The stars in my eyes

Sometimes, like tonight, when I stand at the beach at night and look up at the stars I blow my mind. I often blow my mind when thinking about the universe, the infinite size of it all, the length of a light year and just what is out there. If your mind doesn’t feel like it hits a brick wall when you are looking at the night sky, then you need glasses. My earth-bound mind tries hard to understand it all, but it’s like thinking about death and nothingness. BAMM. There goes my mind again hitting that brick wall. I just can’t comprehend it. And yet I so willingly believe everything that the scientists tell me. I happily drink their astronomical Kool-Aid. I love watching “Cosmos-A Space Time Odyssey” the remake of the original Carl Sagan show. My friend Lynn and I watch it like some people watch reruns of “Friends” or “Seinfeld.” We never get tired of the huge concepts that host Neil DeGrasse Tyson lays on us. “WHAT? We may be descended from bacteria that hitched a ride on a meteorite from Mars?” “WHAT? We are just located in that teeny, tiny corner of the Milky Way Galaxy that is located in a teeny, tiny corner of the UNIVERSE that keeps going and going?” Hold it Neil. You just blew my mind. And there’s that the “Cosmic calendar.” I LOVE the cosmic calendar which shows you what the history of the universe would look like if it were a yearly 12-month Earth calendar. We humans would have appeared at like 3 seconds to midnight on the last day. Jeez, so much happened before we got here. So watching Cosmos and standing at my beach overlooking Smithtown Bay makes me wonder… If those dots of light out there in the dark sky really are stars, balls of gas, planets, and collapsing stars, then I think my mind just blew. REALLY? These dots of light are millions of light years away and we are only seeing a small, tiny inch of what is out there. According to Carl Sagan, we are “spinning on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Holy cow. Then Neil tells me that the sun will extinguish itself and run out of fuel in like 5 billion years. “What will all the people do?” I think to myself. Gosh, now I am depressed. This is when my mind short circuits and I think…I am like a salamander. A salamander might think it knows the whole world. Sure, it knows what it can see and touch and hear, but it doesn’t see the whole real world as it really is. We think we know reality, but maybe it not the whole picture. Maybe I am just a salamander. I see only what I can in my limited universe and somewhere, someone is looking down at me thinking, “That poor little creature at the beach is looking up at the sky thinking she knows something, but she is so limited, with her little salamander brain.” Then I just look up at the Big Dipper and say, “Dude, you’re blowing my mind, but regardless, I have to still go to work tomorrow.” And don’t get me started on Brian Greene’s “The Elegant Universe” and parallel universes…