the significance of being insignificant...

i was commenting on a friend's blog recently, when a certain 'eureka' struck my head... if and when we do wonder at often times about our insignificant presence in this monstrously HUGE world, do we really wonder what it actually means to be so?

some believe there are always two sides to a coin... many others believe there is always one side that you can see, the other one being the flip... looking at the problem in hand from an optimist's perspective, physical insignificance never limits one's abilities to be truly significant to the eyes of the world... sure there may have existed ONLY ONE Gandhiji, or ONLY ONE Martin Luther King, or ONLY ONE Sir C V RAMAN, etc etc etc... but he fact of the matter remains that they were 'naive' about being insignificant... call it a blessing or a boon, so was it! now, looking at the same problem from an eternal pessimist's point of view (note that i'm using an extra word in this context - eternal, as thats how they usually stay... its so easy to poison a whole lot of pure milk, than to purify just a little bit of poison... ), the concept of physical insignificance is too trivial to be noticed in the series of sad, terrible, disgusting and depressing set of issues in hand (according to the eternal pessimist of-course) that its more often than not, rejected from being a subject of discussion...

what one must actually take to heart is that, since this world (and life) is made up of all kinds of perspectives, all kinds of cultures, all kinds of intellects, all kinds of circumstances, all kinds of experiences (good, bad and neither), this concept could easily be argued differently at different points in time by different people, living at different places! a wise-man once said

"life is like a grindstone... whether it grinds you down or polishes you up depends on what you are made of"

its about time you quit thinking about your being insignificant... and start twinkling in the deep blue skies instead!