Where Do We Go From Here?
By: Santosh Pandipati
Tags: Mindfulness, New Years Resolutions, Philosophy, Covid-19, Healthcare

Photons captured by the author on a walk in Los Gatos, CA (2020)

There has been so much life that has been lived by the universe already. This we know to be true from just our own planet’s history. It is estimated that there are currently one trillion species of life on Earth. One trillion. And yet we know so painfully little about conscious experiences scattered throughout existence in space and time. What perceptions run through the minds of dolphins and whales? Of elephants and wolves? Of owls and eagles? Of domesticated cows and pigs? Of all the other creatures that roam our world even as I write this? And what ran through the minds of ancient life that has come and gone, now evidenced only by the muck of oil, the smearing stain of coal, and the occasional stone of fossils? What runs through the minds of innumerable alien species undoubtedly peppered throughout our universe, but too remote to ever access? It is estimated that 108 billion modern Homo sapiens have lived on Earth since the dawn of our species. A hundred billion human beings. Each who possessed dreams, desires, feelings, pain, sorrow, grief, joy, love — innumerable experiences of life. Conscious conceptions of our universe, all long-since vaporized, each a part of an organic individual whose matter now circulates through all of us as part of his or her ultimate legacy. Were humanity to burn itself into oblivion we can still take solace in knowing that there is so much of life still left on Earth, and likely in the universe, and that there will continue to be so for aeons of time.

And yet, with such awareness, isn’t it an extreme form of tunnel vision for our species to hold its suffering in one miniscule year above all other suffering its members have had to endure in all the years that have passed? Or for one human family to do so? Or for one human individual to do so? Alas, there is no escape for each of us from this perspective of the one. This is our fundamental dilemma as human beings: that we are able to conceive of multitudes, and yet somehow we have to reconcile this reality with our innate limitations as individuals, as solo travelers in a vast expanse. We are each in some way an isolated eye of illuminated matter trapped briefly in spacetime, a lens of the universe through which it may gaze upon itself in partiality, struggling to visualize itself in unity. So many windows of consciousness gazing upon existence. So many perspectives, so many feelings, and so many attitudes that are so many times colored by discriminating vision, so many times limited by the conceit of a local vantage point, virtually always a sliver of the whole, never truly an apprehension of totality.

And so I come back to myself, the only perspective from which I can write assuredly. So much has been lost this year, and yet there is reason and cause for hope for all of us individually, and for all of us collectively. That language can convey a shared experience of awareness between people is a miracle unto itself. This very language is the crucial engine necessary to help us climb our way out of an existential hole that we have dug for ourselves, one that if we keep digging will lead to civilizational collapse — and perhaps much worse. That I am able to contribute to this language of shared experience, if only for a brief flash of time in a cosmic scale, is a blessing that I choose not to ignore. Rather I choose to fight for life — to persuade, to coax, to enrich my fellow human consciousnesses, if only to set us on a collective path to betterment. And so I will set about to improve my language and my thoughts, and to seek wisdom in the stillness between my thoughts in the coming year. Perhaps that is the best contribution one human being can make towards the improvement of the human condition. And perhaps that is the best resolution one individual — I — can make for a New Year, and for a new circumnavigation of life.

Photons captured by the author at Lake Tahoe, CA (2020)

(The author reserves all rights to photographs published in this article.)