All meaning is born from entangled confinement, where orders and chaos are shielded from the vacuum of nothingness. All ideas are implanted, yet the origins are long lost, but much should have been born from emergence. Through the anchoring of space and time, we find our paths.
The moment we’ve been given a life, we are gifted with death somewhere along the journey. Together in a single reality, we experience billions of different ones, interconnected, locked, and knotted.
I have been in love with space as a young boy until now. In this dream of the love of the universe, there is no struggle to find academic jobs, and there is no pressure to “publish or perish”; there is no dirty competition or all sorts of toxic academic traits… I can stare at the sky for hours and feel a deep emotional connection with the vastness, feel of being small, being a speck of tiny dust on the pale blue dot. Luckily enough, I have come a long way now, being a postdoc researcher of astrophysics, handling the imprint of the electromagnetic waves generated by galaxies billions of years ago. Yet, at this point, I started to doubt if I could continue being lucky. No earthquake shook faith, yet cracks built up through the years. Seeing too many “pointless” pieces of work being done, money, time, and perhaps career wasted. Some unethical players steal others for what? Just to publish something, to have a paper count. What is the point of it besides damping the whole academia? Look back to myself, am I really good at this? Am I really qualified? Do I know how to solve Schrödinger equations to calculate the quantum states of molecules in the interstellar medium? Do I really understand how to calculate the momentum transfer of a thick galactic disk with gas and stars rotating around? Do I really understand the radiative transfer of the optically thick dust and the lines coming through? I have seen so many blatantly made ignorant mistakes in the papers published… So, what are the points of all these? There are really good pieces of work out there by really “smart” and hardworking people. It is they who are the backbone of the skyscraper of astrophysics, and a lot of people are just pieces of paint on it.
I would not want to be the pigment but to make some real incremental contribution to our understanding of this world. I would like to make something significant, not grandiloquent; I would like to be honest, not fraudulent; I would like to make a difference, not fruitless.
Life forks; the time that decisions have to be made is approaching. With the burden of searching for a meaning, a mystery shall be pondered upon.
(imaged generated by MidJourney using the poem as the prompt)
(Generated with MidJourney using the poem as the prompt)