Narrtive and photographs by Sai Abhinay Penna
It begins before the city wakes up. At 4:47 AM, and I’m already lacing my shoes in the dark corner of the room. From here, the kettles glow is the only warmth. The streets outside are in the colour of old photographs — amber and grey. When I push open the door, the hush silence greets me with the way truth always does, without ceremony, without apology.
The streets around the beach are empty except for stray dogs, and the occasional tea vendor preparing his first mix of tea for the day. The air carries a sense of salt, and the sky above the ocean looks like an extremely carefully unfinished painting.
I begin my run the way I always do, slowly.
To run at these hours every day has become more of a private ritual. The world has not yet started asking for anything. Messages have not arrived, notifications are empty, and no one expects you to be anyone yet.
It is on these runs that the strange things happen, not strange as in unusual, but strange as in true.
For a brief stretch of time, you are simply a human body moving through space in a physical form. On mornings like this, I often look up to the sky and sometimes, something stranger happens. The stars appear closer than usual. Not physically closer, but perpetually, like distant observers leaning slightly forward, curious about what a single human like me might be doing running along a shoreline of a small rotating planet.
I imagine them watching me, not judging but just observing. The way we observe ants building a colony on the edge of a pavement.
There are roughly eight billion humans alive on Earth today. Each of us, convinced secretly that our lives matter in ways the universe must somehow acknowledge. Yet our species is only one among roughly ten million species to exist on Earth. From the view of a galaxy, we can assume that our home is just a small planet orbiting an ordinary star inside the Milky Way, which could contain around a hundred billion planets. Our galaxy is only one among approximately two trillion galaxies scattered across the observable universe.
Sometimes while running, I try to hold all of this in my mind at once, and when I do something peculiar happens. My problems shrink so quickly that they almost disappear.
Deadlines lose their urgency, career anxieties dissolve into footprints on the wet sand. Even ambition, the most powerful and core engine of the growing human life, suddenly feels like a small flame flickering in an unimaginably large room. Through my own eyes, I am the protagonist of a vast and sophisticated story. When I run, it feels as though the city recreates itself around my movement. My life as I experience it from inside is the whole universe.
From the perspective of nature, the calculation is clear — we are insignificant. Each of our lifetimes is roughly eighty years, which is barely one-thousandth of the time humanity has existed. Humanity itself occupies only about one-twenty thousandth of Earth’s history. The universe did not design itself around our arrival. And despite all of this, we wake up each morning with the strongest conviction that we must do something extraordinary with our lives.
Perhaps, human significance works the same way, one life alone may barely record the size of a rich cosmic history. One person writes a poem, another discovers a mathematical principle, and another teaches a child how to ask better questions. And yet another simply shows the value of kindness in a moment when cruelty would have been easier.
Each act is small, yet individually they look like waves dissolving into the sand one after the other. Because, across generations these small acts compounded into something larger. Our very civilisation itself is nothing more than a tiny speck in the ocean of time.
From kings to democracies, cars, airplanes, bulb, technology, computer, mobile, and now, AI — none of these appeared suddenly. They emerged slowly, through billions of lives adding to their tiny additions to our human existence. When viewed from far away, our universe doesn’t seem indifferent to this process. It almost appears curious about it as we are.
Halfway through my runs the horizon on my right begins to glow, the sun starts to rise slowly. The thing about sunrise is that it doesn’t appear all at once. To me, I see the sun negotiating with the darkness. At first, the sun didn’t brighten all at once. It’s ages into light like a slow burning ember. Then, the ocean begins to reflect the light like a sheet of moving glass. The universe rarely moves in spectacle. It is built in the dark silence while the particles lean into one another, matter learning structures, atoms organising into life, life learning to think, and thoughts becoming curiosity.
And curiosity, quietly yet stubbornly, pushes the boundaries of what existence understands of itself.
By the time my run ends, the city begins to wake up. Motorbikes hum along the road. Fishermen return to the docks with their captures. Old men on the corner of the road sit on benches while turning the pages of their newspaper and sipping their morning coffee. It feels like the universe has resumed its rhythm. By the end of my run, I realise that no star has acknowledged, or no galaxy shift has taken place because of anything I did this morning. And yet oddly enough, this realisation felt comforting rather than depressing. Because if no single life is of cosmic importance, then the weight of greatness fades.
What remains is truly simpler: to remain your tiny self ; to write a thought that might travel further than our existence; to raise a child who will see the world more clearly than we do, and to ask questions that makes the universe slightly more aware of itself.
In the eyes of nature, we may be unimaginably small. But perhaps, evolution has always worked this way — not through grand singular gestures, but through the billions of tiny lives, each briefly conscious, adding to their quiet momentum to the long unfolding story of our universe. And somewhere far beyond today’s morning sky, the stars might still be watching us.
Not because any of us matters individually, but because all of us together just might.
Sai Abhinay Penna is a professional cricketeer, investment banker and writer based out of Chennai.
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