The Daily Boost #397
This will blow your mind
Let this “window of possibility” blow your mind:
We call our galaxy the Milky Way. There are at least 100 billion stars in it and our sun is one of those. A hundred billion is a big number, and humans are not evolved to appreciate numbers like that, but here’s a try: If you had a bucket with a thousand marbles in it, you would need to procure 999,999 more of those buckets to get a billion marbles. Then you’d have to repeat the process a hundred times to get as many marbles as there are stars in our galaxy.
Or this one:
There are enough stars in the universe that if everybody on Earth were charged with naming his or her share, we’d each get to name a trillion and a half of them.
Even that number is still impossibly hard to comprehend—if you named a star every time your heart beat for your whole life, you’d have to live about 375 lifetimes to name your share.
“Whatever we believe in,” says author Anthony Doerr, in the article from which I’m quoting, “nothing can be more important than to take a moment every now and then and accept the invitation of the sky: to leave the confines of ourselves and fly off into the hugeness of the universe, to disappear into the inexplicable, the implacable, the reflection of that something our minds cannot grasp.”
When was the last time you accepted that invitation?
(My thanks to Anthony Doerr, via Orion Magazine.)
The Gentle Nudge
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After reading this I went on a journey reading and listening to Anthony Doerr...I remember reading his novel, All the Light We Cannot See, the first time and knowing I had found a kindred spirit. This writing from Orion brings that thread predominant once again in my experience. Thank you...the YouTube video published about five months ago by Louisiana of a 22 minute interview done in Denmark reeks of the connection I sense. May each minute of this day be a blessing of recognition of connection.