Nature, time, and self-discovery: a physicist speaks about the mysteries of our lives, hearkening to Lucretius:

Nature is our home, and in nature we are at home.

This strange, multicolored, and astonishing world that we explore — where space is granular, time does not exist, and things are nowhere — is not something that estranges us from our true selves, for this is only what our natural curiosity reveals to us about the place of our dwelling. About the stuff of which we ourselves are made. We are made of the same stardust of which all things are made, an when we are immersed in suffering or when we are experiencing intense joy, we are being nothing other than what we can’t help be: a part of our world.

Lucretius expresses this, wonderfully:

…we are all born from the same celestial seed;

all of us have the same father,

from which the earth, the mother who feeds us,

receives clear drops of rain,

producing from them bright wheat

and lush trees,

and the human race,

and the species of beasts,

offering up the foods with which all bodies are nourished,

to lead a sweet life

and generate offspring … (De rerum natura, bk. II, lines 991-97)

Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics