Trust the process - Deepak Salwan

 Last evening, was feeling desolate so, decided to go to a star gazing event. And like it does always, space didn't fail to amaze me; it never fails to make my mind go numb trying to fathom the scale of the distances and sizes of the cosmic objects which are so abstruse. I laugh when I think of mankind and how solipsistic are it's beliefs and how desultory it is to the fact that we all are , we all combined along with earth are, not even a tiny speck of dust in the whole scale of universe. 

Not that our earth is devoid of things which leave you completely flabbergasted. Monarch butterflies - they migrate every year from Canada to Mexico. They have this path, which otherwise would have taken three of their generations to learn, is hardcoded in their DNA. Salmon - Every year( if it survives the hungry bears on the way), swims thousands of miles to lay eggs on the same spot where it was born. How does she know her path to get to the exact same spot thousands of miles away ? Isn't it amazing that she has a magnetite crystal in her nose which aligns with earth's magnetic field and works like a compass which gets her to her destination. These and many more, leave you absolutely astonished but what always captured my awe is what lies in the core of our very own star, our Sun. The light; the photon and how it has to surrender to the process to reach earth.

I'll spare the physics part but Sun's core and it's superheated plasma where the sheer heat breaks down the atoms to it's fundamental parts, is the womb where photon is born as high energy gamma ray particle. The heat (15 million degree C...ahem!) causes two protons to combine deuterium which releases neutrinos and a positron and when another proton collides with deuterium.... Oh wait, I said I will spare the physics. So, a photon is born with such high energy that it can destroy anything which comes in it's path. Yet, once it reaches earth, it is a life giving force. Now let this sink in - The light which is reaching earth now, was born few million years ago in the core of the sun. That high energy photon is made to tumble in the core for millions of years, loosing it's energy before it reaches highly proton dense convection and radiative layers of sun. There too, it is thrown around loosing it's energy colliding with protons before it finally reaches the surface of sun with billion trillions of other brothers and they all make their 8 mins journey to the earth to meet our retina and light up our world. It had to loose a lot, it had to tumble in the thickness of plasma, it had to bounce around within protons loosing the energy it was born with. All this while it surrendered to the process to keep loosing something to get to that stage where it became perfect life giving force and was of value to something. 

Now, I had thought of this before and every time I think of Photon's journey, I get reminded that probably, we too have to trust the process when we are tumbled around and surrender to the universe's plan. As Carl Sagan once mentioned, once you become an astronomer, you eventually become a philosopher. Every time, I think about space, I always watch pale blue dot by Carl Sagan. One particular line always hits hard and makes me want to go and hug my neighbour is when he says about earth and showing it as a dot in the empty space in the video- "This is our home, our only home. There is no help coming from anywhere". But last night, when I watched it, it made me feel very lonely; like Matt Damon in "Martian" sitting all alone on Mars. Maybe it's the state of my mind.  Maybe, while I am being tumbled ,loosing some parts of me,  someone somewhere is preparing a ship to bring me home like they did for Matt Damon int the movie. 

Maybe I need to trust the process and surrender....