand scope of things. Mountains like McKinley or Rainier, or the real heavy-hitters like Everest and Kilimanjaro would dwarf those little blue foothills. But if you’ve ever been on top of any mountain, you know that it looks pretty tall when you’re a little human looking down. You’ve probably also been to the ocean. The ocean is so deep that there are mountains down there taller than Everest that we can’t see because it’s so deep. There’s so much in that immense volume that could really easily kill you. So it seems pretty rational to be afraid of a mountain or the ocean, and a lot of people are.
My point is that the list of things that can and someday will kill you is so long that it’s incomprehensible. So you’ve got nothing to fear from a mountain or an ocean — no more than you do from driving your car or any of the other things we consider necessary risks. Why not take the next step? Why be afraid of the infinite void? Space is unfathomably large and full of stuff that could vaporize the whole solar system and there isn’t anything anyone can do about it. Why worry about that? Why be afraid of impermanence, of ego death, of insignificance? Embrace it the way you do a camping trip or a nice vacation to the beach.
It might be difficult, especially for college kids like us. We’re conditioned to think that everything we do matters a ton and affects everyone everywhere. And to some extent, that is true. Every action has consequences. But most of the time, and I’m talking like 99 percent of the time, those consequences are too small to really notice all that much. We do shape the world around us, but it shapes us also. The lines between my actions and yours, my consequences and yours, are very thin, if even there at all. Part of owning up to your actions is admitting when they’re pretty much insignificant. This shouldn’t scare you, it should liberate you. If nothing matters, create something that you think does. Learn to love your insignificance. Love the insignificance of others. It’s all we have.
Nick Shahbaz is a Humor Columnist for The Cavalier Daily.
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