When work becomes worship

The stars gather in the sky’s net of darkness over the wind-swept vastness of Northern Chile’s Atacama Desert. A cosmic ACT is playing out there. The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) that sits in that bleak and arid landscape is like a visual stargate into the eons gone by.

Many of the world’s leading astronomers are using ACT to peek ever deeper into the stream of ‘the oldest light in the universe’[i]. The observations now tell us that the universe’s age is about 13.77 billion years, give or take about 40 million years[ii]. Starting from a dot of mystery, the universe has gone on to also give rise to us—humanity—with all our imperfections, flaws, resilience and ingeniousness.

Floating in the unimaginable seemingly infinite vastness and de facto timelessness of the universe, the saga of humanity, in all the colors of human emotions, plays out. Why and for whom did everything come to exist using the scaffolding of space and time? There is a mystery at the heart of the universe.

The universe must have a purpose for life to exist. What is it? Only an understanding of that can help me place and make sense of myself in the vastness of the cosmic stream. The universe provided life with a playground. And humans have filled that arena with a colossal array of concepts in the form of societies, histories, inventions, etc.

As I contemplate it all, the origins and the infinite mysterious immensity of the universe, I feel as if I am but a little wave washing ashore onto the sands of timelessness. The stars above twinkle and the deep ocean floor below gushes.

As the surf gets absorbed in the sand, all is recycled. Then, my mind opens to the simple metaphor hidden in the dark mysteries of the beyond. I understand that the work that I do is not just for wages to survive and live among humankind; but is an offering of my essence into the turnaround of the flow of the cosmic kind.

Then, work becomes worship.

REFERENCES:

[i] https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/01/astronomers-agree-universe-nearly-14-billion-years-old

[ii] Ibid.