When you feel upset about Federer losing his game to Djokovic, or a boyfriend ending a relationship, or just another parking ticket, remember this: you are a tiny speck on the cooled crust of a giant burning fireball that is constantly spinning as it flies around a vast inferno that has been burning for 23,000 times longer than the entire existence of humanity, is 28,080,000 degrees F, and is the size of 1.3 million Planet Earths. Luckily, the development of the crust of our burning fireball created conditions for just the right mixture of oxygen, hydrogen, and other gases to be formed, combining with the gravitational pull of the inferno we call the Sun to protect us from deadly radiation, and to keep the gases trapped in at just the right levels to create conditions for life.
Meanwhile, also spinning around that giant fireball are seven other rocks of sufficient size to be counted as significant by our own arbitrary measures. We aren't yet close to having the technological capacity to send a human to any of them. There is no way for any of us to truly understand any of this means. How can we conceive of a distance through which it takes eight and a half minutes for the Sun's light to traverse, when we feel that two hours is too far to drive for dinner? We may as well try to explain the internal workings of an iPhone to a newborn kitten. The human brain is pretty limited - and it is, when you look at the bigger picture and everything that could possibly fit in it, really very small indeed.
My Column illustration titled "Dating"| October 2013
