Nobody out there cares!!

Yes, because someone asked, the baby picture is of me. St. Augustine, Florida, 1934.

Pegasus News Flash: “The most powerful solar flare ever detected — a release of energy a hundred million times as powerful as a typical flare from our sun — took place late last year on a star in the constellation Pegasus. The explosion was so massive that, had it come from the sun, it would have wiped out most life on Earth.”

Now, back to beliefs we discovered by ourselves.

Another self-generated belief broke through to me in the Florida Keys, where I was living in a small wooden houseboat at a marina in Key Largo in the 1970’s. Maybe the setting was conducive to revelation – nothing but blue sky and blue water and a narrow bit of stony land a couple of inches above high tide. Everything except the sea and sky looked tiny, and there were few distractions from the seascape. Almost everybody lived on a boat or in a mobile home, and the readily available entertainments were fishing, drinking beer, and making love. I enjoyed the added pleasure of feeding tropical fish through a trap door next to the table where I ate my solitary meals on the houseboat. Stretching my fingers down to those colorful visitors was in itself enough to inspire an epiphany.

I was having trouble in a relationship with a woman – which itself was a kind of positive accomplishment, considering that unmarried females in the area at that time were as plentiful as snowballs in the Sahara Desert. Anyway, I was going through a minor irritating experience with the lady who brightened my lonely writer’s existence at Key Largo, and I went for a long drive to nowhere in order to calm down. I found myself feeling quite emotional, and I realized that the cause wasn’t a person but something in the cloudless sky which met the flat, brilliant water all around me. As I drove too fast across white, treeless land, the words came to me like a loud shout: “Nobody out there cares!” I’m not sure whether I yelled the words aloud, but I think I did, with a feeling of great relief. “Nobody out there cares!” I slowed the car and look up into the blue, and took my imagination out beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, beyond our solar system, beyond the galaxy . . . and no matter how far I went, “Nobody out there cares!”

I was exultant because I was being cut free from a heavy anchor of beliefs instilled in me by other people. I had been taught repeatedly that there IS Somebody out there that cares. God is watching every move you make, checking your behavior against His laws, watching and keeping a record of your bad and good deeds – somewhat like Santa Claus, except that God could see everywhere at all times and cared so much about you that He would plunge you into the torture of eternal fire if you didn’t measure up.

So, to me, “Nobody out there cares!” meant freedom. It’s surprising how often my memory brings back that moment of release and relief.