Last night’s power outage brought darkness so complete that the stars emerged like witnesses to an ancient trial. Standing there with Arash beside me, I became a paradox—infinitely small and impossibly significant, a temporary arrangement of atoms that had learned to wonder about its own arrangement.
“Abbu, why do stars shine?” Arash asked, his eleven-year-old voice carrying the weight of every question humanity has ever posed to the void.
“They’re burning,” I said. “Dying, really. Very slowly.”
“Do they know they’re dying?”
The question struck deeper than he intended. Here was consciousness asking about consciousness, awareness interrogating the universe’s apparent lack of it. We are hydrogen that waited fourteen billion years to ask questions about hydrogen. We are the universe’s method of knowing itself, and perhaps that knowledge comes at the price of cosmic loneliness—understanding that among all the burning stars and colliding galaxies, we might be the only witnesses capable of feeling overwhelmed by it all.
My mother died on a Tuesday. The universe, utterly indifferent, continued expanding at seventy kilometers per second per megaparsec. Somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy, a star collapsed into itself. Somewhere in our own Milky Way, new stars ignited in stellar nurseries. The cosmic ledger recorded none of it as significant. Yet her death shattered our small family like dropped glass. The contradiction lives in my chest like a permanent ache—how can something matter infinitely to me while mattering not at all to existence itself?
I think the answer is that both truths occupy the same space without canceling each other out. Her death was cosmically irrelevant and personally catastrophic, and these aren’t opposing facts but complementary ones. Love makes things infinite precisely because we are finite. If we lived forever in an eternal universe, nothing would carry weight. It’s our smallness that gives our caring its terrible, beautiful intensity.
Standing under those stars with Arash, I felt the double vision clearly. I’m a briefly animated collection of stardust on an unremarkable planet orbiting an average star in the suburbs of an ordinary galaxy. In fourteen billion years of cosmic history, my entire life spans less than a heartbeat. Everything I’ve ever worried about—the unpaid bills, the argument with Happy about whose turn it is to take out the trash, whether my writing matters to anyone—all of it dissolves into statistical noise against the background radiation of the universe. This should be terrifying. Sometimes it is.
But then Arash tugged my sleeve and pointed at what he thought might be Mars, and I remembered: I’m also the universe’s most improbable achievement. From simple elements forged in dying stars came this ridiculous miracle—consciousness, self-awareness, the ability to stand under infinity and feel something about it. The universe created beings who could look back at it with wonder and heartbreak and love. We are how the cosmos sees itself.
Maybe this is what makes human existence so strange and precious. We’re caught between two truths that seem incompatible but somehow coexist. Too small to register on any cosmic scale, yet unique enough that our inner lives contain depths the universe itself doesn’t possess. A black hole can swallow light but cannot appreciate a sunset. A supernova can outshine entire galaxies but cannot write a love letter. The vastness is unconscious; the consciousness is tiny. We alone bridge that gap.
This explains something about the particular quality of human loneliness, I think. We can never fully share the experience of being a conscious entity in an unconscious universe. I can tell Happy everything in my heart, can hold Arash close, can gather with others in the mosque for Fajr prayer, but there remains an unbridgeable distance. Each of us is locked in our own awareness, knowing that we know that we exist, unable to transfer that immediate experience to anyone else. We’re islands of consciousness in an ocean of matter, close enough to see each other but separated by water we cannot cross.
Yet maybe the solution isn’t to bridge the loneliness but to recognize it as evidence of something profound. If we feel isolated in our awareness, it’s because awareness itself is rare and strange. The loneliness proves the treasure. We feel separate because we are, in fact, cosmically unusual—not special in any mystical sense, but improbable in a purely physical one. Consciousness had to fight against enormous odds to exist at all.
The Allah I whisper to during morning prayer understands both sides of this paradox, I think. In Islam, we’re taught that we’re khalifah—stewards of the earth—which acknowledges our significance. But we’re also taught that we are nothing without God, that our lives are brief as a blink against eternity. Both truths matter. I am small enough to need mercy and important enough to receive it. My prayers matter infinitely because I matter infinitely in my smallness.
When I clean the kitchen without being asked and wait to see if Happy notices, when I worry about whether my words will outlive me, when I feel crushed by my mother’s absence even years later—all of this is both absurd and sacred. Absurd because none of it registers in the cosmic calculation. Sacred because consciousness has decided it matters, and consciousness is the only thing in the universe capable of deciding what matters at all.
Arash eventually fell asleep on my shoulder under those stars, his questions temporarily exhausted. I stayed awake longer, holding him, feeling his small weight against my chest. Here was another paradox: this sleeping child contains more complexity than any galaxy, more mystery than any black hole. His neurons firing in dreams hold more meaning than all the mindless immensity of space. He is ordinary—one of billions of children on one planet—and he is extraordinary—a temporary concentration of awareness in an unconscious universe.
Perhaps this is why we create art, write stories, build monuments, whisper prayers into the darkness. Not because we misunderstand our cosmic insignificance, but because we understand it perfectly and choose significance anyway. We matter because we decide to matter. We create meaning because we are the universe’s only meaning-making machine.
The power came back around midnight, flooding the house with artificial light and drowning out the stars. But something had shifted in me. I still worry about bills tomorrow morning. I’ll still feel frustrated when the internet runs slow. I’ll still hope Happy notices when I’ve done the dishes. But underneath these concerns, like a bass note beneath melody, runs this knowledge: I am cosmically irrelevant and cosmically precious, and both truths are equally real.
Tonight, after Arash is in bed and the house is quiet, I’ll stand at the window and look up at whatever stars remain visible through the city’s light pollution. I’ll feel small and I’ll feel significant. I’ll be lonely in my consciousness and grateful for it. I’ll hold the paradox without resolving it, understanding that the contradiction might be the most accurate description of being human that exists—that our significance emerges from rather than despite our insignificance, that we matter precisely because we know we don’t matter, that we are the universe’s method of witnessing its own terrible beauty.