The stars don't even know their own light.

Because they have a sense of proportion.

Because they have priorities.

What are your priorities?

The reachless expanses of space spinning out to infinity?

Or the things you can reach and touch,
that can reach and touch you?

People are mightily significant in the latter realm.
Each of us can be potentially the biggest thing
in another's life: more significant

than all the universe outside the solar system
put together - which it isn't.
The potential significance of a human being
to another human being is that cosmically huge.

It makes more than that difference.
As a species,
too,

our significance on this planet
has been huge. Dominant. Potentially world-breaking.
Significance can be for bad or good.

So far as we yet know, though, humans
are the only things capable of creating
and receiving significance.

Capable of signification.

The far-flung stars signify much to us.

Do they signify anything at all to the stars?

If you say yes, you're just making-believe.

Don't pretend to me, love. You know you are.

Another thing we do. Another thing
that so far as we yet know, only we do.

If we find another species of being
capable of signification and imagination,
that couldn't diminish what we have,

only enrich it.
But until we do,

we have no reason at all to conclude
we're anything other than the source

of all significance in the universe.

Pending another confirmed source.

So far, there doesn't seem to be one.

The stars don't even know their own light.

At least, there's no reason to believe they do.
Not like we do.

So when you stand under the wheeling night sky
trying to reach all those lights with your
so-called so insignificant mind,

reflect: as far as you know,
you're standing on the only place
in all that vastness, where such reaching out

is going on.

And that thing you're reaching with
- your human mind -
is the only thing known that even tries

to discover and assign such

cosmic

significance.

Don't kid yourself. The rest of us
all do it as well, you know. Quite as well
as you. Idly, we'll marvel and gawp
out at the skies,
at the distant and relatively insignificant

stars. Myself,

I glory in them, from right there
where I stand. Their brilliance,
and especially their distance.

It’s mind-bending.
But it's trivial.
And through it all,

I don't lose sight of the things
I really can reach and touch,
which can reach and touch me. The things

that really signify, mightily, meaningfully.

I have a sense of proportion, you see. And humans

are far more than just significant.

And not just to me.