This is probably incredibly incoherent to anyone but me.

I had found a small realm of shadow in the middle of the city - an undeveloped plot of land that only had bone-yellow weeds calling it home. I ran out at a brisk pace deep into the middle of this shadowed ground, each step eliciting the snapping and crunching of long-dead foliage. As I ran I turned about, watching as the city lights all around me became a gloriously illuminated horizon.

My feet stopped at the perfect location. It was a locus just so removed from the lit streets that the dust beneath me was only just on this side of inperceivable. I knelt down, then reclined to lie on my back. I closed my eyes as I settled in to the sharp, needle-like necrotic plant matter. The pain was distracting only while my eyes were shut, with the barbs piercing my clothing and scratching against my flesh.

Despite the pain, in spite of the pain, I got comfortable. What I was about to see made any discomfort bearable.

I bolted open my eyes and beheld the night sky. Thin cumulus clouds drifted slowly through the air, the orange light of the innumerable streetlamps reflected off of them. The lights of distant suns unimaginably distant overwhelmed the ambient din and made the laft few dozen miles through the atmosphere to the surface of our world. All around, at the very edges of my perception, the yellow, orange, and white bulbs encircled my view of the sky, framing it in a scattered man-artificed corona.

As I lied there on the earth, I beheld beauty unlike anything I had ever seen. In those minutes I beheld a microcosm of the universe, and our place within it.

All of us, and all around us, was the very stuff of the universe. By no means is this a statement of the mundane, but rather of the incredible. It had been so compacted in the collective human psyche and exacerbated by the little distractions we make for ourselves that we were things separate from the universe. We were within it, yes, but not of it.

In that moment I knew as an indisputable truth that that belief was false. The elements that composed of our bodies, the life around us, and the earth underneath us were all forged in those cosmic furnaces. We are but the latest aspect of a universe that is continuously evolving and developing, small flickers of consciousness capable of either stupendous self-absorption or profound perception.

In those moments when I knew that I was of the latter, I knew peace. I knew that I was a fluctuation of matter, an intermediary instance bridging the past and the future of the universe.

I knew that what I did in life was meaningless. I also knew that living, and simply doing, had meaning.