ANYTHING
BUT SOMETHING
THAT MATTERS

by: Dimitri Marshall

No man is an island entire of itself:

every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the
main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory

were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of
thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because | am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the
bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

-John Donne, No Man is an Island, Meditation XVII

The world of human beings is an incredibly
diverse place, and itmightnotbe entirely fairto make
sweeping statements or generalizations about
what is going on in the hearts and minds of even
a specific demographic of a particular geographic
area. The lines become increasingly blurred when
you consider the dynamic, evolving, and temporal
nature of the cultures and subcultures within the
constraining and defining attributes of an identified
demographic. In reality, the average Jane and Joe
(and every average in between) doesn't really
exist. Metaphorically, and physically, we all exist in
bubbles within bubbles, all co-existing, interacting,
and participating, at different dimensions of the
grand symphony of the universe; from sub-atomic
particles, to human cultures, to galactic systems on
the verge of — or beyond — human comprehension.
Some of the greatest minds of physics have even
theorized that our universe itself is merely a bubble

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in an ocean of bubbles, within another bubble
existing in yet another ocean of bubbles, and so
on and so forth to infinity.

But for all that can be said, defined, and
delineated, in regards to our differences and
degrees of separation in terms of quantity, there
is equally an infinite quality of unification that also
exists and permeates throughout all of the actors
on this magnificent stage of this cosmic drama.
Consider, for a moment, the most widely accepted
theory we have to explain what we perceive as the
current physical state of our universe: the Big Bang.
Long story short, our entire universe grew from a
point in time and space smaller than the head of a
needle; a singularity. Fast forward in time to a few
decades ago, when the human constructed and
deployed the space vehicle known as Voyager 1,
which later was on the cusp of our solar system on
a journey into the vast unknown of outer-space.
With the last opportunity at hand, it turned its
eye back on Earth and captured an image of our
planet which inspired the famous “Pale Blue Dot”
monologue by Carl Sagan:

“The aggregate of our joy and suffering,
thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and
economic doctrines, every hunter and forager,
every hero and coward, every creator and
destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant,
every young couple in love, every mother and
father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every
teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every
‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and
sinner in the history of our species lived there--on
a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

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