A Mote?
On a 5th-grade field trip, my class stopped for lunch at a Chinese restaurant called the Happy Garden. My fortune cookie said, “You will be insignificant.” A few years later, when I began to grasp “insignificant”, I saw up the side of a sailboat mast “Compared to what?” Finally, I had a second piece of data to work with.
Later in my life still, my wife wanted to visit the Grand Canyon. I said, “Aw. It’s just a hole.” Looking down in from the Canyon’s brink, I saw at a few hundred yards distance, the tiniest turquoise speck. I told my wife I could see a hiker down there. But I wanted confirmation. I man with binoculars took one look and told me my speck was a helicopter easily a mile away. While he watched, it took off – descending. Maybe ten minutes, I watched the Sun glitter off the tops of its rotors as it flew north across the entire Grand Canyon and eventually disappeared into a side-canyon like it never was – 25-50 miles away? Who could tell? I thought of Kaiser Wilhelm when asked how many Russians had been killed to that point in WWI. He is said to have shrugged and asked, “Six millions? Eight millions? Who can tell?”
On our Grand Canyon trip, I saw too many disorientingly large landscapes full of monolithic, ancient rock. It got to me. I could see clearly that I was indeed “a mote in God’s eye” as some would assert.
Then, I had this idea I would start scaling myself, just as on the TV show “Shark Tank” where they talk of “scaling a business” – growing it.
I grew myself 100’ tall. Now I was nothing but a single tree in a vast forest.
At 1000’ tall, my admirers(sycophants?) could see me from 5 or 10 miles tops.
At 5000’ feet tall, I was scaled up absolutely huge, but I disappeared quickly over the horizon.
I tried 5 miles tall. My nose was above the breathable atmosphere!
Reasoning my way to my significance got ridiculous. It became clear that my physical dimensions – probably my very physical self had nothing to do with my significance.
Research, study and fictional analyses continue on this problem.