No, I don’t mean know your place as in “follow the rules”, I mean know your place, as in know where you really are. When I was a kid, I was lucky enough to live out in the sticks on about a hundred acres. One of my favorite things to do in the summer was to go and lay in a field late at night, staring at the stars. When there’s no light pollution, that’s a pretty amazing sight in itself. But if you lay there for a while, pondering the fact that each of those little dots of light is as big and bright as our sun, but so far away that they’re tiny dots in a black background, and then realize that the flat ground you’re laying on only seems flat, and is actually the curved surface of a huge ball that’s spinning on its axis at about 1,000 miles an hour AND shooting in a circle around the sun at about 66,000 miles an hour, pretty soon you can get a little dizzy, and have to claw at the dirt beneath you ’cause it feels like you might just fall into all that SPACE out there.
You don’t have to lay in a field late at night to do this; you can do it any time, any where, by just thinking about the real scale of things, and where you fit into it. Even if you’re a big smartypants who knows all about the universe and stuff, this is a great little exercise. It can alternately make your problems seem small, make the simple act of existing seem majestic, or – if you’ve never pondered this stuff before – give your imagination some exercise. Once you get it sorted out that you’re on a big blue ball hanging in space, just remember not to fall off!
If you need a little nudge to get you going, Carl Sagan does a pretty good job in “The Pale Blue Dot”:
