(33) What I learned about the The Earth

Bit of a different one this week.

Thanks to my friend Donald I have been watching ‘How The Earth Was Made’ on YouTube. And it really did get me thinking about what the Earth’s about and therefore what we humans are about and I’ve come to some interesting conclusions. I’ve long been a pooh-pooh-er (?!) of the Save the Planet tribe. I doubt our planet needs saving. Save some species maybe. Or save the human race more like. But the planet? Nah – she’s no more threatened by us than we are by the minibeasts living on our eyelashes. Our earth will one day shudder and shrug us off like a speck of dust on a rug. Of that I have no doubt. May be tomorrow, may be 200,000,000 years from now, but we will be gone and possibly leave no trace. After all, if the history of the earth was mapped out as a timeline along the entire length of a toilet roll, the emergence of homo sapiens would occur a mere 1mm from the end. So methinks there may well come another stretch of time in the Earth’s history when we’re not around.

So why are we around and what’s it all about?

Sorry – I can’t answer that one. But I make sense of it by allowing myself to get caught up in the scale of it all every now and then. The human race, its condition and all its huffing and puffing amounts to nowt. On a Universal scale nothing we do or say matters – at all.

OK I’m not saying we can do whatever we want and run amok in society (sorry if you were hoping for permission to go wild) but more that if we can step back a little and gain a sense of perspective on our busy little lives we might learn to relax. And maybe realise that we have nothing better to do than merely exist.

Once you get the idea that all you have to do is exist then you might realise life’s a bit easier as existing really takes very little effort. Perhaps it takes such little effort that you find can concentrate less on your everyday existance and perhaps spend some time helping others relax and exist as well.

So – my summary: Us humans do tend to get into a tizz about stuff that may not even matter in a month or a year’s time, let alone 10,000 years. So why worry? Help the person next to you. You might as well – there really is nothing better to do…

Sigh – when did I become such huge hippie?