Between Stars and Dust : Embracing the Banal and the Infinite
Imperious, inscrutable, and utterly banal — life persists as if indifferent to the meanings we attempt to assign it. For as long as I’ve wandered through its corridors, I have felt both its infinite majesty and its crushing monotony. At times, the air tastes of grandeur, of some ethereal secret waiting to be unraveled. Yet, at other times, I am drowned by a sense of pointlessness so thick it clouds every attempt to grasp significance. It’s this oscillation — between a life that appears to demand action and a mind that recoils into dream — that defines me. Or perhaps more accurately, that un-defines me.
I have found myself caught in moments where existence feels almost like a joke, a great cosmic farce. The cruel irony lies in how the mundane, the trivial, and the repetitive hold us captive, even as we thirst for transcendence. I have stared at my reflection, barely recognizable, hair thinning atop my head, while the grey of my beard has become a quiet declaration of surrender. And yet, here I am, confronting life’s imperious demands : earn a living, clean up after someone’s mess, check off to-do lists, meet expectations. All the while, something more inscrutable lingers in the background, taunting me.
But isn’t that the trick of it? The banalities creep in, fill up the gaps, and soon they are all we see. There’s an inexplicable pressure to act, to do, to become something — anything — lest we be left behind, ignored, or worse, forgotten. Yet, my sensibility often revolts against this mandate of action. The idea of “becoming” in the eyes of others feels burdensome, the way an ill-fitting garment constrains your movement. Action, you see, demands that we conform to the realities set before us, but the realities themselves feel absurd. So, why act? Why subject oneself to the labor of performance? Yet, I am also not so naïve to think that retreating into dreams offers any better refuge.
Dreaming is its own sort of torment. It is no kinder than the grind of action. Dreaming makes promises, offers pathways to escape, but all too often, it leads you nowhere. It leaves you spinning in circles, like a body orbiting a gravitational field that will never allow you to break free.
I have oscillated between these two states — action and dreaming — both detestable in their own right, neither truly fulfilling. My mind, with its penchant for precision and its distaste for vagueness, finds itself loathing the dream. Dreams cannot be dissected or analyzed. They float, ephemeral, like mist that vanishes under scrutiny. Yet my body, my emotions, the very texture of my being, detests action. Action, for me, is the hammer that smashes the delicate nuances of thought into coarse, unrecognizable bits.
As I sit here now, neither fully in action nor in dream, I wonder at the nature of existence. The universe itself mirrors this tension. Stars are born from the violent collision of matter, yet their beauty can only be admired from a distance, through the lens of abstraction. And as they die, collapsing into black holes, they carry the weight of their own implosions, of having consumed all they ever were. It’s not unlike life, really — these cycles of creation and destruction. We are pulled by forces invisible, some of them conscious, many unconscious. I suspect the same laws governing stars govern us, too.
Take entropy. The slow, inevitable unraveling of order. It seeps into the corners of our lives, manifesting as clutter in our homes, wasted hours, miscommunications, the dull fatigue that sets in after years of repetition. But the most frightening form of entropy might be the one that erodes our will. The once-sharp edge of desire dulls over time, blunted by the realization that everything we grasp slips through our fingers, sooner or later. And so, life persists, not as a steady progression, but as a slow entropy — a wearing away of our illusions, of our once-cherished ambitions.
What is perhaps most paradoxical, though, is that even in this unraveling, life remains imperious. It does not ask permission. It demands that we keep participating, even if participation feels futile. The very fabric of reality, from the quantum fluctuations that stir beneath the surface of everything, to the massive, unfathomable forces that shape galaxies, all seem to operate with a kind of cold indifference. They just are. They do not care whether we act or dream, whether we move forward or stand still. Yet, here we are, trapped in the midst of it, needing to make sense of it all, even as the universe itself refuses to give us any clues.
I cannot help but marvel at the smallness of human ambition. We aspire to build empires, to leave legacies, to solve the grand mysteries of existence, but the longer I observe, the more I realize that perhaps the greatest mystery is that there is no mystery at all — only endless repetition. The trees outside my window grow and shed their leaves, year after year, indifferent to the stories we tell ourselves. The wind shifts, the seasons change, and life goes on, as banal and inscrutable as ever.
It is in this space — the liminal gap between absurdity and meaning — that I find myself most often now. I have, at times, entertained the thought that perhaps the universe wants us to live in this tension, to never fully resolve it. Maybe the purpose of life isn’t to find clarity or to act with purpose, but to exist in the ambiguity, in the not-knowing. Perhaps we are meant to dwell in the contradictions, to oscillate between action and dreaming, forever unsettled. In this, there is a certain kind of freedom, albeit an uncomfortable one.
If I were to describe it mathematically, it might resemble an equation that cannot be solved — only approximated. The variables are too many, the conditions too elusive, but the process of trying still creates a pattern. Even in its randomness, there is form. The numbers may not lead to a final answer, but they trace a shape that is somehow comforting in its very futility. Like the universe, our lives spiral, twist, and fold into themselves, each movement both significant and insignificant at once.
And here I sit, observing the spirals, sometimes acting, sometimes dreaming, often neither. I do not seek resolution anymore, nor do I expect the universe to provide one. Instead, I live in the paradox, in the imperious demand that I keep living, keep breathing, even when it feels like everything is unraveling. I’ve come to embrace the inscrutability, the banalities, the contradictions. They are as much a part of existence as the stars and the void between them.
Perhaps this is the closest thing to wisdom I will ever attain: the acceptance that I will never truly know, and the recognition that this not-knowing is, in itself, the essence of life. Not in its meaning, but in its movement, its repetition, its slow burn toward entropy.
And in this dance between the inscrutable and the banal, I, too, persist.
In the symphony of stars and silent dust,
We chase meaning where none is thrust.
Between action’s weight and dream’s despair,
Life’s tender paradox hangs in the air.
Thanks for dropping by !
Disclaimer : Everything written above, I owe to the great minds I’ve encountered and the voices I’ve heard along the way.