I

This is the trace left by a larva of the Golden Pygmy moth. This species is a leaf miner; it lays its eggs on the surface of a leaf, and the larva lives trapped in a flatworld nibbling the soft tissues of its host from the inside.

At the bottom, the tip of the thin end of the trace is where the egg was laid. From there, the baby miner discovered the edges of its world and bounced several times before steering toward the inside of the leaf for good. We can follow how the mine becomes larger as its body grows from eating the sugars of the plant. It ends its journey following the wide veins of the leaf before stopping to form its cocoon and fly away.

I like this image because it makes you take a viewpoint that unfolds the time dimension to look at a full trajectory from the outside.

II

You can look at your life like you look at this leaf miner. You can imagine the sculpture that is created from every movement you’ve ever made, from the past to the future. You, in this instant, are like the mouth of a toothpaste tube, leaving a trace that forms a very long snake connecting your birth to your death.

Movements form a sculpture. Source.

You could imagine leaving your body for a minute, climbing a very high mountain, and looking at this elongated sculpture—your life, when everything is said and done. You can try to see the shape it makes when viewed from the sky, zigzagging between countries, forming loops around the areas you lived, and tight knots in the homes you inhabited.

It doesn’t have to remain a purely physical trajectory. You can try to imagine all the thoughts and feelings that have ever crossed your mind and how they all unfold in a long sequence from start to the end.

For most of our lives, our minds are busy assessing options and replaying situations from the past. We have skin in the game. We think because there are actions down the line that could change depending on our reflections.

On this imaginary mountain, there are no actions to be taken anymore. You have slack to look at this sculpture for as long as you want and let thoughts arise that might not normally cross your mind. You might realize how a certain book changed the content of your thoughts durably after reading it, how meeting certain people bends the trajectory, creating new points on the map you will visit regularly, and how far or close you ended up from where you started.

III

From there, you could climb even higher and look at the sculpture the whole universe creates when you unfold the time dimension, from the Big Bang to the end of time.

From this point of view, there is no value to be found, no good or right, as there is no time for action or thoughts to exist. The good and the bad exist within the sculpture when time can unfold. Outside of it, you can contemplate the traces that values left in the minds of the humans who defended them, in the actions they took. What remains is an interesting pattern in the cosmos.

IV

As you slowly return to your body, to the mind of a being in time taking actions, you can keep this perspective accessible in a corner of your head. You could view this moment from the point of view of the universe. Instead of seeing the whole picture, you are contemplating an extreme close-up of the universe’ sculpture: the details that are unfolding in your movements, in your mind, right here and now.