A post to help you be awakened by life when you’re feeling weary. Inspired by a particularly dreadful period of insomnia.
You.
There you are.
You’re staring at a computer screen, waiting to be woken up, whatever that even means. Maybe you’re wondering if the blue light from your screen is really hurting your sleep.
Maybe you shrug because you know that all the hurt you’ve endured in your life can’t compare to the harm of a simple light wave. Is blue light the real reason you can’t sleep at night?
To answer that question, let’s take a step back through time. Long before you read this sentence. Long, long before you learned that life is random and death is inevitable. I know, sounds bleak. But your story gets better, I promise.
Let’s take a step back and open the aperture. Who are you really?
Well, here’s the facts:
You are trillions of cells, the result of billions of years of evolution — though it only took about six million years for you to evolve from ape to homo sapiens. From the viewpoint from space, you came into being in a blink of an eye.
You have a name, a particular way of walking, along with a unique amalgam of physical attributes. Your hair color is largely determined by the expression of a gene called melanocortin-1-receptor, and that will determine if your hair color is black, brown, blond, or red.
But we both know you’re more than the color of your hair. Such details don’t even matter right now, not when you’ve made such a long journey to get here.
In certain eras, you’ve hunted and gathered; in other times you’ve planted seeds and tilled fields. You’ve given life and created descendants, hoping they’ll have an easier time of it than you did.
In certain eras, you’ve fought in wars and killed many people, but I know that you’ve fought just as hard for peace. Maybe this is why you can’t sleep.
You’ve seen so much life, so much death, and everything that could exist in the space between.
You might not remember all this. I certainly don’t. But rest assured: our ancestors have endured all of this, and more. And those experiences are woven into our DNA. For better or worse, those memories are hardly accessible to us on a conscious level. Maybe this is why you can’t sleep.
Nonetheless, please consider this exquisite truth: You come from the stars, literally.
Really, this isn’t just to say you’re more than what you see in the mirror, though it’s true.
I hope you know that you’re more than the sins of your mother and father, though you may still feel the burden of them. And why shouldn’t you? I’ve just spent all this time trying to tell you that you are your ancestors, so why wouldn’t they follow you around like a ghost?
But let me ease your burden a bit and convince you that you are still more than all that. You’ve overcome their past mistakes. You’re part of a better world. But don’t get smug about it — you hardly even had a choice.
Let me pause here and ask you to bear with me because things are about to get a little strange, if it hasn’t already.
You’re more than all these things because, despite all that, you are the universe.
You are the universe because, like the universe and because you inhabit the universe, you’re expanding out in all directions, ever-growing in complexity and consciousness. Believe it or not, this actually relates to those blue light waves I was harping on about earlier, but we’ll get to that in a second. First, the laws of time dictate that there’s no other way but forward. You have no choice but to transcend.
Like it or not — up, up, up you go. I’ll be climbing up with you — probably a rung or two behind.
You’re hurtling headfirst into a blurry future, always looking over your shoulder at an equally blurry past. Time travel is rough, but you do it every single day so you’ve gotten used to it. Every second that ticks by you are time traveling, and every once in a while you find yourself hoping you won’t get left in the dust. But that dust is what you will become before not too long, and that frightens you. It scares me too.
And that blue light that you hear is the reason for your sleepless nights because it’s all anybody on the Internet is talking about? They’re related to the reason we were even able to know the universe is expanding. I worship those blue light waves.
Speaking of the Internet, you may be wondering if we’ve created a monster. I wonder that too sometimes. All I can say is that we still have it in our power to harness this unwieldy beast for a greater good.
Monsters or no monsters, you are a celestial being living a mundane life. I’ve already shown you that your body was built from the stars, hardwired to be as boundless as the night sky. I sincerely hope you don’t need further proof of this because my grasp of astrophysics would be inadequate for the task.
At any rate, your life — that I so rudely called “mundane” — is precious, and not just because we’ve been taught to value human life above all else. In fact, our life is no less and no more important than any other orchestration of atoms. We just happen to be more complex and hold within us greater depths of consciousness than your granite countertop does. And that is perfect.
So let me amend myself: my use of the word “mundane” was wildly incorrect. A contradiction that my silly brain spit out because it’s been hammered into us that life is just life. A, B, and C is all there is to life. Insert anything you like into A, B, or C. It’s arbitrary for the sake of this argument, but common ones include country, job, money, and the infuriating, loosely defined, and ever-changing concept of “success.” When you hear life talked about in these terms, who could blame you for thinking that life is mundane and barely worth waking up for?
But you have no excuse for thinking it mundane now, because haven’t I proven to you that life is anything but mundane?
How can it be mundane when you can open your eyes and see life and the universe, and in the same breath, you can close your eyes and see the dark void that you came from, and that you will soon return to?
You are a blissful combination of light and dark, good and bad, beautiful and ugly.
You can awaken to your self, which is not really yours at all, and that comforts you. Every fragment of your being came from all other fragments, where the darkness converged into a blinding light of time and space. You are both you and everything you were born from, but at the same time, you are not limited to either of those things.
Have you awakened to yourself? Your “self,” which is not so much a singular being, but is in fact the whole universe manifesting in a physical body. Your body, the ever-unique combination of attributes that make you a “you,” and I an “I.”
You awaken to your self and all that entails –
The temporary. The infinite. The sad. The beautiful. The dark. The pure. The awakened.
On that last note, I hope you feel more awake. Do I even have the power to wake someone up? Better still, who am I to even try? Am I even “awake”? If nothing else, I hope you’re less worried about blue light. There are far more important things to think about right now.
I hope that you feel more awake because I know that you’re worth waking up for. You say, How could I even know that?
I know this because if I could see you now, if I looked hard and squinted against the light in your eyes, I could see that you’re not just you, as defined by your name or your occupation or the country on your passport.
Actually, it’s not hard to imagine you at all. I hope you’re imagining me as divine as I see you right now. There — you see? I’m just as anxious to be woken up as you are. But I’m so very tired, and torn between a desperate need for sleep and a desperate need to wake up.
But you know what? Now that I think about it, I bet I wouldn’t even have to squint that hard to see the stardust that you came from, to see the awakened life you are now.
Blue light be damned.
