The events of this week make me think about time and our relationship with it all. The words of 2 prominent physicists now gone come to mind. A snippet from Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, which I've written about before, expels some poignant wisdom for turbulent times like these in which a week feels like a year:

"...everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena."

After contemplating that truest of sentiments for a few minutes, I then remembered Stephen Hawking's short yet profound rationalization in A Brief History of Time:

"Space and time not only affect but also are affected by everything that happens in the universe."

While perhaps odd complementary quotes, their combined wisdom gave me hope. We are minuscule vessels of matter existing on an unfathomable scale, and yet...we matter. Our thoughts matter, our words matter, and our actions matter. The microscopic output we produce on this planet in turn plays a part in the entire workings of this reality we call the universe. If we can connect to this plain yet powerful truth, we can feel fulfilled in our place, our space, and our significance in this world. If we relinquish the concept of ownership, we can attune to the notion of contribution. We already change the nature of the universe through our being, no matter how small; certainly, we can change the world.