When you think of Earth, our home, what do you think of? Does it stress you out? Bring you feelings of joy or hope? Or are we merely all floating on a giant space rock with no regard to how beautiful it truly is? Think of it this way; every human we know or have even just shared a glance with makes home of this place. Yet somehow, we are all merely a speck of dirt in the vast distance of space around us. We are that annoying particle of dust floating in front of our computer screens that we forget about a millisecond after it’s gone.
Now you might be wondering… WTF is this girl rambling about; but trust me, it will make sense, just keep reading.
30 years ago, a photograph was taken by the Voyager 1 space probe nearly 6 billion kilometers away from our home planet. In the photo, Earth is an incredibly small dot, no larger than the period at the end of this sentence. This photo serves as a reminder that we, along with our personal problems, are so insignificant in regards to the universe. In saying this, 2020 (as we all know), has been the year from hell; there’s no denying that. But, what’s more important is how we all prevail and overcome each obstacle that is thrown at us, together. Nevertheless, we can’t take everything so seriously and need to work with what we have.
We might be in the midst of a global pandemic, as well as a time of great racial injustice/hatred between all people, which in turn causes the giant mental health crises we face, but what we need to realize is the core of our very being. Our lives are not eternal, they are fleeting. We will not be here forever, and we need to stop being so hell-bent on ruining one another. We all assume sides and segregate ourselves in a world full of hate, yet forget that we are all one species living on the same planet. We share the same roots and need to understand how interconnected we truly are. It is our responsibility to challenge the hatred, end the “us vs. them” mentality, and open the eyes and hearts of those who fail to see otherwise. Lifting one’s gaze will eventually lift their vision.
Now, I’m not assuming that life will be sunshine and rainbows all of the time, however, we need to wake up. Why spend so much time and energy on things that hold no true benefit when we could and should just make the best of the time we have here. We live on an incredibly beautiful planet, yet we don’t care for it in the ways we should. We merely survive, instead of truly living- everyone is guilty of this. We go through the monotony of life without realizing we can all flourish with what and who we have. We always want something better, rather than working on making the best of what we were given.
We shouldn’t be counting the days, we should be making the days count. We need to focus on living in each moment, as we never know when it might be our last on this pale blue dot we call home.