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There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.—George Santayana
(With nearly 600,000 jobless Americans, millions who have lost their homes to foreclosures and the prospect of multiple industries across the board doing a turn-around from this deepening slump anytime soon, the picture can be terrifying even for those who have been this way before. It is as if someone pulled a giant plug and we are being drawn to a black hole of despair. The misery index is rising.
Take courage. The truth is that we are going through a cycle. This has happened before. The difference between the tough times then and the tough times now will be in the degree of severity, the length of time it takes to hit bottom, get back up to recovery mode and, ultimately, how resilient we all collectively prove to be in the process. Time will tell. For now, we do need to take things in perspective, look at the big picture despite the stark reality of these tough times, see how our personal lives fit in that big picture and know without a doubt, that THIS TOO SHALL PASS.)
Betw een birth and death is life. How you live that life is up to you. Many of the wisest men who have pondered the meaning and the purpose of life over thousands of years have defined life according to their own perceptions and circumstances. In the end, you alone define your own life.
The Big Bang Theory claims that out of gas and dust, the universe was born 13.2 billion years ago in a spectacular explosion. The solar system where our tiny, fragile, magnificent earth orbits was born only in the last 4.5 billion years. Life, in the form of single-celled organisms began on earth 3.4 billion years ago and man began to walk the earth just a few million years ago. How does one fathom the unfathomable? One brilliant writer drew a more readily comprehensible parallel about the existence of human life as we know it in this way: If the time frame of 13.2 billion years were to be thought of as a 24-hour day, human life only began the last two or three seconds just before midnight.
Our planet earth, with its satellite moon, is the third rock from the sun—an ordinary, garden variety, midsize yellow star—only one of two billion stars in an ordinary, garden variety spiralshaped galaxy called the Milky Way. Scientists estimate that our sun has enough fuel in its belly to burn for another nine billion years at current brightness before it dies. There was a time when men thought that the Milky Way comprised the entire universe. Now we know better. Galaxies huddle together to form clusters and superclusters and our galaxy—the Milky Way— is only one of a small group of about 20 galaxies orbiting in our tiny neck of the woods of the visible cosmos. Scientists now claim that there are perhaps 125 billion galaxies.
Edwin Hubble—for whom the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was named—theorized that the universe is still expanding. In 1993, the Hubble telescope has been able to turn out stunning photographs of about 40 billion other galaxies orbiting in space in a universe that is perhaps, boundless. Since then, that telescope, the extension of the human vision into the vastness of the universe, has continued to astound even the most cynical among us. It has photographed the existence of another 1,500 galaxies, previously undiscovered. In 1997, the Hubble showed evidence of a black hole bigger than the sun’s mass— 300 million times at least. A few astronomers even theorized the distinct possibility that there is not just one universe but the existence of multiverses. The concept and the imagery of watching the night skies particularly on clear, moonless nights boggle the mind and strains the limits of the human imagination.
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