Mountain Minute #208: Bored? Read This.

Where are you right now?

• an office?
• your house or apartment?
• a coffee shop?

Perhaps you are tempted to say Ohio or India or Tokyo or wherever your mail gets delivered.

Such replies may be factual, but they also obscure a larger truth.

You are here:

You live among trillions of stars and countless galaxies.

Each twinkling star is a sun, many warming planets far different than ours but still capable of supporting life in one form or another.

Your own galaxy, a majestic pinwheel of 100 billion stars, is a mere dot in a larger cosmic tapestry—woven together with dark matter and energy—and punctuated by black holes so massive that they devour light.

Those black holes are the tombstones of ancient, massive stars and at the same time they are the seeds from which new galaxies are born. They are cosmic oxymorons: full of information, yet revealing nothing; they tell us that even in death, there is creation, and in darkness, there is unexplored beauty.

Now, return your gaze to your immediate surroundings.

You are not separate from that grand cosmic ballet, but rather are an intimate part of it.

The calcium in your bones and the iron coursing through your veins come from the hearts of long-gone stars. The atoms that constitute your being have partaken in cosmic events unfathomable in scale.

The walls that seem to confine you ("made of" 2 x 4s and sheetrock) are conglomerates of quantum fields, vibrating strings, or whatever the true, final language of reality actually is. (At this precise moment, I cannot say for certain.)

Your consciousness and thoughts are intimately connected to all these elements.

When you ponder a mathematical equation or marvel at the beauty of a painting, you are essentially the Universe realizing its own majesty. You are anything but alone or mundane. You are an assemblage of cosmic history, a sentient being capable of pondering the imponderables, situated in a Universe resplendent with a beauty so profound that when you pay full attention, it will move you to tears, fill you with awe, and beckon you to explore, to understand, and to be one with creation.

In other words, you are in the midst of incredible complexity and connection.

So the next time you find yourself thinking, "I am bored" or "I am lonely," think again. You are a vital and inseparable part of a universe rich enough to keep you entranced and excited for billions of years.

**

Bruce Kasanoff is a distiller of people, ideas and possibilities. He is the founder of Bend Reality .