Close your eyes.

Well wait, if you do that you can't read this. Still, just run with this for a few minutes.

Close your eyes. Feel the space behind them. Imagine that it surrounds you even with your eyes open. Empty space as far as the eye can't even see, a void engulfing you. You are nothing more than a spec in the universe.

Sense your own scale. Think of how many people are in your town. Your state. Your country. Your continent. Your planet. Now, think of it this way:

There are, roughly, 6.5 billion people on the globe with you right now. You can't really even imagine that number. Not deeply. Spread out one hundred pennies. Look at it. Doesn't it seem like a good bunch of pennies? Now imagine one hundred bunches of one hundred pennies.

That's only ten thousand pennies. Shit, ten thousand pennies. I knew a guy who had ten thousand pennies once. He kept them in a drawer in his bedroom. "Just in case," he would tell people when they'd ask him why he kept them, "just in case." In case of what, I don't know. In case of scale? Perhaps.

All right, this is getting nowhere. Let's try another scale. Roughly (very roughly) a billion months ago - dinosaurs walked the Earth. That's how many a billion is. There are 6.5 of them in terms of humans on the planet.

How big do you feel now?

Not that you should feel smaller than average, that is. This isn't a Mister Wizard lecture. I don't want to cram your head full of numbers too badly. A billion months though is a good concept. Think about it.

Dinosaurs, with wall calendars, thinking they just had to flip over to a new... WOOPS meteor. 83,333,333 years later (a calendar for each year mind you) we're here. How many hanging kitten calendars do you think are buried and now reduced to oil?

Somewhere, next to a T. Rex skull, there's a hot Stegosaurs of the month calendar. I hate wall calendars, you understand. All of them. If you can't remember what day it is, you probably don't want to.

Having thick paper reminding me not only of what day it is but also of what fucking dog ass of the month it is just too much to ask. More than the meteor, I bet it's why dinosaurs died out. Wall calendars.

Let's move up the scale and leave the dinos to their doom and eventual resurrection as the shit that makes that bus outside the window go vroom.

The planet we're on is not the biggest. It's not the only one around. Just in the solar system we inhabit we're one of nine (fuck you, Pluto stays). The space between planets varies but at its closest let's work with a rough of 34 million miles.

That's just the next planet out. At its utter closet. Getting a sense of scale yet?

Honestly -- you probably aren't. Not really. It isn't easy or instinctive to grasp numbers this big. Now in a solar system this big -- you are one person on a planet in a solar system, remember -- what does a single person look like. Less than nothing?

How about, then, in the scope of the galaxy? The numbers start to look meaningless, and if the numbers are meaningless how much more so are we meaningless in the face of them? Meaningless will be used once more in this paragraph. See? It was. That use?

Meaningless.

It's humbling, huh? Realizing you are less than a speck of a speck of nothing in the face of the wider universe is strange.

So close your eyes. Feel that much space around you. The speck of a speck feeling. Let it wrap tightly around you. Float on it. Feel it deep in your bones, if possible. Spend a few hours with it.

Space. It doesn't go away. It just fills the area around you, until there's nothing left but you and it.

That's how I feel all the time.