bhaskar saikia

Not long ago, I came across a line on social media that lingered with me:

“You are a ghost, driving a meat-coated skeleton, riding a rock hurtling through space. Fear nothing.”

I don’t know who the author is, but the words carry a truth that feels larger than their source. They strip away the noise of daily life and point us back to the raw strangeness of existence.

When we pause for a moment, the absurdity and beauty of existence reveals itself. We are fragile beings, wrapped in skin and bone, yet animated by something invisible—call it spirit, consciousness, or simply awareness. We live on a rock that spins at dizzying speeds, orbiting a star, tucked away in a galaxy that is itself only one of billions. The perspective is staggering, humbling, and strangely liberating.

Carl Sagan once gave us a vision of this perspective that still echoes through time. The story behind his famous phrase—“a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”—comes from his reflection on the Pale Blue Dot image of Earth, taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990 from a distance of about 6 billion kilometers. From that vantage point, our planet appeared as a faint speck of light, caught in a scattered ray of sunlight. On that tiny dot, Sagan reminded us, every war and act of kindness, every triumph and tragedy, every dream and disappointment, every life and love has unfolded. To realize this is to be humbled, but also liberated.

For if we are stardust, brief travelers in borrowed bodies, what is there really to fear? The enormity of the universe does not make us insignificant—it invites us to live more lightly, more bravely, and more fully.

So when fear rises, remember this perspective: you are a ghost in a skeleton of stardust, on a world suspended in a sunbeam, riding a rock through endless space. And perhaps in that reminder lies the freedom to fear less, and to live more.