I grasped the concept of infinity at a young age. I recall sitting in the doorway between the living room and kitchen of our small house with the sun streaming through the front windows with that strange feeling that I get when I try to imagine endless. I still experience that strange feeling today when I imagine the infinite.

It’s the same feeling I get when I wonder on questions like “Who am I?” and “Why am I here?” or the really, really big one – “Will I still exist when I die?“

I don’t know what the feeling is and I cannot really describe it very well but the closest I can come is a sort of awe I suppose. Does anyone else have that feeling? I am suddenly baffled, feel insignificant and awed all at the same time. I get the same feeling sometimes when I am reading about quantum mechanics.

I recall having a conversation with my Grandad. He sat in his corner armchair surrounded by books. He loved a good yarn, he always used to say, along with the word “Champion” whenever asked how he was doing – even if he wasn’t. I can’t have been more than 7 or 8 years old and I told him about my infinity feeling. He looked at me and started to tell me that he had just read a good yarn in which it turned out we lived on the nucleus of an atom. The atom was part of a molecule that made up the structure of another world and that was just the nucleus of an atom in a molecule that made up the structure of yet another world and so on – to infinity in both directions. He said, he felt it too. That strange giddy feeling. I was amazed by his story and had that feeling all over again.

The word infinity is also intriguing. Its a small and finite word yet its meaning is that feeling…..that unknowable thing far beyond my mind’s ability to comprehend.

And so as I sit contemplating the goddess, I feel that same giddy feeling and I know that it is another instance of infinite. Incomprehensible.

And yet I accept it. Just like I accept the other instances of the word. I will never know – not in this lifetime anyway what it really means but I will try to grasp a concept bigger than me, bigger than us all, and feel strange for a moment like I always do.

There is one thing though that gives me a little hope that maybe one day, in another existence, I may come to understand infinity. It is that we are all part of this wondrous infinity – this one thing that we do not have any capability to grasp.

One day.