So a bit back, I got to do a "product demo" at work... basically, sit at the front with some acrylic paints and a small canvas, and invite customers to join in by buying a canvas, we supply the paint. I'd never painted like this before. It was fun. And while the result is certainly amateurish... I've got a real sense of pride over it. Especially since all I had to work with was a tube of yellow, red, blue, black, white, silver and gold.

As or the subject matter... I am fascinated by space. The cosmos is mind-blowing in its majesty and mystery. The more we learn about it, the more we realize there's oh so much MORE to learn about it. Forces beyond comprehension at work. Images of vast destruction and chaos reach us as beautiful lights and billowing cosmic dust, but even among the chaos and unfathomable force of a hypernova there is birth and creation at play. Hell, we owe our very existence to such devastation, stellar explosions being the birth of the heavier elements we're made of.

And here we are.

We are a tiny, infinitesimal speck in it all. Almost the sum totality of the Universe is instantly lethal to our kind, and by that I mean "all life on Earth". And events playing out every day could scour this globe clean of it all, or even reduce the globe itself to nothingness.

And yet, here we are.

Despite it all, here we are. And we're reaching out. The Voyager 1 probe is almost out of the influence of the Sun's solar wind, almost into true interstellar space. We observe, we study, we learn. Slowly the mysteries unravel. As we look outward, we -perhaps ironically- learn more about ourselves in the process.

Here we are.

Mathematically insignificant, yes. And statistically, it's highly unlikely we're the only life out there, even though by all indications, life is but a tiny bit of the Universe. But doesn't that make us all the more special? Doesn't that make our light shine just a bit brighter?

At some point, get out there one night. Go someplace where light pollution doesn't blot out the stars, and look up into the sky on a clear night. Take in the sheer number of lights up there, lie back and just watch, knowing that what you see is itself only a tiny fraction of a fraction of all there is, and what we are seeing is actually a picture of the past, that the light we see now has taken anywhere from decades to millions of years to reach us. A massive time-lapse image painted across the sky.

And know that... here we are.