Feeling Small in the Vastness

Until we were in our teenage years, my older brother and I shared a bedroom. One night, when I was seven, we lay awake, talking about the enormity of space. I tried to contemplate a galaxy with billions of stars and a universe that expanded forever, perhaps. I remember the fear those thoughts gave me; that I couldn’t comprehend the enormity of space, and that I couldn’t answer the question: if the universe doesn’t go on forever, what’s on the other side?¹

I felt small and insignificant against the vastness of space.

At one time or another, all of us have had the opportunity to view a night sky without all of our modern light “pollution”. The stars visible to the naked eye are breathtaking, and what we can see is an incredibly tiny percentage of all that is out there.

The universe is big. Really big. There are so many things (a scientific term describing everything bigger than Le Bus floating in space) that the significance of the number is lost on us. We can’t really comprehend the numbers in 10¹² or 10¹⁵.

And here we are on our relatively small, blue marble, cruising around our relatively small sun at 67,000 miles per hour.

For hundreds (maybe thousands) of years, humanity believed we were alone in the cosmos (how very presumptuous of us). Every person alive today could be allocated 1,000 square feet and we’d all fit in Texas, US. That’s the measure of our collective insignificance against the mass of the Earth which, again, is a pretty small planet by most estimates. The odds that we are alone in the universe are staggeringly low (1/10²¹ or smaller).

Werner Karl Heisenberg (that physicist behind the Heisenberg uncertainty principle) once stated:

Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word ‘understanding.’

Let’s dial it back a little

Setting our thoughts of the universe aside for a moment, consider a time when you’ve felt small against the backdrop of some challenge you’re facing in life. Perhaps your partner has just abandoned you to raise your three children alone. Perhaps you’ve been diagnosed with a disease that may take your life much, much sooner than you had hoped. Perhaps you’ve lost a job or experienced any number of tragedies in your life.

While the size of the challenge certainly doesn’t show up on a universal scale, the feelings of inadequacy are often the same. We contemplate the challenge with the same level of incomprehension. Any of the challenges we face in life may cause us to question what we know and, as Dr. Heisenberg said, redefine our definition of ‘understanding’.

As a child, the thing that helped me overcome my fear of the universe was to stop thinking about the end of the universe, and start considering all the things that I did know. At the time, I think my knowledge was pretty well limited to just the names of the planets in our solar system (Pluto, I got you.) Keeping in focus those things I did know helped reduce the feelings of anxiety and overwhelm when trying to grasp at the things I didn’t know.

It’s the same with any problem in life. Sometimes trying to look at the whole problem at once is overwhelming and terrifying. So, we take a step back and look at the pieces (however small they can be made) individually. We can take action right away in the few things that we really understand. Then, we learn and grow. Eventually we comprehend more about our situation and are better equipped to deal with it, even if that means coming to terms with an unchangeable reality.

Uncertainty, when it impacts us directly, is difficult to accept and deal with. As Pema Chödrön once said,

“Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that. We don’t know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don’t know.”

Our lack of knowledge often makes us feel small against the backdrop of the vastness that surrounds us. That doesn’t mean, however, that we are in any way insignificant.

¹Incidentally, my 7-year old son presented me with questions about the enormity of the universe yesterday after I started writing this article. The universe is trying to tell me something.