Compared with everything that exists, this planet is a negligible thing. Compared with the planet, a person is negligible. That is not a poetic exaggeration to make a point, it is simply counting, and everybody knows it and almost nobody stands still in front of it for any length of time.
Watch what people actually do outdoors on a clear night. They look up. They say something about how many there are, or how you never see them in the city. And within a few seconds they are looking at something nearer, or talking, or going back inside. Four seconds, more or less, and it is remarkably consistent across everybody.
It is not boredom. Something in us knows what is up there and roughly how long it would take to actually take it in, and declines the invitation. Almost everybody does this countless times, and some people have also spent whole nights not declining, and the difference between those two nights is not a small one.
Why we look away
The obvious explanation is that it is frightening. Our own scale, seen properly rather than mentioned in passing, is not a comfortable fact to hold. Everything we have built and carried and worried about is happening on a very small object among an unimaginable number of others, not one of which is aware of any of it.
But fear is not quite the right word for it. What actually happens when anybody stays with it is that their sense of their own importance loosens, and that loosening is uncomfortable in a specific way, because a great deal of ordinary life quietly depends on that importance being firmly in place.
If we are negligible, then the thing that has been worrying us all week is also negligible. So is the slight from three years ago that still turns over some nights. So is a good deal of what the days have been organised around. That is not a relief in the moment. It is much more like the floor moving, and the instinct is to get back inside where the floor is reliable.
Negligible, and with a place
And yet each negligible part has its own place. Both of those are true at the same time and they do not resolve into one another, and there is no need to make them. They can simply be held together, awkwardly.
Nothing out there is redundant. Every one of those objects is exactly where it is, doing exactly what it does, and the whole enormous thing works without supervision. Smallness and belonging are not opposites and never were. We assume they are because we have been taught that mattering is a matter of size, and it is not.
So the night sky does not say that anybody is nothing, which is how people usually report it. It says that we are not the measure of anything, which is an entirely different message and much easier to live with once the difference between the two can be heard.
What happens to the troubles
What actually happens, if anybody stays out there long enough, is not that the troubles get solved. They are exactly as they were when the door closes again and nothing about any situation has altered by a degree. Nobody has been reconciled and no decision has been made.
What alters is the proportion. A thing that filled the entire frame is now in a frame, and there is a great deal else in it, and the difference is not intellectual and cannot be produced by argument. Nobody gets there by telling themselves that their problem is small. That never works, and everybody has tried it, and it usually makes things slightly worse.
It requires actually standing in front of the thing until something registers the scale, which takes considerably longer than four seconds and cannot be hurried by wanting it. People come back inside with everything unchanged and something in them set differently. Nobody could have argued themselves into that position by any means at all, and how it works is not understood by anybody.
