Can you imagine infinity?
I know, I know, you have more practical and pressing things to think about than infinity? But before you dismiss this post as highly irrelevant, I want to point out a major benefit of pondering infinity– it anchors the challenges embedded in everyday life.
Two images circulating on social media from NASA’s James Webb Telescope – The Cosmic Vine and the BOSS Great Wall crystallize the concept. Both are billions of light years from Earth highlighting the enormity of the current known universe. The Cosmic Vine is a cluster of 20 ancient galaxies stretching 13 million light years long. While the BOSS is a cosmic web of 830 individual galaxies spanning 1.3 billion light years across.
To save you from looking it up, as I imagine most have forgotten, one light year is 5.88 trillion miles. Understood another way, it would take a plane flying 600 miles per hour 1 million years to travel one light year. Enormous doesn’t really capture the scale referenced here. And that’s at the heart of my point.
I used to have a rendering of the Universe made from the Hubble Telescope published in 2000 hanging in my office and later at the Soul Source center. It helped me not to catastrophize. Now, I have the BOSS as my screensaver. However you bookmark the images, it can help you get through a difficult day, week or longer.
Problems and challenges are swirling vortexes that pull and tug exerting great force that can sweep us in. And that is the problem of having, well, a problem. Each of us needs something to overcome the negative pull that can propel a pity party into the depths of despair.
No one is immunized from life challenges. So the best each of us can do is to inoculate ourselves. Clearly what I am suggesting is not a panacea for all problems. But if you reflect on just a typical day, you will realize that there are many small annoyances that easily snowball. The key is to defuse the tension before it compounds. I am partial to gazing at the BOSS, the Cosmic Vine or any of the gorgeous pictures taken by space telescopes. They are not only tension diffusers but they remind me that each moment is one in a vast, unknown number of moments past and future – infinity.
It’s clear from other writings that I am partial to anchoring ourselves within an eternal perspective. I do so in part because I have found for myself and others that it provides a good foundation for experiencing and coping with the good, the bad and the ugly in life. Even if you don’t share my frame of reference, I challenge you to see if gazing into the Milky Way, the star filled sky or renderings of the BOSS or the Cosmic Vine helps dwarf the problems and situations that are troubling you.
Each of us, like the Universe we inhabit, is in a constant state of evolution and expansion. The extent to which you can remember this directly correlates to the degree of your inner peace and joy. And these my friends are what I wish for each of you. . .
