The Smallness of Man

When is the moment of illumination? The day or moment when a person realizes how truly insignificant they are in the order of the cosmos? Is it the first time they fly, looking down through the clouds to see tiny cars on tiny roads, electric with the experience, only to be suddenly quieted by the realization that they too are tiny? Or perhaps watching a video of the earth from space, marveling at its beauty, only to be stilled by the inky blackness in which we float. Maybe when they look over the edge of a huge chasm, and human minuteness becomes readily apparent?

Most of us plod through life consumed with the enormity of it all, secure in the facade we call country, family, career, politics, education, normalcy. Although many do one day have any epiphany, that moment of illumination, when the wonder that is the universe brings the minutia into perspective...they are swiftly swallowed again by the cacophony of life.

Truthfully, most of us never stop to ponder the enormity of the tremendous blackness we call the universe. Our tiny lives have less voice in that void than the loudest plankton in a giant ocean. And yet... we matter. To our families, friends. To strangers who have never known us, we all have a strange affinity for our fellow man.

Why is that? Could it be anything less than the Divine that gives us breath? Could mere chance have brought life to this tiny rock, orbiting a tiny sun, in the tiny galaxy we call the Milky Way?