Cosmic therapy

Minutes after I finished watching a documentary relaying some celestial curios (such as the existence of gigantimundous ethanol clouds, happy hour gone amok), I went out to deposit my garbage and to buy milk, bread.
 

Rain patters gingerly outside, the usual mill of folk mosey or bustle around cars and shops and sidewalks, some hugging them, others trotting uncomfortably as if the concrete were hot coals. I felt complete serenity. Lately I've been feeling socially-anxious, a bit self-conscious, which I attribute and is almost always the case to a bad conscience. Now, outside, all I could think of was the billions of neutrinos passing through my thumbnail every second. A secret, it felt, that I held and others did not know.

The comfort derived by the awareness of these cosmic flints of near-light speed particles racing through everything gave me a becalmed gait and mind. Sauntering across the wide avenue at the lights, nothing crabbed my thoughts; wonder and awe, surreality almost, informed my mental space. I looked around at others and saw them as I most often did throughout my life as an alien species, with strangely moving parts and odd gestures of impertinent randomness, while feeling the tight yet thoroughly comfortable intensity of my own physical economy. Air swept before me. A giant puddle spanning bumper to bumper a parking lot I was crossing appeared as a moat one moment, a stream the next, beady silver balls of rain spitting off the surface. The retail clerk was unusually friendly. Smiles greeted me. An uncommon expression of easy friendliness, not feigned or loaded with energetic charm, felt itself on my face. I came home the same way, smiling at space like helium must at oxygen. It occurred to me not for the first time that the best therapy for any anxiety is watching a documentary like the one you shared; or contemplating the grandeur of the universe. Our problems reduce to mini-black holes. Clarity pervades. Peace enters.