open your eyes

'after sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. within decades we must close our eyes again. isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? this is how i answer when i am asked -- as i am surprisingly often -- why i bother to get up in the mornings. to put it the other way round, isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?

"there is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. for those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. what is the best way of countering the sluggish habitutation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? we can't actually fly to another planet. but we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways."
— richard dawkins (unweaving the rainbow: science, delusion and the appetite for wonder)'

via RDF