URSABLOG: Do We Matter?

Holidays are a time for a change of scene; not just relaxing – whether recuperative or hedonistic – but allowing all of our senses to be open to inputs which we don’t commonly process in our daily lives. Whether this is from immersing yourself in the sea, discovering new tastes, or hiking through oppressive jungles, it can be a time of discovery. Sometimes these discoveries come from the challenges of being in a different place, in a different culture, and at others by having discussions with people on topics way outside the bubbles – professionally or personally – we construct around ourselves, and they can be so unnerving, and revealing, that they gently pierce and disperse the bubble without us even noticing.

Sometimes these discoveries can be pleasant, illuminating and inspiring. Often they can be challenging and uncomfortable. Place yourself outside of your usual comfort zone and it can be at least disorienting and at worst terrifying. But how much do they matter? Once you are returned from your adventures, rested or otherwise, it is so easy to drift back in to routine that those things that unsettled or inspired you, that you swore would change your life for good, are quietly forgotten as you reach for your familiar crutches and panaceas that you had vowed against – never again! – to fall back on. And life goes on.

But does it really matter? To us, of course, it really does because we are – necessarily – at the centre of our universes. We have to survive. We think we are all too consequential as we encounter thousands of different people that we have never met before, and unlikely to meet again, as we travel down roads, through airports, on ships and in and out of areas of touristic interest. We have to get to where we are going, we have to experience to the full what we came to experience.

I had a revelation – for me at least – one night on a Greek island. It was in fact deep into the night – nearer sunrise than sunset – at a place where the lights and sounds of late-night partying, of houses, hotels or yachts, could not reach me. I lay back on the ground. The northern wind had scoured the sky clean of clouds and moisture, and above me was the whole canopy of the heavens spread out in stark and sparkling detail. I had never seen a night like it, and with no one to share the experience, and – surprising though it may seem – completely sober, I was astounded by the commonplace. It seemed that not only that this sky was exclusively mine, the whole situation was primed to give me a message, my own personal message. A few volleys of shooting stars reinforced that impression.

I wondered what that message was. Was it – rather banally – that I was such a small part of the universe, so small, that I was insignificant in the great scheme of things? No, I decided, I am too self-centred for that. Was it that I was bound for greater things? That I should be inspired by the beauty of the universe and – again rather prosaically – reach for those very same stars? No, I answered myself, I am 57 years old and any great successes would surely have come by now. My words had forked no lightning, and in any case lightning was certainly unforthcoming on a night as clear as this. And whilst acknowledging that dark may eventually be right, I decided to just live in that moment and gently drifted off to sleep until I was awoken by the warming rays of the rising sun.

I gazed out over the sea: beneath me, across the offing and towards the horizon. Not a ship in sight. I found myself rather forlornly searching for some evidence of my professional life, of any part of my life. My mobile had no signal. There were no lighthouses, in fact there was no sign of human life at all, dead or alive. Just the mountainside, the rocks, the sea, the sky and the sun. I was alone, I had no-one with me to share looks of wild surmise with, but that was ok, I had chosen to be. Again, the temptation arose: this must be significant, there must be a message, a universal truth here to gather, distil, and then share. But nothing. Zilch. Nada. Tipota.

I lit a cigarette and stayed in the moment. I thought about the universal sky of the night a few hours earlier which I had wanted so much to be for me. I thought about the sun waking me, me alone. And I thought about my choice of being there alone. I drew no conclusions; there were none to draw. I felt a little feeble, a little absurd being so inconsequential in the face of this natural beauty, of these special moments. They were not meant only for me I thought, as I finally gathered my backpack and started back to where I was staying, a few kilometres on the other side of the mountain, whose shoulders I was traversing.

As I reached the road just above my room I met a handful of tired, stumbling, bleary eyed men returning from their all-night revels to sleep off the worst of their excesses before returning to the beach. It must have seemed incongruous – a middle-aged man in hiking boots meeting fashionably dressed youths in flip-flops – but the meeting was pleasant with good-natured greetings exchanged. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, for all of us.

In the great scheme of things we don’t matter: leaving aside the universe (the majority of which is dark matter, so dark may be right after all), even on this planet we are – in terms of mass – insignificant.

The bulk of the Earth is metals and silicates. Geochemical estimates suggest the total carbon content (core + mantle + crust + atmosphere + oceans + biosphere) is about 3.1% of Earth’s total mass. Almost all of that carbon is not part of living things — it’s bound in minerals or dissolved in the mantle. In terms of biomass, i.e. the total of carbon in living things, we are miniscule – 0.000000009% – essentially zero on planetary scales, not even a statistical rounding error. Life’s carbon is minuscule, a tiny, temporary surface veneer in geological terms.

But, as I’m sure is now evident to you – and may even come as some relief) size is not that important after all. We – as living beings may be next to zero in terms of physical mass, but we are hugely consequential to what happens on this planet. It would not be the planet it is without life.

Take that one step further down and take a look at us – individually and severally – as human beings, an even more negligible proportion of the total biomass is hugely significant, at this moment in time, both as a result of our shared history and accumulated knowledge and technology, but also what we are doing now. And all of it matters: the power in our hands is both disorienting and terrifying.

But what power do I mean? Few of us have the power to make the world better geopolitically, or politically even as we bemoan the powers that be. We may have strong opinions about one thing or the other, but usually all those opinions can do is clash against the opinions of others or, rarely, persuade others to change their opinions. Man, and woman (sorry Aristotelis – female lives matter too), is a political animal after all.

But what matters, what makes our lives matter, is what we do. And whatever political system we operate under, distasteful or otherwise, every human life has consequences, and not just at the ballot box, if indeed the ballot box exists at all.

Who we deal with, how we deal with them, what we bring to the table, what we do when we are sitting at it (metaphorically or otherwise), whether it is the kitchen table, the board table, or the desks where we work, whether it is on board the ships we work on, the machines we operate, the buildings we construct, the work we do with our hands or our brains (or both), the children (or animals) we rear, the people we care for, we all have agency of our own.

I may feel hopeless sometimes, and powerless in the face of faceless, unfeeling, overwhelming power. But I exist, and that is not only a gift – even though I did not ask for it to be given to me – it is the essential fact of my being on this planet. What I do about it… well, I am happy to say that I have an embarrassment of riches. I have health, I have freedom and the freedom of choice, and the power to act in my world. It is no less or more than that. But it is more than enough.

Simon Ward