With the London Marathon a week away and having had an amazing chat recently about humanity, energy, the stars, the universe and other interesting stuff like taking "Gong Baths" and the new craze for vibration mediation, I thought I would share a little something to think about in terms of breaking the marathons of life down into bite size chunks, and keeping everything firmly in perspective.
While it is wonderful to have goals, dreams, aspirations and fantasies about all the amazing things we should be, could be, and may well be, it is always good to keep some perspective and know, that in reality, we are just not that bigger of a deal.
And we never will be.
Let's try something just to illustrate the point.
When we think of big, and I mean really big, we usually think of the Earth. It’s massive, right?
In fact that really depends on your perspective. You could actually fit 1.3 million Earths inside the sun. Let that sink in.
Sun is pretty big right?
And yet from the Galaxies perspective the Sun is pretty small.
According to astronomer and scientist Michelle Thaler, if you were to shrink the sun down to the size of the dot in this letter ‘i’ right here on the page, that tiny little dot, if you made the sun that small would in turn make the relative size of our galaxy, the Milky Way, the size of the Earth. So everything becomes smaller the bigger your vision.
Take a minute to visualize that and let’s not stop there.
A while back, astronomers found a tiny section of the night sky that appeared to be empty. And ‘tiny’ means the size of a pin head. So Pretty small then. Yet what did they find?
Imagine for a moment that you held that tiny pinhead up to the sky, that little portion of the night sky to our eyes would ultimately in the main appear completely void of celestial light. Empty.
To see what they could really see in the pin head of an empty space using the lens of technology, they focused the Hubble Telescope up there and let it absorb light for ten days.
Guess what they found in that pin head of dark empty space?
In that tiny dark part of the night sky, which looked completely empty, they ended up discovering 3,000 galaxies! That is 3000 Milky Ways, not the chocolate bars but the part of the universe which contains the planet earth, that Milky way! So in that tiny bit of space the size of a pin head held up to the night sky which from our perspective contains nothing, with a shift in perspective it actually contained an unfathomable amount of amazing stuff.
Just to put this all into perspective using our galaxy the Milky Way as our model, we can multiply the number of stars in a typical galaxy (100 billion) by the number of galaxies in the universe (2 trillion) to find that there are an absolutely astounding number stars in the universe. Approximately 200 billion trillion. And I, and you, and everyone else, is simply a tiny spec of dust on one of them.
And now with the $10 billion James Webb Telescope (picture below) probing the cosmos to uncover the history of the universe from the Big Bang we are likely to find a whole lot more, maybe even new life, new beings, new technology, and who knows what else, certainly an entirely new perspective on who we are, the role we play and how we exist together in an infinitely connected flow of life.
What does it all mean?!
Well, let's say that when feeling the desire to have a meltdown, creating dramas, and getting apoplectically pissed off because the barista forgot to put 3.5 soy vegan sprinkles in our lattes, we may want to take a moment, do some controlled breathing and consider how amazing it is actually to simply be alive. The odds of being alive by the way are 400 quadrillion to one.
Yes, you heard it right, you even being alive required the unbroken stretch of survival and reproduction of all your ancestors, reaching back 4 billion years to single-celled organisms. It required your parents meeting and reproducing to create your singular set of genes, and the odds of that alone as mentioned, are 1 in 400 quadrillion. So never let anyone say you are not amazing!
And as we are all in the same boat called Humanity, sailing on the wild stormy seas of life, we can now all relax in the knowledge that while we are amazing none of us are that special in terms of the awe inspiring epically powerful expanding universe. Which by the way, continues to grow at a mind boggling 176,000 miles per second, and is currently estimated to be 93 billion light years across. With 1 light year measuring a quite remarkable 6 trillion miles.
Head spinning yet?
Still think we are the centre of all creation?
This is likely my favourite image taken to date of our universe, every single dot you see is a Galaxy, not a star, an entire Galaxy likely containing upward of 100Billion stars!
As I look at this incredible snapshot of life and start to imagine this massive universal perspective and all of us together on our little rock in the cosmos, we may start to see that no matter what we are thinking or doing, like writing this little article, running a marathon, or doing anything that we decide really matters to us, and it should matter to us, it really just is not that big of a deal, whatever it is.
And it never will be.
So with that change of perspective and understanding of our place in the cosmos, maybe we could all take a moment to feel how small we all are, yet know that we are all part of this amazing universe, and we are all connected to everything and everyone in it.
And while we are definitely not a big deal in terms of our place in the universe, we are all a huge deal and very special to each other, particularly those who matter deeply in our lives.
Just maybe then with that in mind we could find a way today to help someone, anyone really, by simply acknowledging how special they are to us, and in that moment making them the ultimate centre of our universe and the most special person in it.
And while we enjoy a change in perspective, a change in the weather and feel grateful for being alive today, let's all help each other out and send this to someone who needs to get a bit of perspective in their life, delicately explaining that life can be a wonderful thing, depending our own unique perspective of perspective.
Have a great weekend and when you find yourself listening to someone's sensational life drama about how catastrophic their trip to Costa coffee has been, you can now help them with some perspective, and yourself with some inner peace.
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