Worlds in collision

With all the "news" about the war in Iraq, the presidential elections, the recession, none of which is good or positive or uplifting, I thought I'd turn my eyes heavenly, with a little help from NASA and the Hubble telescope. It is such a beautiful, amazing universe, isn't it? And frankly, our puny intrigues don't mean a hill of beans to what's really going on in the world.

Galaxies are colliding. One day the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxies will collide, and the collision will take place over the course of a billion years. If we--our species is still around (fat chance!)--what will we think? What will we think is happening? The Christian Right will say it's the end of the world, even though it's preplanned and inevitable today. And talk about global warming. Don't worry, if we're around, we won't feel a thing. Just a slight pinch. A bit of discomfort.

But it's something to think about. More and more I keep thinking that life is just like watching a reruns on TV. After a while you just know how things are going to turn out, and life loses just a bit of its mystery. But that doesn't mean there isn't mystery in life. You just have to look for it in different places.

Here, on earth, in the United States, in Massachusetts, in Boston, it's all the same, over and over and over again. And some people really like that. They like tradition. Ritual, even in all it's weird and dysfunctional ways. Bizarre interpersonal relationships that are perpetuated are just fine for a lot of people, because they'd rather put up with a little discomfort, whether it's a galaxy colliding or personalities than change. People just don't like change.

But I love it. I get bored so easily. And the universe is filled with change. It's built on it. The universe is constantly changing. We used to think that the natural state of matter was stillness, and it took force to make it move. What we've learned is the natural state of matter is motion, and it takes force to change the direction of the motion. But we're moving all the time. The atoms that make up our bodies and the spaceship that we ride on and the galaxy our spaceship spins around and the space that our galaxy inexorably speeds towards a collision with another galaxy.

Happy Friday.