Stardust

I was sitting on the couch, staring up at the wall. My home had just been painted. I could smell the paint. My leg was propped up on the coffee table.  A bandage wrapped  just above the left knee, covering 40 or so stitches, where the doctor had removed a melanoma. The cancer had been discovered early and I did not require further treatment.

I was sitting there contemplating, really contemplating how it happened because It was the second time I had cancer. After the first time, I attempted to make some changes, to be healthier. I had been healthier, reduced a lot of stress in my life. But, I still engaged in disordered food behavior and the thought cropping up in my mind was: I caused the cancer because I still had an eating disorder and I was just pretending to live a healthier lifestyle. Then, the harsh internally punishing kicked in. You're bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad. And I was sitting there, smelling the paint.

Suddenly, there was a thought that crossed my mind, “It doesn't matter what I do. I don't have control over what will occur in my life. I don't have control.”

A strange thing happened. I began feeling like I was physically getting smaller and smaller. I could feel myself getting teeny tiny.  I had this sense, and it was a full body sense of feeling my tininess in the universe. I could feel my place in the cosmos and realized I am a speck of dust. I mean, I am literally the size of a speck of dust. In that moment, I felt that smallness, that tininess.

And it felt good. I felt a sense of relief. I felt a deep sense of relief from the burden of responsibilities, of trying to control everything, of life as I had always viewed it. The relief was tremendous. 

I felt truth in the sense that I am a speck of dust in the universe. I am a speck of stardust.

As that realization unfolded, something else happened. I immediately felt this sense of harmony and joy and beauty and profoundness. I felt an incredible vastness of my size, of my being. I felt my value.

I felt my value for the first time. I felt my value in simply being. I draw breath, I have value. My value is innate. I'm a tiny speck of stardust with zero control and I have value. I have value just because I am.

I am here. I have value. I felt it. I felt it in an all encompassing profound way. It's hard to take that experience, where I had all of these physical sensations and a sense of being connected to the entire universe and a sense of my value for the first time and put those sensations into words, into ideas and concepts to communicate to other people. 

It was an experience that showed me my value, my place in the universe, what I did and did not have control over. I would love to say that from that moment forward I stopped doubting myself, stopped having negative thoughts, stopped trying to control things. That's not what happened because of the way my brain is wired. I still would need to change old patterns of thought and behavior.  But that experience gave a powerful, powerful wiring in my brain.

I take from that experience a deep fundamental understanding of my place in the universe, the awareness of my value. I understand my value is innate, it doesn't come from what I do, or from external things like how I look or what I wear or what I accomplish. It doesn’t come from the car I drive, the house I live in or where I live. My value doesn’t come from any of the things that I checked off the list throughout my life trying to prove I was worth something.

That's not where value comes from. I understand. I understood from that point my value is innate. Now what I do with it. What am I going to do with my value today?