Noticing the small things
 

Sometimes, I just stare at some random little detail, star in the sky, street corner in the city, a blade of grass, or something like that and wonder: "Has anyone ever truly noticed this or thought of it before? Will anyone ever think about this again?"

There's so much information flying about these days, after all, we live in the information age. Most things you don't even stop to consider. It's like you're drowning in things to notice, read, watch, and listen to that things only get a superficial glance, and you don't stop to really think about anything.

Sometimes, I'll get on my computer and just start playing some obscure video game that everyone else has forgotten, or watch some old TV show that was canceled after 2 episodes.

It just really puts it all into perspective. That little blade of grass, will most likely never be noticed again in its short blip of an existence. The human writing this post is just an infinitesimal speck of matter on a planet orbiting a star that is wheeling around the center of a spiral galaxy that is shooting through space around other galaxies that are ultimately screaming toward some unknown destination. This isn't the only universe either. There are an infinite number of other universes, where anything is possible, and none the same. If it can be thought of, it exists in some way, somewhere. (Avatar, the Na'vi, hell...even Neytiri, for real, exists somewhere out there.)

The universe, no, the... ultimate... everything, in all of its complexity, is simply awesome; mind-bending in every way possible.

I believe I owe life that little respect, to notice it, to try to understand it, even a little, tiny, infinitesimal part of it.

I hope you stuck with me through that. I am typing madly to get this out before I lose it.

I understand... Sometimes I feel the same way. I look at something, and realise that it will never be exactly the same. The next day, things will have changed.

Oel ngati kameie.

I see exactly what you mean.

We spend way too much time rushing around, missing everything beautiful in this wondefully obscure world. A beam of light shooting through the clouds, a birdsong, the feel of the rain on your face. All some of the simplest, yet greatest pleasures that life has to offer, all completely free.

Just slow down your world and take all of the beauty of the moment in.

Oel ngati kameie, tsmukan. Truly. It's that very thing that I have been rediscovering these past several months, that pause to really notice the world around me, around us all. The world moves too fast for me, and I have too many people in my life who just don't see the value in pausing long enough to really see anything. To them, it's wasted time. To me, it's all there is...moments of life strung together. The value in life is in noticing those moments, I think, those little things that exist, maybe for a short time like a blade of grass, maybe for much longer, like a piece of rock. There is great beauty and peace in just noticing them.

Oel ngati kameie; but I can't help but feel a bit sad when I notice something like that, because quite possibly it will never be given a second thought by anyone else ever again.

Let me tell you about why we can't truly think about everything in a Douglas Adams quote.

"The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses. Since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation – every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

Trin Tragula – for that was his name – was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. She would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.

“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex, just to show her. Into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she haw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot have is a sense of proportion."

I seem to remember Zaphod Beeblebrox not having this issue -- didn't he wind up concluding that he was the single most important thing in the universe (and then eating the cake)? :D

Yep, although then