A Growing Feeling of Irrelevance

Over the last few months I've been subject to a growing feeling of irrelevance. Not inadequacy or depression, simply irrelevance. I had a dream the other night which sums the whole thing up quite nicely. I was standing on a cliff which overlooked a huge crevasse, i could just barely make out the bottom, and as far as i could tell, there was a tiny river or lake or something (i was quite ashamed of my subconscious for this; cliched much?) which ran between the cliff i was standing on, and the cliff three hundred metres in front of me. careful, i thought to myself, if i fall, i'll die. (yeah i know, staggering, my intelligence, isn't it).
I lent over a bit and felt myself tipping, but rather than falling conventionally (ie as the rulesof gravity dictate), i started to fall upwards. Eventually i reached the upper limits of our atmosphere and saw myself rushing away from earth and into everything else. I turned around to see if i could find pluto (even my dream-self is an idot) and when i looked back, i could no longer see the earth. I was surrounded by what i assumed was space.
For a moment i was worried, i thought about my parents and siblings and friends, and anyone else who would miss my existence. The list ended quite suddenly, and i realised that, even though there were lots of people who would miss me, a lot more people didn't know and didn't care.
To be honest, it was a comforting thought. My own death didn't matter, certainly not to me, and the amount of people it affected was minimal. The strange thing about death, i thought, was that it only matters to the living.. the dead don't care.. and the coffins, the pretty urns, the flowers; well they all serve the purpose of comforting the people left behind. If i died in a field near kent, surrounded by cows pecked at by birds, or Buckingham palace while i was meeting the queen, the result is the same for me; i'm dead.. blam blam, bie bie Gabe..
My family, on the other hand, and the people that care about me, well, i'm sure (whether they admit it or not) they would rather i died meeting the queen.
But sorry, i'm getting away from the point, anyway, there i was, floating away from everything i knew, and the thought struck me; why would it matter if everyone on earth died, what would it matter if the whole planet was vaporised, the whole solar system sucked into a black hole or destroyed in a big ball of fusion-powered fireball?
For the religious people out there, i imagine god would be fairly pissed off, it took him seven days to make it, and the freakin fireball took care of it in a matter of hours... Man, some intergalactic-reckoning committee would cop a telling off for that one.
Irreverence aside, even on a small scale, we, as a species, as a planet, even as a solar system... well we don't really count, except to ourselves.
My dream was a bigger stage for a sensation I've had pretty much ever since i can remember. You know when you go to a huge waterfall, or you see the sun setting over the water, or, maybe just after breakfast, you turn around from whatever your doing and see an ant carrying a bit of what was going to be your lunch, almost three times as big as itself? And suddenly, you feel dwarfed by the Big-ness of everything, overshadowed by things so much simpler or refined, outsmarted by the simple elegance of a mountain or the tenacity of an ant, a beetle, a tick that is doing its best to eat your foot or a cockroach that is way better at living than any person? Well thats how i feel... And at first it was worrying, it required thought, attempts at rationalizing and categorizing, but now, well, just like in the dream, now i find it comforting.
Its very existential i guess, the burden of my existence is placed on my own shoulders, rather than those of god, or reincarnation, and the more i see, the more i experience, the smaller that burden seems.

Anyhow, i probably need to go drink tea, and get rid of those extra brain cells that force me to think/
Gabe Xox