Dots

Sitting on my back porch this morning, I watched the sun rising behind the trees, birds soaring through the sky, and clouds flowing high above. As I looked beyond the clouds to the clear blue sky, I remembered that less than an hundred miles above me, shorter than the distance between here and Columbus, our atmosphere ceases to exist.

If I go a little further, I find our lone moon. From that vantage point, we are a floating ball of blue, brown, green, and white. I am but an invisible dot on that ball.

The Voyager I spacecraft, which left earth nearly 50 years ago, is over 15 billion miles away. Back in 1990, when it was a mere 3.7 billion miles away, it look its last picture of our planet. We were but a pale blue dot in that image.

From a solar system across the Milky Way, our entire solar system would appear as a small dot, one of billions of stars in our galaxy.

Talk about feeling small.

We are a dot on a dot in a dot…and I could keep going.

So why do some us think we are so much more valuable and important than others? In a universe where we seem so inconsequential, what brings someone to think they are better than another human being?

I think there are endless answers to that question, but I ask it seeking reflection not a response.

Despite how tiny we are relative to the universe, we are all valuable. Each human life may be a dot, but together those dots have the capacity to create something beautiful. We are a mosaic of human beings, each with their own culture, language, religion, perspective, abilities, and various other contributions to our big, beautiful world.

When we attempt to minimize, degrade, or otherwise eliminate one dot, it harms us all. We rob ourselves of the richness that is all of humanity and the entire ecosystem that is planet Earth. This includes every dot represented by the animals, plants, and other aspects of creation all around us. The leaves on the tree. That bird that flew overhead today. The water droplets in the clouds. They all help create this beautiful work of art we live in.

I am convinced that until we see ourselves as one dot among countless dots, we will fight and claw to prove our worth. We will take from others to increase our possessions. We will dominate others to build our power. We will degrade others to enhance our pride.

Realizing how small I am allows me to more fully appreciate how important everyone and everything else around me is. I might be a dot, but when I work to enrich the experiences of the dots around me, they will glow more brightly and shine their light back at me. If we could learn to do this, we could glow brighter than any star in the universe and shine light in a way that could eliminate the darkness we see around us.