ArcaMax

It was a meeting-heavy week. They were mostly one-on-one, which I like best, but those tend to take the most effort. The morning of day three, bracing for more meetings and sitting outside a cafe with the creeping heat starting, I watched a mother and son walk past me into the shop. Cute, I thought. Then, a continuation: Even though those two likely loved each other and were sharing an easy morning, both of them would die. One of them would carry the grief of the other.

My brain wanders into strange neighborhoods when left unsupervised. While other people are noticing the weather or wondering whether their coffee order is taking too long, I somehow find myself contemplating mortality before nine in the morning. Still, the question lingered. If our lives are brief by every meaningful measure of the universe, then, just, why with all of it?

That question has sent me in two seemingly opposite directions. One has been toward the routines that quietly shape an ordinary life: city council meetings, gym sessions, conversations with friends, and the weekly deadline that waits for no one.

The other has been toward astronomy.

Carl Sagan once wrote, "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." The atoms that make up my hands have been around for billions of years. The calcium in my bones was forged in stars that died long before there was an Earth. Every breath carries molecules that have passed through forests, oceans, dinosaurs, strangers, and the people I have loved. For a brief moment, those ancient ingredients have assembled themselves into me, a temporary arrangement capable of pre-caffeine existential dread.

There is something wonderfully humbling about that thought. It strips away the illusion that I am the center of the universe while somehow making my choices feel more significant instead of less.

The universe has had billions of years without me and will continue for billions after I am gone. The only window in which these particular atoms can write this column, laugh with my family, lift a heavier weight than I managed last month, cast a vote, or tell someone they matter is this fleeting arrangement called my life.

That feels less like freedom than responsibility.

Serving on the city council has made that lesson impossible to ignore. Most meetings are not history in the making. They are discussions about roads, budgets, ordinances, parks, drainage, and a hundred other ordinary decisions that rarely inspire speeches or newspaper headlines. They can feel almost laughably small when compared to galaxies that stretch across millions of light-years.

Yet civilizations are not built by extraordinary moments alone. They are built because ordinary people repeatedly show up on ordinary Mondays and decide to fix a street, fund a library, plant a tree, or make a neighborhood a little safer than they found it. History is remarkably dependent on people who continue to care after the excitement has faded.

As I watched that mother and son disappear into the cafe, I realized the answer to my own unsettling question was never going to be found by looking farther into the universe. It was walking right past me. Meaning is not something waiting at the end of life to explain why we were here. It is built in the brief years we are given, through what we notice, what we practice, whom we love, and what we leave a little better than we found it.

For a handful of decades, the universe has entrusted me with these borrowed atoms. I cannot choose how long I keep them, but I can choose what they practice while they are mine.

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Cassie McClure is a writer, millennial, and unapologetic fan of the Oxford comma. She can be contacted at cassie@mcclurepublications.com. To learn more about Cassie McClure and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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