I climbed out of bed around 11:30 last night and for the next hour fought off mosquitos, listened as creatures of the night moved in the scrub near me, and basked in the increasingly red glow of the moon as it went through a total lunar eclipse.
Was it worth getting up in the middle of my night for? Absolutely!
There are many wonderful pieces of this universe that just scream out to be noticed and I am so glad I got to witness this little one.
When you feel highly flawed as a person or a photographer, like I do, you always wonder if your pics are going to do it justice. So I was pleasantly surprised that the shots showed what I wanted them to.
I have attached a few pics showing the transition to total eclipse at the end of the blog. Hope you enjoy!
As I went back home and climbed back into bed to resume where I had left off in my dreams, there was a lovely sense of accomplishment attached to what I had just done.
There was also a lovely feeling of insignificance as I lay my head on the pillow and realized that no matter how big any one of us thinks we are, in the grand scheme of things we are insignificant.
And in an instance like this, that is not a bad thing.
We all seek significance. We seek relevance. And when speaking in terms of how we affect those around us, those are good goals to have.
But it is also important to remind ourselves every now and then that the universe doesn’t even know we exist. And when we are gone, the universe will be the exact same without us.
Thus our perspective of what is important is skewed inasmuch as we worry about things and reach for things that are largely irrelevant.
Yes, indeed, there are things to worry about and we need to give them the weight that they deserve when we prioritize or extend ourselves. The people we love and care about, the little creatures that are affected by our actions, the environment of the planet that we live on.
These are all hugely important to us and to the world. And we owe it to ourselves to make sure we do our best in each of those things.
But as I looked at each star last night, I realized that the light that traveled from the most distant stars in the universe has taken over a thousand years to reach here.
And at this moment in time, we are often therefore looking at stars that don’t exist any more. They might have exploded 500 years ago!
So, now imagine you are on one of those distant stars looking at earth. The light from our planet will take the same thousand years to arrive there and so to someone standing there and looking at us, we may not even exist by the time they see the light that leaves here today.
As a distant planet, we might have died off many hundreds of years ago.
So, how significant does that make us!
And that is only considering the one universe we are in. How significant is our universe itself even when stacked up against the millions of universes out there?
I am not trying to blow your mind on a Monday morning, but just wanted to help you realize that whatever worries the week brings you, try to keep it in perspective.
Only worry about what you can actually accomplish and let the rest of it fade away. We have but one life; enjoy the ride!
… just a thought!
