Everyone reaches a point in their lives, or many points for that matter, when everything seems overwhelming and all encompassing. Our lives seem too much to handle, or the mountain of a career we have chosen is just too steep. Everything and everyone is too much to take, or the hill of things to do is too high. This happens when we are inside our heads, focusing on our intentions and ourselves. We forget how small we actually are. Sometimes, we just need to put that into the perspective of our lives.
Last Thursday night, my professor showed us a clip of Carl Sagan talking about the "Pale Blue Dot" Photograph taken by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. It is one of those photos that puts everything into perspective. You know those charts and diagrams that are supposed to show you how big you are in comparison to everything else in the universe? For some reason that never did it for me. Those were so abstract; sometimes it takes a photo to really understand and comprehend the true size of the earth.
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At first this photo seems like a really bad noisy photograph taken accidentally at night, but it is anything but that. It was taken intentionally by NASA to see what our blue marble looks like from far away. The photos we see of Earth are normally from the Apollo missions, satellites, or the International Space Station (ISS). In those, the Earth seems pretty big, because we can see the continents and oceans. This one shows Earth as a tiny speck. It is the one little pale blue dot, illuminated by a beam of sunlight. You might get it confused with the dust on your computer screen, but that is our earth. How incredible it is that something so small and seemingly insignificant in context of the vastness of the universe can harbor such life and beauty.
This image holds so much meaning. As Carl Sagan says, everyone you have ever known or idealized has lived on this little speck. Wars have begun and ended on it. Everything that seems huge to us here seems so inconsequential when viewed at this size. The Earth is just a little speck of dust floating in the sunlight.
My challenge to you is to remember this photograph and the meaning it holds the next time anything upsets you whether it is insignificant or not. Remember that we are all on this little speck of dust together, and we have to make the most of what we can with our lives. We can’t let fear, anger, or emotions hold us back. We cannot let what happens determine whether we are happy or sad. Our joy for life must come straight from the heart. Everyone else is living on this particle of dust as well, and we must have respect for each other. Nothing is worth getting upset over when we remember our true size, and how lucky we are to be taking a ride.
