Zoom In

When I wrote this, I was sitting on the ground with my back against a tree.

Right now, I’m typing at my desk.

I’m completely still, but I'm hurtling through space faster than I could imagine. This planet is not stationary, and so even though I think that I’m not moving, the opposite is actually true. Zoom out (and out, and out), and I’m really spinning through space as my planet circles the Sun. None of us are ever still.

Stay zoomed out. Earth is a tiny blue-green ball wrapped in filmy shreds of clouds. There are seven billion people on that tiny blue-green ball, and the universe doesn’t care. We’re tiny specks, too small to see. It’s like looking at a sample of pond water--you don’t realize there’s anything there until you zoom in.

That doesn’t make the tiny things any less beautiful, though.

Back in eighth grade, I saw a euglena for the first time. Euglenas are these tiny unicellular organisms with a flagellum and chloroplasts and all kinds of other important organelles. I’d seen cartoon pictures in my textbook, but there was no way that that had prepared me for what I saw under the microscope. My clear droplet of water was transformed. I saw chloroplasts and nuclei, and suddenly euglenas were real. Zoomed in, the clear droplet of water was alive and beautiful.

Earth is a little bit similar. Zoom out, we’re uncomfortably insignificant. Zoom in, and we’re euglenas. We’re moving and changing, achingly beautiful in our diversity and even in our brokenness. We’re fascinating in a way that words can’t quite capture, because even we don’t really understand ourselves. We run charities, we cure diseases, we commit murder; pictures might be worth a thousand words, but even a picture isn’t enough to capture that. In the end, though, we are seven billion tiny specks in a little corner of the cosmos, and if you care to zoom in, we are beautiful.