The Advantages Of Having A Small Mind.

Sometimes the big picture really is too big.

It’s possible to think of your life in such a way that it appears insignificant. You can think of yourself as nothing more that one of nearly eight billion people on Earth. Then you could go even further, and think of the Earth as the fourth smallest planet in the solar system. Smaller even than some other planets’ moons.

You could remind yourself that the solar system is more than 4 septillion times smaller than our Milky Way galaxy, which in turn is only 1 of over 2 trillion other galaxies. If you scaled everything down so that the Earth was the size of an atom, the observable universe would still be almost 3.5 million kilometres wide.

Things don’t get much better if you think in terms of time. The universe is almost 14 billion years old and it hasn’t even stopped growing yet. Most of us do so by the time we hit 20. And while I’m sure I could come up with some fun astronomical scale comparison for a human’s age, it’s not really necessary. The universe is 14 billion years old, and you’ll be lucky if you make it to 100. It’s hard to put it any more plainly than that.

Our lives pass in the blink of an eye. Our entire planet is smaller than a speck of dust. At most, we’ll meet a few thousand of the billions of people we share this…