Flying into Colorado yesterday, I caught a glimpse of something weightless yet heavy. Looking down through the airplane window—those tiny grids of geometry below, highways like veins, people invisible, lives unreadable—it struck me again how minuscule we are. Not metaphorically. Factually.
Specks. Blips. Temporary flickers on an indifferent stage.
From above, you see the artificial lines we’ve drawn across a landscape that never asked for names. Cities pretending permanence. Roads like scars. Little ant-people running around feeling important, when in reality—poof—any of us could vanish, and the cosmos would not blink. No grief from the moon. No silence from the stars.
And yet.
We are here.
Feeling.
Grasping.
Loving.
Screaming.
Trying to make meaning in the dark.
There’s a kind of sacred absurdity in that. A beauty that doesn’t need to be justified.
I thought, for a moment, about astronauts and their descriptions of the “overview effect”—that flash of insight when you see Earth as a fragile, borderless whole. No countries, no politics, no self-importance. Just a living marble floating in black. It’s not a thought. It’s an undoing.
From 35,000 feet, I touched the edge of that undoing. A soft undoing. Like loosening the grip I’ve been unconsciously holding.
The ego says, you must matter.
The view says, you might not.
And somewhere between those voices, I smiled.
I’m still here. Still living, still feeling, still becoming.
And maybe that’s enough.