The Sun

There is something majestic and eerie about the quiet and dark reaches of space. The astronaut videos of the view from the ISS show a certain serenity, introducing a gush of love and feeling of responsibility for the pale blue dot. The silent and slow moving planets, the rare view of pluto fly by as the probe hurtles past the icy rock are sights inspiring awe, inviting introspection and a turnaround in life and thought, bringing massive opportunities of exploring within and outside, a wealth of knowledge and a host of reactions within the body and mind.

It opens one’s mind to a never ending space, a lack of limits to a mind that is trapped in time and space. The mind is unable to grasp the idea of there being nothing outside this nothingness. What is this nothingness standing on top of? What is beyond the farthest reach of space, what is outside this space? Inability to apply the laws of the physical world on this idea is both titillating and frustrating. What was before and what will be after? A better question would be what is ‘before and after’, after all? The idea of time as we perceive it, seems meaningless in the outer space. 

Time is useful, but only in comparison. What do these distant planets use time for? As they combust, explode and scatter around and reconstitute new heavenly bodies, does time matter to them or do they follow another set of dimensions we cannot fathom being trapped in our four? Is the perception of time equal to a comparison of data? Do we compare data when perceiving time because we are small and limited? Yet it is a seemingly limitless amount of data being compared in every beat around the globe, in every human mind that lives today and then consider the amounts generated by those who ever lived on this planet.

The most staggering things remain the distances in space and the amount of unknown staring back at us. One making the other possible.

Yet the video of the sun in its fury fails to evoke wonder or majesty. It seems like a quiet show of excesses, in self-absorbed arrogance. Rising flares betray an erratic, angry warlord wanting to be left alone. It doesn’t pull or attract the heart, it doesn’t make sense why. The sun is the center of gravity, why shouldn’t it pull something so tiny as a heart to itself, just like any expanse of cooling, mothering water pulls one to its fold. Why does it not have an effect like the bare rocky stretches of land on Mars or Pluto, icy or sandy?