When I wake up every morning, I get a lot of stimuli that remind me how needed and important I am. We all wake up like we are the center of the Universe – a Universe of our own imagination.
The fact is I am one of several billions, and over the course of history everything about all of us will be forgotten.
Alexander the Great and his mule driver both died and the same thing happened to both.
Marcus Aurelius
There are over 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars and many of them have other planets.
If you died tomorrow, your close family and friends will miss you terribly but the world would not stop, or be significantly different. I don’t say any of this to make you feel sad but to challenge the voice that has guided you most of your life. The voice of your parents, and the entire world that insists that you are special. What has “specialness” gotten us? We walk around entitled, crumble at any hardship. We go around using words like “I deserve”, buying things we don’t need to impress people we don’t know so that we continue to feel special.
I remind myself every day, that I am a nobody, that Einstein is only a little bit less insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Since the world owes me nothing, and I am a small part of it there is a decided advantage.
How do you embrace this found beauty in being insignificant?
- Stop tying your sense of self to your accomplishments. If your identity gets tied up to how much money you make or your title, you will find yourself caught up with the irrational conflicts that is sure to come. One day your bank account or degrees won’t be there to save you, the fall will be steep. The world will remind you that you are insignificant, immunize yourself today, so that day won’t be as painful.
- Lean into your smallness. I hike every chance I get, the picture above was from my last hike. I am moving closer to the mountains to hike more because there I am reminded what a nobody I am. I appreciate the beauty, and my insignificance more. Once your ego is out of the way, nature becomes more beautiful, you are more open to real vulnerable feelings, heck you will love like you never have.
I am a nobody, and it is a beautiful thing.
We’re each a negligible part of a vast cosmic entity, and there really is something beautiful about that if you choose to see it for what it is.
Zat Rana
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