When you think about life, you could do it at several different levels, some of which are:

• Staying at the conventional level where we look at our lives as individual people experiencing the world through our senses in the different roles we play

• Zooming out and looking at ourselves as an individual of a species of mammals on Earth in the Milky Way galaxy floating away in the broader universe

• Zooming in and looking at ourselves as a mass of cells and atoms that we are composed of

• Stepping back and considering our life as a time slice and understanding which sliver we fit in

The level we generally operate at is the first one, as individuals governed by our brains and consciousness in the present moment. And while we do that, we make ourselves the focal point of our universe and time.

Scientifically speaking, we are an infinitesimal dot in the expanse of the universe and live in a thin slice of time relative to the history of the universe, which is ~13.7 billion years. In reality, everything around us today is transitory, and all things will come to pass, similar to the poem of the great Ozymandias. Buddhist monks remind themselves of this universal truth when they work on their sand mandalas for nearly 30 hours and then destroy them in a few moments. Such is the impermanence of life.

Some may argue that certain lives are more impactful than others - some extraordinary people create a legacy. Great people like Leonardo da Vinci, Mother Teresa, Steve Jobs, or name your own favorite, left legacies and significantly impacted the world. Yet the humble truth is that even their great works and contributions are ephemeral. They have been around only for some decades in the last 600 out of our 200,000-year human history, and likely 200,000 years later, they and their work may not be as renowned. Our whole world, as we know it, will fade away one day, and all of those works will not matter.

Effectively, in the long term, nothing matters as much as we imagine, so what matters most to you today needs to be defined by you. You are the master of your ship and the author of your story. We create stories to give meaning and purpose to our lives at a level we comprehend. Stories ascribe meaning to events that may be scientifically insignificant at other levels. And that is where we have the most power - all we have is our story and what we tell ourselves about our life and its meaning. It is up to us to craft it and give our own meaning to it. Outside of that, nothing else matters.

- Random musings of a Zen Thinker