I can imagine the universe as a great river, infinitely wide. It flows slowly, eternally, with no thought of where it's going, or why it's going there. It has no concept of time, of distance, or even of its own existence. It is not alive in any sense of the word we understand, and yet it exists, always in motion.
And off in one little eddy of this unimaginably vast, unthinking, unknowing river, some joker has poured a box of laundry detergent. And in that little eddy, so small as to be essentially invisible on the vast surface of this eternal river, billions of tiny soap bubbles form, float briefly, then pop.
Those soap bubbles are us, bobbing along, full of our important goals and plans and projects, proudly and busily building our skyscrapers, fighting our wars, getting our bonuses, salting our french fries and buying our SUVs. But as profoundly important as all this stuff is to us, we are actually so small as to be invisible. We are a trail of soap bubbles a foot across and thirty feet long floating on a river a trillion to the trillionth power miles wide. We are a temporary and inconsequential anomaly in a cosmos that neither notices us nor is affected by our doings. Eventually the last of us will disappear, and a half hour later, it will be as if we never existed.
Of course, if we win the PowerBall, all this will change.
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