Insignificant Significance

 

In a way, it was inevitable.

The single room held all the vestiges of a life lived, perhaps not well, but not badly. It did not end here, no, it ended in a sterile, utilitarian room on the other side of the city, where everyone went to die, because “life at all costs” really meant “profit over humanity”.  They told themselves stories that made them feel good, justifying their inhumanity, excusing it, giving it false righteousness.  No, he wasn’t allowed to die with that humanity, but made to die alone, away from the parts and pieces of a life he had lived in earnest, for there was profit in his death, a perceived morality, and others felt his living more important than his life.. Not surrounded by the people, the stories, the accumulation of dust between the chapters. But that wasn’t really the worst part.

One life, an infinitesimally insignificant instant in the fullness of time and space, hidden away at the edge of a galaxy in an unimaginably large universe. Literally inconceivably large. Even out it the open here, laid bare, it was really no more significant to be alive than to be an electron around a hydrogen atom, which mattered more that the sum of its kind. For its time, for its assembled molecules, it was however, significant. It matted to itself because it became conscious of itself. It mattered to others like it. So life is relative then. It entirely depends on perspective. Even to others like it, even those not like it, same time, same space, may never meet and to one another bear no effect on one another, never know the other even existed, or yet, a small action taken ripples across the life of the other with or without attribution changing its story. Everything matters. Nothing matters. Its all relative. But for this life, this random not random collection of molecules that became conscious and made decisions moving it through time and space, creating ripples by thoughts, actions, it was all here in this one room. Already it was forgotten, the man dead now across town, disconnected from these, these stories within objects devoid of meaning for the context was gone. So too, the dissembling molecules that once bore a consciousness, was without context, disconnected as it was from its stories, its dusty intervaling insignificant significances. Relatively speaking, in the fullness of time, it never mattered but to the others adjacent to it. And even then, ripples fade, replaced, combined and intermingled, with other significant and insignificant ripples, and eventually forgotten, or its insignificance made manifest as a line in a forgotten and no longer extant tome, if it ever even rose to that level. Life, one’s life, is insignificant in the full scheme of things, but it matters to those who have it, to those who are touched by the ripples that life created. But only for their time.

And so then, the moments, dreams, machinations, contests, trials and tribulations, so intense for the rewards though meaningless in the full scheme of things, seemed important in their time. Relativity being what it is, they were likely given more value to those who bore witness and none by those who did not and were unaffected, but really, did that matter? A relative question, to be sure.

Gideon wondered. Why did power over others matter to those who sought and evolved it to control others? To what purpose? What divided good, from evil, both large and small versions? Why had their collection of molecules that became conscious feel the need to have control over others, to take away or damage that one and only instant in time they existed in? The stakes were nil for them in reality, but they did not see it that way. It was penultimate for their victims for it changed their experience, darkening it. Why would one consciousness want that for another knowing how they themselves hated it? He sat quietly for a moment, and his thoughts focused on the sounds that came to him now that he left his thoughts to become present, to hear the juxtaposition of the peeper in the woods and the airplane in the sky, the car on the road, the man opening a soda can with a snap and a hiss. Ordinary sounds. Insignificant other than that they existed and then they didn’t, and would never again. He smiled with the thought that his was the only consciousness that heard all of these uniquely at this moment in the entirety of existence, and that this should mean something. It didn’t. And that irony made him smile.

The man, elderly, a burden to no one, a friend to a few, died over a cup of coffee. Alone in his room, late at night, his collection of molecules that had become a consciousness wanted a nice cup of coffee, and a moments companionship with the bodega clerk, Clemente, and left his life’s collection, to go get a cheap, meaningless moment of happiness. He died because another collection of molecules with consciousness shot him because he got in the way of whatever it was that motivated it to control and take away things from another collection of molecules with consciousness. The old man’s last words to the gun wielding collection of molecules with consciousness was, “Why? Why do you want to do this?” Clemente knew the old man by sight and his first, to Clemente his only sound, cried in sudden agony when the old man fell as he did, so saving Clemente as the gun wielding taker of life then fled. The old man died for no other reason than he was there between thief and victim, and felt he should help Clemente, a group of molecules with a consciousness that gave him sundries and a moments companionship. The other’s answer was as silent and meaningless as the bullet that entered the old man’s brain, disassembling his consciousness, but not killing him outright. That would come later, in that sterile utilitarian room across the city, where he died alone without the things that told them who he was, had been, the sounds to which he responded to as him, those things in that room that would not be discovered for a couple months after someone’s profit from him was noticed missing. It was only then that he mattered. And by then the connection was broken because no one cared enough to connect the stories.

Gideon stood, looked around the room. He walked over to a photo of the then not elderly man with a woman and a younger man, contemplatively picking it up. A family perhaps… no one to interpret it, no context, no meaning, just an image, a collection of molecules without consciousness.  He put it back gently, with respect, as it was precious even without a voice. He turned and took it all in, just as it had been left by that collection of molecules that had consciousness that had brought them together as part of his story. All of it would be collected and discarded, no profit to anyone so of no value to anyone.

Gideon reflected for a moment on what it was to be human, to have a life, live a story, to have choice and yet none, to control, to be controlled, to benefit from success in endeavors, and to be bullied for meaningless power by another, to know moments of joy, love, wonder, sadness, fear, pain.  There were so, so many conscious collections of molecules, now, in the past, to come in the future, billions upon billions, just in this one place in space. Overwhelmingly they would exist unknown to the others. For it all to be so significant and insignificant in the moment, but so meaningless in the end.  Forgotten, no cumulative value to these consciousnesses. The struggle was fought so hard for the stakes were insignificant. Did this make any sense? Did it need to have meaning outside its own existence? Was that not value enough? To these collections of molecules that became conscious it seemed not so to them. Some valued the others, many did not, as a whole they doomed themselves in the selfishness. To be able to be the source of peace, wonder and joy, why take so much pride in profiting over others, having power over others, not allowing others to simply be left alone to themselves in their moment of existence? He would never understand this.

And so, Gideon left, because it was inevitable.