Ink | Pen | Paper

This universe never ceases to amaze me.

While inside Chowking's second floor (at JY Square), anxiously waiting for the skies to clear up over Western Cebu (because I was planning to take photos of the partial solar eclipse), a few points of realization came over me. First, it's so easy to keep track of (and plan for) celestial events, using say, a computer simulation, because the enormity of the celestial bodies involved allows them to just trudge merrily along their paths as dictated by the laws of physics laid out by Kepler, Newton and Einstein, and when those numbers get plugged into a computer simulation, things work out as they should in the real world--it's like magic--you get this amazing feeling of power, of being able to know that such a grand celestial event will actually happen.

However, it struck me that much smaller events, that are much localized within the sphere of one's existence...things such as the weather, are almost next to impossible to predict accurately. I was thinking about this as clouds in the distance broiled up and faded, creeped from east to west or north or south, and while it gave me a great feeling of knowing that the precision of my Planetarium software (to calculate the point of where exactly in the sky the eclipse is occuring) is uncanny, I still felt helpless at the fact that I cannot do the same with the clouds I was seeing. I begin to ponder on the weather, when all of a sudden I realized, this "localized" phenomenon or factors (of whether I would be able to take photos of the event or not) is not only constrained to things such as weather. I mean, just think and pause about it for a moment.

Supposing the sky was perfectly clear earlier...and the scene was perfect for a snapshot...but then...what if I was ill and sick in bed? What if I had an emergency and had to do something else urgent at that same precise time? What if the batteries in my camera failed? All these factors are real, and had the same potential as bad weather to ruin my plans to take photographs. And when I try to gather all these factors, there's one thing in common with all of them--they are things very "local" in nature...they are things that occur "around" me, in which I'm directly affected by. Then I began to realize, it's all about scale. The scale at which these celestial events occur are simply gargantuan and colossal, and the events which I deem have great impact in the things I do, or where I end up with, eventually turn out to be very minute things that occur within my own little "sphere" of existence. Somehow I made the connection (it can be an erroneous one at that), that the more immense an event would be in this universe, the chances for predicting what would happen next, would be easier and is directly measurable by the scientific method, whereas, when you go down the scale chart, and proceed on to small and smaller things, the opposite becomes true.

But instead of that thought making me feel fearful and uncertain, it made me somehow feel more comfortable knowing that there are certain things out there, that, due to scale, will just continue to be, continue to change, just because of the magnitude of their existence, and that my little issues and worries, my little "sphere" of being, are all just little happy "accidents".

Well, you guessed it--due to the unpredictability of the local weather, I never got to take a photo of the partial eclipse. But hey, at least, the act of attempting to do something about it, despite the uncooperative weather, made me think deeply once again about stuff!

Perhaps one day, with advances in science and technology, we can indeed predict the weather, or when will our next wild mood swing will precisely occur. I'd be fascinated to know how that will be like, and how will it affect that sphere of existence we all carry. However, we still currently live in a world where most things, usually close to our physical and social proximity, will tend to dictate what we do next, or where we end up, and here we are, still continuing to learn and accept how things are--I believe the more we gain perspective on these differences, the easier it is for us to understand why we struggle to keep being "we".

-RODION