Insignificance

Excellence Award in the 'Step Write Up 2011' competition

The sound of the ocean rang endlessly in my ears as I took a deep breath of the salty air. I dug my toes into the soft, moist sand beneath my feet. Indeed, it was true. The sea is the place to be when one is troubled. The gentle breeze caressing my skin soothed my pain. The refreshing salty spray from the waves washed away my doubts and filled me with certainty.
I gazed at the waves in distance and wondered to myself. In this cruel reality, no matter how conspicuous we may seem to our peers or how important we make ourselves look, in the end we are no more than insignificant specks in an infinitely massive universe. The towering waves along the horizon are but minute fractions of the billions upon billions of litres of water in the ocean. The Earth itself is millions of times smaller than the Sun, which is in turn considered to be a very small star. When you look back at a single human being, or even the entire human population, we are insects with unsubstantial dreams and ambitions.
After millions of years of human evolution, the human race has brought nothing but war and tragedy upon itself. When one thinks about the future, a picture of an age furnished with advanced technology comes to mind. But we are too short-sighted. We never think ahead. We never think about what will come after the future. Everyone knows that nothing can last forever. Wood will rot, plastic will breakdown and iron will rust. One day, several billions of years from now, even the Universe will end. What will happen then? How will the human race deal with the inevitable end? When we are busying ourselves with the trivial matters of better cell phone models, we aren't preparing ourselves for the end that is sure to come.
Why are we troubling ourselves about the infinitesimal problems of our love-life when we know that it will not last long enough for us remember? What is the difference between a kiss and a slap when we are all going to die one day? Surely, nothing will matter once our lives are over and our consciousness is left drifting in an eternal oblivion. We won't know if our descendants will secure a place in a university or win the lottery. So why exactly are we living our lives and giving life to our children when we know that they are doomed to live a short life of less than a century?
History is but a brief description of the many wars that had once ravaged the lands. From the ancient times of the Egyptian Pharaohs to the modern age of politicians, nothing is as consequential as the dates of wars and how they were fought. War is the nature of human kind, but do we ever look back and ask ourselves why these bloody stains in history ever happened? We always convince ourselves that these wars must take place for diplomacy to occur, but is there even such thing as permanent peace? All things will end and nothing is immortal.
I sighed and discarded my thoughts. What good does thinking do? What good does anything do? I had come to the beach to throw away my doubts, not create more. As I watched the Sun move ever so slowly towards the horizon, I decided it was time. The ocean was where life began and it will be where mine will end. Without any doubt or regret, I leaped off the edge of the cliff where dozens of rocks awaited me at the bottom. Of the 7 billion people who populate this planet, one more death will not be mourned.

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