The Inner Struggle

In recent musings, it seems to me that the constant inner struggle, the constant realization of all people is the struggle between the infinite and the infinitesimal. By this, I mean to say that mankind is constantly struggling with his place in the universe. His infinite ability and the childlike wonder of seemingly limitless manipulation of physics with more and more modern scientific thought and technology progress is continually battling his realization that he is nothing, that he is nothing more than a blip on the solar radar.

I was thinking while strolling home, that everytime I moved my arm, every swing, I was pushing the tiny atoms that make up the world around me in all sorts of directions, sending them spinning and careening into one another out to infinity. Because as I make my way through space and time, I move those atoms and molecules out of my way and they bounce on and off and through me in quantum displays of dizzying theatrics. I am everything. I am part of the universal sheet. But at the same time, I'm nothing. I'm just a tiny mass of particles weighing about 150 lbs (in 1 g) in the limitless array of astrological bodies and suns burning at energies human minds cannot even comprehend.

And I think this applies to every interaction we make, every feeling we have. Our feeling of being infinite, limitless, is our human arrogance. Our thought that we are top of the food chain, that we can do anything, that we are living gods. And at the same time, humans feel lonely, desperate, afraid, and insignificant when left alone in the vastness of space. We need that feeling of connection, not only to the world around us, but also to the people around us.

To try to understand both is the ultimate question. How do we couple our infinite nature with our infinitesimal significance? How do we describe our ability to reason without a creator from nothing but chemicals and compounds? How do we describe the emergence of the universe from nothingness except the smallest of bundles of energy and matter? How do we get a finite answer when summing infinite positive numbers? It's the beauty of these questions that intrigues us, and it is the coupling of the arrogance and the insignificance, the infinite and the infinitesimal, that appeals so greatly to our human nature and causes us to pursue.