Monday, November 2, 2009-

It’s raining, I’m tired, and I figure just this once it’s okay for me to do a little copy and pasting. I mentioned my college application essay in yesterday’s train ride post. I hope it can share with you the thrill I get time and again from merely stepping back and realizing just where I am on this fantastic planet we call home:

Our world is merely a pale blue dot. It hangs in space, a point of light lost among the stars. This was the realization of the brilliant Carl Sagan who so profoundly captured the matter-of-fact truth about our planet, pointing out how minuscule we all are in comparison to this “mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.” This past summer, oblivious to Sagan’s genius, I too came to realize both the minuteness and the limitlessness of human life upon earth. Our world is at once both negligible and immeasurable, lost forever in space and all of us with it.

This last June, I bought a cheap ticket on an even cheaper airplane traveling from Denmark to Barcelona, Spain. The flight was short and I was well prepared with my passport, tickets, and credit cards in my pocket, and color copies in my bag, prepared for the worst. I arrived in a small airport forty kilometers north of downtown Barcelona, stuck in a forgettable town that barely marked a point on the map, trying to make my way into Catalonia’s tourist capital. I was confident in my Spanish skills,

but discovered that the people of northeast Spain don’t speak Spanish, they still stick to their native Catalan. I was having my first true insight into just how diverse a single nation could be, let alone a continent or globe. I had to pause for a moment, searching through guidebooks, train schedules, and metro maps just to figure out where I was headed.

Eventually I found myself on a bus bound for the train station, and from there I caught the next train to the metropolis’ downtown. I guess it was while I sat by that train window, drowsy and unexpectedly content, marveling at Catalonia’s mélange of culture despite its small size, that I realized that every one of us has one inescapable thing in common. No matter how small our world may seem, there will always be a place where you have never been, a place where you are lost to the life you’ve known.

As I rode along, lost as I’d ever been, I slowly kept playing a single image in my head, that of Google Earth. It would start with me on the train, and I could vividly imagine the Spanish countryside as it shrank into the Iberian Peninsula, then all of Europe, only to end up as a dot on the map.

And then, as if I had the world on GPS, I would come time and again zooming back until I sat staring out the train window, marveling at the fact that I was in Spain, thousands of miles away from home on a train with people just as “lost” as me, uncertain as to where I was headed or how I would get there.

And so I leaned back, wholly and unreservedly in love with the world, and took another slow breath, watching the specks of dust drift around the passenger car, excited about the fact that I would only ever be a microscopic point on this pale blue dot. I couldn’t wait to explore, I couldn’t wait to learn, to understand, to appreciate, and to experience it all. I couldn’t wait to live my life, because I, just like the rest of this world, will always be lost, and my realization that every instant would bring something new and every adventure would take me someplace different was precisely what made me so content. As I closed my eyes and zoomed above the train again, I could practically hear Sagan’s voice in my ear,

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives…[and] our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light.” I realized that the second you stop trying to find yourself, and understand that getting lost is when you’re truly living your life, then you will see exactly where you’re headed. So in the end I looked down, with Barcelona and all the rest of the world beneath my feet, larger than the pale blue dot, at least for a moment.