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Take some time to reflect on how astonishing it all is
Friday, 11 August 2006
Sometimes we all feel as if we're living grey little lives. We want to be moving galaxies, but instead we're stuck in traffic, feeling ill, assigned boring tasks, or filling in tax returns. No wonder everyone feels a bit down every now and again.
Here's something I find really helps in dealing with the mundane day-to-day problems we all have - take a step back and look at the astonishing bigger picture for a moment. Both the universe we live in, and our place in it are miraculous, when you spend a little time thinking about it.
Here we are standing on a planet that's rich in life and resources to support that life. It's the only one like it we've ever found anywhere in the galaxy.
What an amazing place our world is - with its forests, canyons, oceans and mountains. Look at photographs of natural landscapes and enjoy their astonishing beauty. The European Alps, The Grand Canyon and The Great Barrier Reef, to give three examples out of many, are stunning in a way that no human-made object can hope to compete with.
Roaming around the world's landscapes are all sorts of fascinating creatures - tigers, fish, birds, kangaroos, iguanas, bears. And don't forget the wide variety of beautiful plant-life - the rain-forests, woods, undersea plants, and flowers.
Look up at the sun which ultimately provides energy for the world. It's a massive ball of nuclear fire that feels as if it's been placed there just for us. And look at the stars littering the night-sky. Each of those is a sun also. There are at least 200 billion of them in our galaxy alone, and there are billions of galaxies in the universe. Space is so big - so full of wonder and possibility - that it boggles the mind just to think about it.
Have a look at yourself and marvel at what an amazing creature you are. You have a body that can perform all sorts of different actions - running, climbing, sitting, dancing, riding a bike, skiing, parachuting, swimming. You can use it to climb to the top of a mountain or scuba dive to the bottom of the sea.
Your hands are among the most amazing tools ever built, they can punch, type, play the piano, stroke, lift heavy weights, paint, point, manipulate and signal. Inside your chest beats a heart that will likely work perfectly for seventy years or more without ever needing a rest or maintenance. And that's just one such organ, you have a liver, stomach, skin and kidneys which will also probably work more reliably and longer without upkeep than any machine yet built by man.
Inside your head is the most amazing computer ever designed. It can interpret the incredible amounts of information coming in from your senses, remember all sorts of facts, come up with new ideas that have never existed before, recognize millions of patterns, let you appreciate music, and help you feel human.
Appreciate the number of astonishing coincidences that had to occur just to allow you to be born in the first place. Not only were you the winning sperm out of hundreds of millions, but so was your father's, your grandfather's, and so on. If any event down through history had prevented any of your ancestors from conceiving at the exact moment they did, with the exact sperm they did, you wouldn't have existed. And yet, here you are.
Marvel at the time you were born in history and the richness of tools available to meet your needs. Our ancestors were dropped naked in the dust of this planet - and just look at what they've built out of that dust for our benefit. Agriculture, language, music, art, science, philosophy, cars, computers, television, ships, fine food, jewelry, movies - all developed out of nothing but the natural world around us.
Yes, we all have things in life that are a complete drag. We get involved in petty disputes, insulted, attacked, used and abused. But perhaps that's the price we have to pay in order to be worthy of the astonishing gifts we've been provided with.
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