Ever wonder if we are not a part of something bigger? By bigger I don’t mean your church or work. That does give one the sense of something bigger, but not big enough. What I am thinking is bigger than being part of a country, or a particular ethnic group. It is probably bigger than the planet and solar system itself.
I am going to use your body for a second to set up what I am thinking about. You are made up of roughly 37.2 trillion cells. That means what makes you you are 37.2 trillion living beings that work together to live in partnership. That partnership allows you to eat, love, and experience life. Now your liver cells might not even know of the cells in your femur. They would be an undiscovered country waiting to be explored, except hopefully your liver cells are homebodies and they stay with the rest of their kind in their segregated neighborhood. So individual cells live, eat, reproduce and die all the time. You don’t notice because as long as the status quo is maintained you just continue to exist.
Now take this model, but expand it to the universe. I’m not trying to initiate anything religious here. I just want you to imagine that you are one cell in something that is much bigger than you. You don’t even need to know what that role is, but what you continue to do would be important. I mean, you could be the appendix of this greater thing, but chances are you wouldn’t be. Now that is quite provocative to me.
The best part is we probably will never know. Much like that liver cell who only knows the environment that surrounds it, so are we if this is true. We might never be able to surmise what role we take part in this community of life. While that saddens me, it does give me one cool thought/hope. If this is the case then life would be abundant throughout the universe, and as such we will find other parts out there. It would be like that liver cell finally deciding to go exploring. I just hope if we do that we don’t become the cancer.
Never Short On Words 