Current mood.

I wanted to have eternity to ponder the science of creating universes with the mind of a God.

I wanted to have eternity to live in love with my sweetheart in our best, perfect bodies, having all the sex and enjoying our loved ones, in a paradise with no pain, loss, or death.

I wanted to grow up to become a member of a race of immortal, omnipotent intergalactic space aliens, because I was promised that I already was one in embryo. Cosmic Mormonism promised worlds without number. I loved the idea of God as ultimate scientist, physicist, chemist, and engineer and couldn’t wait to be the same.

Instead, I got two divorces and have become an atheist that practices secular Buddhism and mindfulness meditation. I stare into the abyss and it stares back at me. I get this one precious imperfect finite life to live and love and comprehend all I can with an imperfect flawed body and mind before my atoms disperse back into the stardust from whence they came and I cease to be aware. I get to ponder the mystery of the stars and galaxies, knowing that relativity will make it impossible for me to visit them, or even observe anything but the light from their distant pasts.

What I’m coming to understand is that what I have is beautiful. What I have is the existential questions humankind has always struggled with since the first human asked the first question, and there are still no sure answers. How did I end up a thinking ape on a rock in space, contemplating his own death? Is it just the result of the universe throwing trillions of dice for billions of years, or is there some kind of force that organized it all? All we really know for sure is, we’re here, and we can think, now. We’ll probably never know, Tomorrow is never guaranteed. I am not alone, because every mind in history has had to grapple with these questions in some form or another. I’m actually in quite good company!

I still pine for old thought patterns, old beliefs sometimes, but part of what makes each moment of consciousness so beautiful is the painful, temporary nature of it all. Everything is changing, always. There is no permanence. The cells in our bodies are always dying and being replaced, a flowing river is never the same water moment to moment, the sun will burn out in billions of years, the universe itself may end in being compressed back into the infinitesimally small point it started from, or in eternal expansion into nothingness.

The final takeaway for me is: life is precious BECAUSE it is finite and fleeting and mysterious and frustrating and beautiful. I intend to cherish every moment of it.