Wherever you are, it's all relative

The stars have changed since January 2015 when I first wrote this, but the message has not.

Driving home in the evening last weekend, I was so struck by a beautiful sky that I pulled over and snapped a photo. Of course, my phone didn't do it any justice but there in the glow of the sunset were Venus and Mercury, as close together in the sky as they will ever be this year. I just stared. So beautiful. And, in a way, it was just right there. So close. Right there in my sky; in my life.

And yet so far away. Mercury is 100 million miles away; Venus, 147 million miles.

Makes me feel small. But then the stars -- those beautiful stars beginning to twinkle -- they are even farther away. The nearest one isn't measured in millions or even billions of miles. That distance is measured in light years! The distance that light travels in one year is roughly 6 trillion miles. Nearly unimaginable. And the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is 4.37 light years away. Unimaginable times four!

Makes me feel even smaller. But small isn't a bad thing. Just relative.

It reminds me of a comparison John Allen Paulos wrote in Innumeracy: one of my human cells (and one of yours, of course) is to the size of my body as I am to the entire state of Rhode Island. A virus is to me as I am to the entire earth. What??? A virus that can sicken or even kill me is that small? An atom is to me as I am to the earth's orbit around the sun (that's 93 million miles, right? Times TWO because we're talking orbit here!). And a proton? Well, that's to me as I am to . . . you guessed it: the distance to Alpha Centauri!

Makes me feel gigantic. Humongous. Times four! But huge isn't a bad thing. Just relative.

So there I was: right smack in the middle of unimaginably-small-times-four and gigantically-humongous-times-four. Just me, just there. Electrically charged particles staring at beautiful light beams from trillions of years ago.

Which brings me to this thought: Wherever you are, it's all relative. Do your best. Appreciate as much as you can. Enjoy your place right now.

© 2025 www.megreilly360.com

9/1/2025