I've been fascinated by outer space ever since I was a little girl. I used to have countless picture books about galaxies, nebulas, comets and space dust, which I read enthusiastically all the time. I lost those books some time ago, though - I have no idea at all where they're hiding now, but my love of knowledge about outer space still hasn't died. And I've got to buy myself another one of those books one of these days.
At first it was just because I was attracted to the pictures - you know, the alien beauty of misty violet and greenish-blue space clouds; the delightful sparkling swirls of countless stars in the midst of absolutely black space. A little later, I realized these were merely artistic portrayals and not how space looks when viewed through real telescopes, but the more I read about the universe, the more interested I got in its complexity. It's a world more enormous than our tiny realities, in which we shrink-wrap our consciousness of the cosmos, lest we go crazy trying to balloon our tiny realities just to meet the standards of outer space.
Even as I tried to understand unimaginable distances involved, I got blown away by the heart-hammering feeling that you were smaller than the human mind could imagine, and reality vaster than the brain is able to conceive. The thought of something so incredible and mysterious brought chills to my spine. There are so many things we can't explain, and the world is one of them.
I guess somehow, it helps me to think about how insignificant I am; how trivial my problems and hopes and dreams are in this universe. Because even if I die - even if the entirety of mankind gets wiped out, this planet will still exist: and not only that, the sun will explode on its own, the stars composing the milky way will be sucked into the supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy, which then in turn will be swallowed by the even bigger black hole in the galaxy supercluster. And despite that, there will be countless other galaxies and countless other superclusters, all drifting apart and slowly decaying as space itself is expanding. You might even go further to think about aliens and the theory of multiple (and parallel) universes, in which case - would you really matter at all?
It might not be the best thought when I'm trying to live realistically (how ironic, considering that our realities are microscopic in the expanse of space), but whenever I feel everything's getting overwhelming, I think of all of these facts, and I feel at peace.