Lightning and loneliness
I spent a good fifteen or twenty minutes sitting behind the garage, watching lightning light up the cloudy sky. Every now and then, a lightning bolt would appear–short at first, and then it grows longer, lighting up the darkness for a split second or two. Everything goes black, then the lightning comes back. And everything becomes brighter. It’s one of the coolest thing I have ever seen.
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I keep getting these recurring dreams about my high school batchmates. Nightmares would actually be a more appropriate term. The situation dreams change, but the central theme remains: loneliness. Isolation. In every dream we have a reunion, or I’m somehow stuck with my batchmates in a certain place. Nobody talks to me and I feel stupid. Well, stupid would be an incorrect term, but I get that feeling because I shouldn’t even be there but I am.
It’s not that I’m over my past. I am. But what bothers me most about my dreams is that it tells something about me that I’ve been denying for the longest time. It’s that, in spite of the people I go around with at school, and underneath the photogenic smile, I am the loneliest person I know.
Now that’s something I need to deal with. Because if I don’t, I’m liable to drink sand in the desert. And I don’t want that.
——
Philosophical musing for today (something I learned from Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder):
Did you know that when you look at the stars in the sky, you are actually looking back in time? The universe is vast beyond comprehension and the distance between the earth and the stars is so great, they are measured in light-minutes and light-years. A light-minute is the measurement of the distance light travels in one minute. Light travels through space at 300,000 kilometers a second. A light-minute, therefore, is 18 million kilometers. One light-year is approximately around ten trillion kilometers.
The furthest planet away from earth in the solar system is Pluto, around 5 light-hours away from us. So when you look at Pluto through a telescope, you are actually looking five hours back in time.
The entire Milky Way is 90,000 light-years wide. So when we gaze at a star in our galaxy, 50,000 light years away from the sun, we are looking back 50,00 years in time. Beyond our galaxy, there are a hundred billion stars. The nearest galaxy to ours, the Andromeda nebula, is two million light-years away. That means the light from that galaxy takes two million years to reach us. So we’re actually looking back in time when we see the Andromeda nebula in the sky.
And apparently, no galaxy in space remains where it is. All galaxies in the universe move further away from each other at incredible speeds. The further they are away from us, the faster they move. The universe has no geography. So when astronomers pick up light from galaxies billions of light-years away, they are actually charting the universe as it looked during the Big Bang. Everything we see in the sky is cosmic fossil from millions of years ago. And that is why I no longer believe in astrology. All it does is predict the past.
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6 Responses to “Lightning and loneliness”
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I agree totally!!!!
Hey Lauren, thanks for the welcome message =) Check my reply on my blog…
When I’m outside the whole lightning thingy freaks me out…
Yeah lightning is cool and I also enjoy watching lightning light up, but only when I’m at home
Hahahaha! Sophies World is an awesome book! And everything about that whole light thing is true. But then again, whats even cooler is that since light take so long to reach us and since whenever we look into a telescope, we are seeing the light images from many, many years ago, if we are able to make a telescope big enough to collect light from the farthest reaches of space, we can actually see the universe as it was at the beginning of time. Or, if we take it a step further, we could even see the universe at it was before time even started… If your interested, pick up the book “The Universe in a Nutshell” by Stephen Hawking. Very interesting book that will probably get you back into science and physics… hehehe!
> And that is why I no longer believe in astrology.
> All it does is predict the past
Fantastic! Just what I need to say to anyone who goes on about star signs!
Apparently, some of the delivery men delivering things to our department ask, “Is this the Department of Physics and Astrology?” They wouldn’t understand why we might laugh at them. But as you point out, those two letters make all the difference.
I can relate to the comment you made about being the loneliest person you know… I feel exactly the same, but people always just see what’s on the outside and not the inside:cry:
I guess many of us reading this page feel the same way. There are too many lonely people in the world, and usually the people who least deserve it. Just remember - it won’t last forever. One day the smiles and happiness will reach the inside too.