My Philosophy

I have always been afraid of stars. They sit there in the sky, radiating into the ashy, indigo abyss until their light reaches the furthest recesses of the universe. I am dwarfed, I am nothing. Stars terrify me; stars are beautiful to me. They represent that wonderfully terrifying transcendence of living, that pristine and fiery, wondrousness of existence. Stars beautify insignificance.

One night I lie on the soft turf of the stadium. My school is silhouetted in midnight’s darkness, my best friends are sprawled beside me. They are talking, probably about some calculus problem or critique we just read in class. I am merely here absorbing them, and then it happens. Looking up at the stars, I have a moment of all-seeing magnificence, of complete understanding. The stars have watched me watch them my entire life; they have watched me question and challenge them. Now they have given me my own philosophy.

I am insignificant. My life is eerily short, but I am so lucky to be at all. I read a poem in Spanish class by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer that stated, roughly translated, “this mortal life and the eternal one that touches me.” Eternity is alive; it touches me briefly, but its presence gives me purpose. One life is the equal of a grain spilling through the sands of time. We are nothing. But we are everything.

I am significant. Think of the factors that lead to a person’s existence—the magnificent coincidence of living. The Earth existed before I did, evolving in a dark universe, a rock that cooled to create nature and humans with reason and perception. Sometimes I feel that people underestimate the miracle of their own being. They are living. LIVING. We are all lotto winners in the cosmic shuffle of the most impossible odds. This is what gives me faith and fuses my steadfast belief in both science and spirit. I believe in the physical and holy wonder of the universe, and I always will.

My friends are all here with me, and with them I realize that I have a purpose on this Earth: love, learning, love of learning. I will spend the rest of my unbearably and wonderfully short life trying to fulfill this marvelous purpose. There are times when I feel a crushing fear of death, but then there are the instances of wonder, like lying on the field with the ones I love most, that without death would not have the same luminosity.

Last summer, as I stood inside the archaeological marvel of the passage tomb Newgrange in Ireland, I realized that history actually began with the stars. The tomb was built in accordance to celestial movement, and once a year, on the winter solstice, the sun rises and illuminates the passage. It’s a moment of life, of breathing history that reminds me that I really am part of a magnificent story. And I will never know its end. That’s the beauty of the story.