Imagine

Imagine nothing, absolute nothing, no light, no heat, no matter, nothing at all. It’s quite a hard thing to do, to direct ones’ intellect to that which is only defined by absence. The human mind is designed to concentrate on the important information in any situation, filter out the significant from the mundane, see the face in the crowd, pick the voice in the roar. In nothing, we are confronted with, just that, nothing, unqualified naught, the absolute absence. Think about it too hard, too long, and you’ll find yourself on a cliff edge, just about to fall.

But just for the moment, for the sake of experiment, imagine nothing.

This is what space is like. Oh, yes, astronomers will tell you about stars and gas clouds and occasional lumps of rock, but for the most part they’re just trying to attract funding. Most of space is nothing, which is ironic, because it also contains everything, or at least everything that we know, (there is always the troubling possibility that we are the atoms in someone else’s universe). The Universe is so vast that it contains both everything and nothing, only everything is bunched up, in clumps, and the nothing is spread out all over the place. It’s the nothing that makes space so huge, the endless, endless nothing. They say the stars are so far apart, that even travelling at the speed of light, which is as fast as anything can travel, you would grow old waiting for the next one. Just consider that, the endless silent eons, the eternal darkness, the absolute emptiness.

But like I said, don’t think to long.

Imagine just one tiny piece of that vastness, one miniscule inch of the ultimate whole. It doesn’t matter where, or when for that matter, time has little meaning out here in the darkness. There is something here, in this endless emptiness; a tiny light, not the distant light of a star, but the warmer, more delicate light of electricity, a tiny, fragile, glimmer that the cold and the distance haven’t yet extinguished. It is an ambassador, from a planet known as Earth - an ambassador to an unknown race.

It moves, this light, this insignificant, near-invisible emissary, across the endless reaches of the night, it inches onwards, ever onwards, a tortoise to the dancing comets’ hare, it crawls along, oblivious, but even the tortoise made it in the end, and time will tell.

Time, time, that’s the thing, enough time will manage anything, enough time will manage everything.Days pass, and turn to years, but how do the hours count? The clock that tells such things echoes a sun it can no longer see, and will not see again, save if the universe, as infinite as it is, curves and comes around, becomes itself again.

Will our herald ever get to there, its hopeful, destined home? To the bosom of a distant race, alien to our own? Or will it languish ever on, never to return? I do not know, I cannot tell, but as you sit, remember this: up, up, up there in space, eternal and beyond, for every passing year that herald lumbers on.