Racism, reincarnation (of sorts), COVID, thinking too much, and the heat death of the universe

I've been thinking too much. It's a skill of mine. 

I've been thinking about race. I've done a half-decent job learning over the years but it wasn't until recent events that I realised I have so much work to do. There's so much to learn (and unlearn) about the country I live in, about countries overseas and the people I thought I understood, but now I realise I will never understand. 

There's a lot of being overwhelmed, too. It's easy to get lost in systematic racism, to feel hopeless in the face of the oppressive force and weight of a history I didn't create but that I benefit from. Easy to forget that it's not about me, that sometimes I'm part of the problem. 

(Maybe stop thinking.)

I've been thinking about COVID-19. Thinking about 'thank you for your sacrifice' metaphorically carved into gravestones. Thinking about statistics and numbers that are far too high, about symptoms and masks and hand sanitiser. About the loneliness in isolation.

(Maybe stop thinking.)

Thinking about Hong Kong, the Uyghurs, Syria. Intersectional feminism, queer rights. 

It's all so big.

(Maybe stop thinking.)

(Maybe stop thinking.)

(Maybe stop thinking.)

It turns out all you need to end one existential crisis is another existential crisis. I've been binging Crash Course's Big History, learning the history of Us from the beginning to the end. It's been oddly calming, thinking about the beginning and end of life, the universe, and everything. 

There's this physics law that I learned in school, wherein matter and energy can be neither created nor destroyed, only transformed. I had always used it in textbook questions, which, to be honest, is rather boring. (If the system is contained then energy in = energy out. Substitute variables and solve.) But what this actually means is that approximately 13.8 billion years ago, when the universe expanded from many times smaller than an atom to about the size of a grapefruit in half a second, all of the matter and energy in me today was there. 

The cells in my heart were there, expanding into the unknown cosmos. The neurons that make up my consciousness. The atoms in the breath in my lungs. I wasn't there in the same form, of course. I looked very different back then, a mass of swirling subatomic particles and energy. Then one day that matter coalesced into a star, hydrogen and helium atoms fusing, shooting energy in the form of heat, light, and radioactivity into the darkness. Again I transformed, into planets and galaxies, sunlight. This body that I so often take for granted was maybe once sunlight. How wonderful that must have been, to be sunlight.

Then there's the heat death of the universe. Billions of years from now, our sun will scorch the earth with her dying breaths, leaving the planet uninhabitable before blinking out. The universe will grow dark as the rest of the stars transform into black holes, grow cold as energy across the universe reaches equilibrium, as the black holes we once thought were gods leak matter and dissolve. I like to think of my energy floating through cosmic soup trillions upon trillions upon trillions of years from now. Watching the universe collapse on itself. Always transforming. 

I learned about reincarnation at school. Never thought much of it at the time, but isn't the first law of thermodynamics just another form of reincarnation? I have always been here, one way or another. My energy was in the sea, in the dinosaurs. My distant ancestor, with my energy in their bones, died, feeding the soil, feeding the plants, feeding another generation. And one day, I will blink out with the rest of the universe, a slow death. I will have been there for it all. 

I'm too Christian to believe in nirvana, but I like the thought of my energy spanning the eons. What can I say? I'm much too selfish to put anything but myself at the centre of history.

Perhaps it's strange to find comfort in the eventual death of the universe. That's okay. I guess it's all I've got right now.