Weather to die for

Another glorious late-Summer Sunday here in Suffolk.
It was so nice in our back garden, and we had so few opportunities to eat outside during the damp horrors of August, that I decided to throw up an impromptu barbecue for tea tonight. It was gorgeous. As we finished eating, and as Philippa took Mathew indoors for a bath, I sat near the slowly cooling barbecue coals and watched one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen unwind before me.
It was almost spiritual. I genuinely felt lost in the utter beauty of it. All those negative thoughts I have about myself, and my fellow man, and the terrible future we have contrived to create between us, disappeared as I realised we are all – all of us, individually, and all of us collectively – nothing. We don’t matter. We are insignificant spots on an insignificant planet in an insignificant corner of an uncaring, unknowing universe. As much as we like to convince ourselves we’re important, we’re not doing anything that will affect anything other than the inhabitants of this Earth. We could bring about the death of every breathing creature in existence right now, but in the grand scheme of things that will mean f**k all. The planet will survive, and change, and thrive again, as it has done after every previous slew of extinctions that it has witnessed.
In a way, it takes the pressure off me. I don’t need to feel guilty every time I use a plastic bottle and I don’t need to get angry when other people put cardboard in with their everyday rubbish. Because it doesn’t matter. We’re finished as a race and as a society, but the world we call home will live on. It will re-absorb our constituent parts and re-use them for the next, better species that comes along.
I thought all this, as the sunset blazed and flickered and spewed cyan, crimson and lilac across the Suffolk sky.
And then a passing pigeon shit on the barbecue coals, and it stank.

RC 10-10-21