Reading Reflection, October 2014

I had to keep a journal for one of my classes this semester, and this is what came out one day.

There are so many points Hogan makes and things she discusses in the chapter The Voyagers (p. 125) that resonated with me, like most of this book, but this particular chapter discussed things that I’ve always thought about, even as a child. 

When she is discussing space and how it’s so vast and immense that we literally can’t comprehend it, and the photos of earth floating in the black abyss that people initially were not allowed to see, it got me thinking of something I’ve thought about since childhood. I’ve always been deeply fascinated by space and the stars and the solar system. Looking up at night has always taken my breath away, another of those things in nature that’s always there and people take for granted. But when I look at the stars, I feel a powerful sense of just being tiny. We’re part of such a vast, unbelievable phenomenon, we’re the tiniest speck in something so huge that we virtually know nothing about.

This feeling overwhelms me when looking out into the universe on a clear night. I say looking “out” rather than “up” because I think it’s important that we realize it’s not just us down here and the sky, sun, clouds, and stars up there. It’s not above us, it’s around us. When we look at the sky, we’re looking up, down, to the side. We’re looking out there, at a vast and mysterious infinity that is so incomprehensible it doesn’t even seem real. So we don’t really pay it the attention it deserves. We go about our business “down here” on earth, follow all the rules and regulations and expectations we humans have put in place for ourselves, go about our business running errands, going to school, working jobs so many of us hate. Further, dealing with things like hatred, fear, depression, loneliness, and ill-health. Further still, prejudice, discrimination, war, poverty, world hunger, terrorism. How foolish this all seems to me, just looking out into this universe to which I belong. To which you belong, along with everyone else on this incredible planet Earth. A planet that, out of everything the universe contains happens to have everything we need, everything to sustain us, trees that produce the oxygen we breathe, water to hydrate our bodies and keep them running, plants that provide food with everything our bodies need, even our own personal star to invigorate us with vitamin D and warmth. 

We are guests on an incredible and beautiful planet that gives and gives and gives. This planet is a gift. This life is a gift. We are part of something so big, and we don’t realize our problems, many of which we create ourselves, are so small, insignificant.

As I write this, I’m sitting in front of Egerly. The sun shines bright and hot upon everyone here, through the huge white clouds floating lazily across it. A slight breeze blows and I can feel autumn slowly arriving. Carefully planted flowers in front of the building are losing their vigor. Leaves are changing. So are we.

I’m watching other students and professors walk casually by, and it occurs to me that in the same instance, we are all completely different, yet exactly the same. These people who surround me may be of a different race or ethnicity, different cultural backgrounds. They’ve all grown up differently than me and each other, had various people come in and our of their lives and experienced a multitude of things good and bad, amazing and horrible. These people even think differently from me, and from each other. We view life in all different ways, and to some degree, our perceptions of life depend on our backgrounds, upbringings, people we’ve met and things we’ve experienced. At the same time, all these differences are what we have in common. These people around me are, at this moment, background characters in my personal story, and I am one in theirs. All these people have a complex life - experiences, emotions, fears, ambitions, people, values, and perceptions - that I will never know, and they’ll never know mine. This is what every one of us has in common. I once read that the word for this very realization is “sonder.” Have a moment of sonder every once in a while, or more often if you can. We are all so different, living absolutely unique personal lives, but as beings on the same planet in this huge mystery we call “life,” we are exactly the same.