when you thought there was nothing there, but there was so much

They watched the empty night sky for four months. For four months, they looked at this area in the sky because there didn't seem to be anything there. It makes you wonder why anyone would bother to look for something that they thought they wouldn’t find, or furthermore, that they didn’t expect to find.

But they found something; they saw through time. This speck of sky, this unimpressive part of the universe, contains 10,000 galaxies. Hubble Ultra Deep Field represents the oldest and farthest region of space ever observed through a telescope. It was chosen for observance due to its disparity to areas around it; in a sky illuminated by celestial bodies, we thought we'd found somewhere different: emptiness.

So we learn. That is the momentum that knowledge has taken in man's search for understanding: there is always more. Outside of what we know, outside of what we can know, outside of what we will ever know there will always be much, much more. We simply do not have the perspective to ever fully capture the transcendent size of the universe because we are entirely too limited to ever do so. We are born, we live in awe, and then we die like everyone before us has done.

I’m left with that brief feeling of terror whenever I look up at the night sky and realize that I mean less and less the farther away I let my eyes travel. It is what Edmund Burke would classify as a normal emotion in the presence of the sublime. When confronted with absolute, consuming, overwhelming space, I feel a powerful sense of motion downwards. I’m here, on Earth; I will never be there, I will never experience that.

In essence, we get lost in the infinity. It is very easy to succumb to the feeling that everything is so much bigger than us. I do. A lot. I forget the tiny snowflake landing on my lips and gently melting there like a kiss when I think about the galaxies out there, the exploding stars, the black holes. That’s the dilemma you’re left with when you try to reconcile your existence with that of an entity that was there before you were an idea, and will be there after you are nothing but a collection of lonely cells.

But then I remember that when I walk through a snowstorm, I’m really walking through so many snowflakes. They’re all different, all ephemeral, yet all so beautiful as they land on my eyelashes, melt, and become tears of awe. There is awe in this as well, they’re saying, as there is in those galaxies so far away. What I experience now is singular to myself, singular to all of time, and although it passes all too quickly, it happened. That moment. In a universe that is constantly expanding, or contracting (whatever you believe), your life happened when it didn’t have to. What’s more, you exist.

There’s something in that, isn’t there? In that I can stand under the night sky. I can see the stars, the galaxies, see back in time. And I can walk back to my room while snowflakes embrace the ground, and me.