Journey #23

I’m what is called a “detail person.”  Apparently that means I don’t make for a good corporate-level manager, because I get too caught up in the little bits, the small details, but for me it is the little bits, all put together in the the right way that make up the bigger picture.  A bit like pixels in a photo.  If the little bits don’t work too well, aren’t put together properly, then what we perceive as the big picture doesn’t make sense and could even collapse like a house of cards.

It all kind-of works when you are looking from the point of view of your home or local office, your school or even your town.  Lots of little bits, people, industry, education, health, ideas, dreams… all coming together to make a rich community tapestry, but is that really The Big Picture?  Could that be just the local part of an even bigger picture?  Are not our communities just small parts of larger communities?  And they, in turn, are they not part of even greater communities:  states, countries, our entire planet?

And what if you could step outside our planet and see the much bigger picture of our galaxy?  Of Laniakea?  Of the whole cosmos?  We are such very, very, very, tiny bits of such a vast whole.  Are we really so important?

The answer is Yes.  And No. 

If you think of Earth as a single pixel in a photo of the entire cosmos, it would not be noticed at all in that Big Picture.  It’s a miniscule pixel point where everything is blurred because we can’t bring it all together into focus – as a planetary community.

But if we could remember that we are all parts of the same universe, and could work together to make our little pixel-point right at the focal point of that universal picture…  well it just might be noticed if it goes missing!