Michael Lloyd: Making Life Meaningful

 Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown

And things seem hard or tough

And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft

And you feel that you’ve quite had enough …

Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving

And revolving at 900 miles an hour,

That’s orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it’s reckoned,

A sun that is the source of all our power …

The Universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding

In all of the directions it can whizz

As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know,

12 million miles a minute, and that’s the fastest speed there is.

So remember when you’re feeling very small and insecure

How amazingly unlikely is your birth

And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space

Because there’s bugger all down here on earth!

Mrs. Bloke: makes you feel so sort of insignificant, doesn’t it?

First Man: Yeah, yeah … Can we have your liver, then?

Mrs. Bloke: Yeah. All right, you talked me into it

People have always noticed how small and insignificant they are in the face of the vastness of the universe – and they have always been troubled by it. And that in itself is an interesting and surprising fact. If we are just finite and not made for anything else, if all we can ever hope for is a brief and miniscule existence, why would we have a problem with that? Why would it trouble us, if we have never known any other prospect, if nothing in us carried the memory that we were intended for more than this? A caged bird may feel wretchedly constricted because it is made to soar over mountains – but why would we feel constricted by our mortality? If we are constitutionally finite, it is a very odd fact that many of us feel the need to transcend that finitude in some way.