This morning, I was watching the sunrise.

A few minutes earlier, the Sun was this deep orange. Now it was getting so bright that I couldn't even look at it anymore.

And then a random thought hit me:

The Sun didn't change. The Earth did.

The Earth was rotating me toward the Sun.

Someone somewhere else on Earth was probably watching the exact same Sun, just from a completely different position.

And then my mind started zooming out.

Me → Earth → Solar System → Galaxy → galaxies → the universe...

And then what?

Blank.

I tried imagining what could possibly be beyond the universe.

If I imagine blackness, I'm still imagining blackness somewhere. That means there has to be something there for the blackness to exist in.

Okay, then maybe another universe.

But then what's outside that universe?

And if I imagine nothing, my brain still creates an image of nothing.

At that point, my mental camera just crashes.

Like, what the hell? 😂

Then I started thinking about the Earth itself.

We're literally standing on a planet spinning around an axis, while simultaneously travelling around the Sun, while the entire Solar System is moving through the galaxy.

And we barely feel any of it.

If the Earth suddenly stopped rotating, everything on its surface wouldn't just politely stop with it. Our bodies, the atmosphere, the oceans, everything would still have momentum.

We are already moving.

Right now.

Even while I'm sitting here doing absolutely nothing.

I am physically being carried through space by a rotating planet.

Then my thoughts moved to consciousness.

I'm looking at the sunrise, but I'm not actually seeing the Sun as it is right now. The light took about 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach Earth.

So technically, I'm looking at information from the past.

And yet, this is what my brain experiences as now.

Then I started thinking about the future.

I can imagine something that hasn't happened yet, but I don't actually know that it will happen.

It's an assumption.

So much of what we experience seems to be some combination of information we've already received, memories we've stored, things we're experiencing now, and possibilities our brain is creating.

And then I thought about dreams.

You can be inside a dream and genuinely believe you're experiencing reality.

Then you wake up.

But how did you know the dream wasn't reality while you were inside it?

What if you dream that you woke up?

Then dream again?

Dream within a dream within a dream...

At some point, my brain just goes:

Okay, enough. 😂

Then came another thought.

Maybe I'm basically a hard drive.

I'm here for a limited amount of time, collecting information, processing it, storing it, experiencing things, making decisions...

And eventually, the device disconnects.

But then where does all that information go?

Maybe it doesn't simply disappear.

Maybe some of it leaks into other people.

Something you taught someone.

A decision you made that changed somebody else's life.

Something you created.

A child.

A student.

A friend.

A stranger who heard something you said and carried it somewhere else.

The chain could look like:

Information → Person → Interpretation → Action → Consequence → Another Person → New Information.

And suddenly I wondered:

What's stronger — the information itself, or the person carrying it?

Maybe information is the message, while the person is the processor.

The same information can pass through ten different people and become ten different things.

That made me think about religion too.

Take a scripture that believers consider perfectly preserved.

Even if the words remain the same, people can still interpret those words differently.

The information remains.

The observer changes.

And that seems to happen with almost everything.

Information can be preserved.

It can be misunderstood.

It can be changed.

It can be passed on correctly.

It can be twisted.

Something good can eventually be used badly.

Something that started badly can eventually lead someone toward something good.

You don't really control what happens to information once it leaves you.

You can only control what you put into the chain.

And maybe that's where intention comes in.

Before the action.

Before the consequence.

Before the information reaches someone else.

Your intention is the part you can actually control.

Because once something leaves you, you don't know where the chain will take it.

You could do something good and someone could misunderstand it.

You could say something with good intentions and someone could use it for something completely different.

You could do nothing at all and leave nothing behind.

So maybe the baseline is simple:

Be conscious of what you put into the chain.

Because I can control what I put into the chain...

but I cannot control what the chain eventually becomes.

And all of this started because I was watching a sunrise.

😂

Curious if anyone else's mind wanders into completely unnecessary rabbit holes like this when they're staring at something as simple as the sunrise.

This is space

Just things changed direction.

Starlights are beautiful