How does a mote of dust orient itself in an endless universe that stretches away to infinity in every direction, with no up or down, or right or left to guide it?

We adhere to this rock spiraling through the void by the grace of gravity, but what is down to this planet we cling to? Is it descending into the fiery hell of the star that gives it life? Is it instead falling away into the cold darkness of nothing?

Change is the only truth we have. Whatever is, won’t be for long. Whatever any thing is, it will cease to be that thing eventually—perhaps in a nanosecond after it became the thing that it was, perhaps in a millennium. Either way, the universe will change and every constituent part of it will be along for the ride.

Humanity has a difficulty that, frankly, we can’t be sure any other thing in existence has. We can conjure up a sense of direction. Gravity helps, sure. Experience helps, too. When someone else tells us that the direction they are pointing is up, or down, or left, or northeast, or that way, or way the fuck over there, we may not immediately trust their sense of direction, but when hundreds, thousands, millions of people tell us the same thing, that’s good enough right? We let go of a rock we’re holding, it falls to the ground. What if it kept falling? Again, where is that rock headed? Descending to hell? Ascending to darkness? Shooting out across the universe like a spear, carving wake into the void?

We have only our eyes, our ears, and that sickening sinking feeling in our stomach’s to tell us we’re falling. It’s localization though. It only applies to this rock we cling to and slither along the surface of. When the human race pushes past some of the barriers that exist, blocking it from becoming a true space-faring species, up, down, left, right, port, starboard, theist, atheist, good, evil, forward, backward, growth, decay, life, death…

…these words mean nothing. The only thing that matters is change. Here you are, there you were, there you’re going, there you went, there you are, here you come. The only constant is that the most you’ll ever be, is something you’re already falling away from or toward. Existence is a decaying orbit toward a dark and unknowable end. There is nothing to slow the descent, nothing to cling to as you fall down the long hole to the void that stretches away to a single thread.

You are no blue giant, you are no brown dwarf, you haven’t the ego of a gas giant, you haven’t the swagger of a planet in an irregular orbit, you’re no craggy visage of a mountain range, you’re no crevasse, you’re no ocean, no sea, no gulf, no bay. You haven’t the stature of a mesa, the wherewithal of a peninsula. Archipelago? Scoff at the thought. Not desert, not plains, not soil, not even dirt. All of these things are older than you. All of these are more experienced than you. You are not even a mote of dust in the rays of sunlight that illuminate the world that is so much older than you.

You, compared to the all, are nothing.

But that’s going to change.