Reaching for the stars

1050:

When we look up at the stars in the sky (on a clear night that’s no problem for any of us), it’s like watching a cat sitting on a mat.  There’s nothing to do, nothing to want from seeing this, except to observe it.  There’s nothing about the stars or the cat to bring under our control or to want.  It’s simply is.  Maybe we feel a yearning frustration for things we can’t reach, like the state of mind of the cat or the distant stars but they remain nothing less than unreachable.  And so what?

Maybe, as we gaze up at the stars, we know they are not in any practical way part of our daily reality; we always have to return to the here and now, to appreciate what we already have ‘at home’, in our human-based reality.  We have the sun, our own star, we’ve got the Earth, our own planet, we have companions and we even have a true representative of the ‘now’ in our cat-on-the-mat.  Each appreciated but incomprehensible wonder makes us feel like very lucky beings.

We look up at the stars.  They shine down on us just as they shine down on their own orbiting planets.  Perhaps this reminds us of our future (which we also can’t ‘touch’, or see, because it hasn’t happened yet).  But the ‘unreachables’ each project important possibilities and probabilities.

Something a little closer to home, something more tangible, is the past.  It represents something we can’t touch or alter, but it tells us stories about ourselves – some of the things which have made us what we are and moulded our social attitudes.  Many humans have been exploited.  Many lives have been wasted.  We are now living in the age of machines and machine-minds, to which we can attribute a lot of the damage we’ve done to each other.  We’ve even turned animals into machines so that they will guarantee the production of goods for us.  We’ve housed these machines in cages and concrete enclosures.  By bringing  about such extremes, by seeing the damage we’ve brought about, by gazing at the stars, by noticing the calm of the cat, all this points to the obvious possibilities and probabilities of repair.  Who knows, but repair might bring us closer to what seems today so unreachable.