The world at my feet
Walking through the alleyway, I stride over something that makes me stop and look again. It’s not the usual discarded rubbish, but a small sphere of blue oceans and white clouds – the world at my feet.
I consider it. So tiny, yet the scale of it makes sense if the space around me represents the expanding universe. Looking at it, it feels as though my mind can suddenly grasp the whole of planet Earth, something that is normally difficult to do because I’m always too close to it.
I enjoy the novel perspective – of feeling far away and viewing the World objectively – a marble in the immensity of space. It brings me comfort and reassurance that the cosmos is way bigger than I could ever possibly comprehend. We are only a tiny part of it.
The opening passages from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being comes to mind…
“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground... The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.
What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”
