Temporary Lungs

Every living thing is a fragment of a fallen star, briefly learning how to breathe. I think we arrive here already ancient. Stardust given temporary lungs, borrowing oxygen from the atmosphere of a world that has spun for billions years. We are perhaps brief flares in an endless cosmos. There is peace in remembering that you are temporary. Peace in knowing that the river of existence will carry you whether you struggle or float.

There are mornings I wake up before the house does, when the weight of all my unnamed grief feels like a second body. When the fear that the world is breaking faster than anything can be built to replace it, loudly takes up space between my ears. I lie there and can feel the long darkness pressing down on me.

And then, the sunlight hits the wall across from the bed with a tiny sliver of light. The chickadees in the back yard sing out their loud calls to the morning sky. Light, coming in anyway. The world, insisting on itself.

Last night, my six-year-old daughter hopped out of the car and started giggling, loud with delight. I asked her what was so funny, what had she seen to make her burst out in laughter?

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just, the world is going to keep going, isn’t it? It’s going to keep turning, every day. And people are going to have babies. And their babies will have babies. And it all just keeps going forever, doesn’t it!”

She threw her head back and laughed again. Running up the front stairs, shouting: “It just keeps going, doesn’t it!”

Here’s the thing: the universe is very probably billions of years old. It does not require your participation to continue. Rivers and streams flowed before you arrived and will run long after you have become something else. Long after you are soil, memory and stardust the world will continue to turn. Stars burned for millions of years before there were eyes to see them and they will burn long after.

When I was a child, I regularly attended church and every Sunday my teachers talked about the eternities to come, life after death, endless existence in the realms beyond perception. It scared me, this idea of an endless existence (not to mention the potential different qualities of existence…but I digress). Like my daughter, I find peace in that fact that long after I am gone the universe, the whole of creation, will carry on. I don’t know what happens really after this life, but there is a relief to knowing that the world is not waiting for you to fix it before it continues. Forests grow back after fire and green things are already pushing up through last years leaves. Stories keep unfolding, generation after generation, an endless braid of human persistence. When accept our own impermanence, it seems easier to find contentment in the certainty of the earth turning day after day.

We are fragments of fallen stars, yes, but stars that are still falling, still burning, still becoming. We are the universe experiencing itself in temporary form, learning to breathe, to laugh, to continue. The world will keep turning. The river will keep flowing. The babies will grow up and have babies, and those babies will one day hop out of cars and glimpse eternity in the ordinary miracle of persistence.

And I think, if we are wise, we will throw our heads back and laugh with the delight of six-year-olds who have just understood the best secret the world has to offer: that we are brief but we are also part of the endless.

It just keeps going.

And so do we.