When I was a kid, there was a cartoon, The Adventures of the Little Prince, where the main character lived on a tiny planet in space and caught a ride on a comet to get to Earth. Adventure ensued. (There’s a book, too, which I adore, but I can’t read unless I need a good cry.) One of the reasons I loved that show so much is that I wanted to live so close I could touch stars.
I still love space. I never studied astronomy, but I always consume pictures of stars, planets, galaxies, and this year, a black hole(!) as if it were my last chance. It’s something to wonder at for a person who is admittedly jaded.
But I can’t do it for very long. I start to fall into the vastness of it all – both physically and metaphysically. I am not sure which is the larger rabbit hole. They are equally difficult to corral in my head. It hurts, too, tightens the pit of my stomach with a touch of fear and anxiety at the comparison of life with LIFE.
But sometimes, when all those circumstances that made me jaded seem to converge on me at once, I use all those space-related things to anchor me. There’s nothing quite like all that mystery and vastness to give you perspective and even trigger the imagination. If scientists can take black holes from theoretical to real to having their picture taken in 60 years, what could I be capable of in five?
I never really thought about why I felt that way, why staring at space things grounds me. I’ve written about how hard introspection is for me, so I’m sure no one will be surprised that I let the thoughts flit around in my head unexplored. That maybe it’s because it offers perspective. When the daily struggle feels so big, it feels good to be reminded about how small I am. Not in height or weight or personality, but in personhood. It’s hard for any one issue – or ten issues – to feel that big when you put yourself into the grander scheme of things. Maybe it’s the connection, hearing about things so foreign to me that are nonetheless made of elements I studied in high school.
It really came into focus for me while I was watching an interview on cable news last month. Since he said it so much better than I did, I will leave you with what Neil deGrasse Tyson said to Ari Melber. Maybe it will strike a chord with you, too.
“The atoms of our body are traceable to the crucibles in the centers of stars, that then later exploded, scattering that enrichment into pristine gas clouds that then formed star systems with planets, one of which was the sun with Earth. So, we are not simply in this universe, alive yes, the universe is alive within us. That is a gift of modern astrophysics to civilization that borders on the spiritual. So that when you stand out in the night sky and look up, do you say, “Well I’m small and the universe is big?” You might say that and it’d be true. But a bigger fact in that is you are made of the same ingredients as those stars. We are not just poetically, we are literally stardust. That achieve consciousness to contemplate the extent of the universe in which we live.” – Neil deGrasse Tyson on The Beat with Ari Melber (MSNBC 9/22/22)