#aGift4Misha

I’m at home alone with COVID, which is giving me time to naval-gaze and empty my inbox. In that inbox, I discovered that my friend Alex Gorosh (director of my series RoadFood) sent me this little documentary short on the topic of time.

For some reason, the unfathomable magnitude of space and time has always been a great source of comfort to me. I remember feeling miserable as a teenager and looking up at the stars of the night sky and taking great comfort in the fact that I was just a speck on this tiny blue planet in an ever-expanding universe of quintillions of planets. Looking up at the night sky on a clear night in New England as a kid I could see faint glow of the milky way—hundreds of billions of stars so distant they ceased to be points of light, but together they added up to a dusty smudge of luminosity across the sky—and all of the stars the Milky Way are in our own galaxy! And there are hundreds of billions of stars in hundreds of billions of other galaxies in this universe. To my high school mind all of this comforted me, because how could my little problems ever feel big when held up to the enormity of everything.

I always remember being soothed by the vastness of the universe, but when I was 40, I read “Annals of the Former World,” a tome on geology by John McPhee. The book beautifully illustrated the great expanse of geologic time, which so often exceeds the limits of our comprehension with this simple quote, “Consider the Earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.”

When I remember to remember, this too comforts me. The infinitesimally-small-smallness of my troubles helps them fade into nothing. Watching these few minutes on Youtube this morning, it was comforting to see that I am not alone in this perspective on our blink of time in this world.