Earth is man

I was sitting in my patio, smoking. The night not quite dark enough due to the lamppost out back on some telephone pole and the occasional airliner making its way to the airport some 20 miles away on the other side of town. The sound of the engines flying by periodically doesn't actually bother me - I grew up so close to LaGuardia Airport that when a plane flies over my house, high enough to still look like it radios to some neighborhood kid's remote control, the sound comforts me. Sometimes, if they fly just right, I can see the planes through my skylights when I lay on my living room couch. But on this night, I was in my patio ... thinking.

There I was, a small indecipherable spec in the expanse of earth. Did you know the radius of earth is 6,999,125 yards - that's like 70,000 football fields. The fucking thing weighs 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms - and I'm complaining about 20 pounds! But overweight or no, I lived through a week that epitomized a cliche: I had the weight of the world on my shoulders.

I got to thinking about the weight of the world, though - and about how it's the attributes of earth itself (gravity) that determines how much it weighs. Floating out in the expanse of space - it weighs nothing. Nothing at all.

So you see - it's a matter of perspective. I refuse to feel like my job, my kids, my responsibilities, my finances, my car, my mortgage, the recession and blah blah blah all weigh 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms. If I'm to believe that the Lord hung the sun in place and made the oceans and birds and shit - then I'm also to believe that he wants me to realize that the weight of the world is nothing.

And sitting there filling my lungs with tar and nicotine, while a plane flew over the house, I let it go. I let the week go - I let the stress go. I simply gave it over to the Lord.

Truth is - that job did not give me my joy ... and that job cannot take it away.

And in that thought it came to me - how man is very similar to earth. Like ozone, a tough skin wards off all sorts of cancerous nonsense ... and deep within us, we each possess the the busying things that make us who we are. Oceans ebb and flow, cars and trains and planes travel to and fro, magma and lava come and go ... much like the biological, emotional and psychological activity within us stays in constant flux. And more importantly ...

It's the gravity WITHIN the man that determines the man. All of the external weights and measures that try to weigh me down and define me amount to nothing.

Nothing at all.

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