It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Yes, it is that time time of year again. I certainly hope everyone is having a great holiday season.  I wish people of all faiths a peaceful and joyous holiday.

There is a fair amount of chatter this time of year about the true meaning of Christmas. For Christians it is the birth of the Savior. My sentiment is that I wish that the generosity we feel during the Christmas Season could be propelled throughout the rest of the year.

This is not just a cliché in terms of gift giving. We as a civilization do not do a great job managing the world’s resources. Consider that if the Sun’s size was represented by a basketball, the Earth’s size relative to it would be a pellet about 2.2 millimeters in size. (This is a very small fraction of an inch so we’ll stick with metric for the very small.) Using this scale how far would our little pellet be from the basketball relative to the distance from the Earth to the Sun? I don’t have access to NASA’s resources on this but I would say pretty far. Just kidding. I have an idea.

What would you say? If you placed a basketball on the ground and held a little pellet between your fingers how far would you have to walk away to represent the distance of the Earth from the Sun? 5 feet? 10 feet?

This is a loose comparison but on the scale of our Sun down to the size of a basketball, one inch would equal approximately 91,000 miles. This would put the 2.2-millimeter pellet about 86 feet from the basketball. I have heard similar comparisons with the scale of a foot equaling a million miles meaning that similarly sized spheres would be about 93 feet apart.

Our little pellet is out there pretty much in the middle of nowhere. To make matters worse regarding how small our world really is, most people presume that the entire Earth is friendly to human existence and that is not true. If you were dropped in a bathing suit, or in your birthday suit as in the case of some new reality shows, haphazardly anywhere on the Earth most of the places that you would land on you would be dead in no time at all. You would likely be frozen, asphyxiated, or drowned in vast amounts of water if hypothermia didn’t get you first. There are only so many places on Earth that are beach weather friendly.

So, what exactly do we do with what livable space we have on our little pellet? For starters we divide up the land with imaginary lines. Then, after we divide everyone up in these boundaries, we divide up those groups by social class, race, and here it comes, what different things we all believe.

I find it ironic that three of our major religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam; all pretty much share the same origins in terms of ancient texts and the same holy land but somehow always seem to be at odds. These ancient religious texts where written by men thousands of years ago who didn’t know anything about the world. In fact, our comparison of the Sun to a basketball is far more than they ever imagined. Yet, we are perfectly willing to hate and kill each other over the ancient tenants that they wrote. The same goes for the fighting over the holy land.

The holy land? What exactly is that? Remember that little pellet between your fingers? That’s it. That’s the holy land because it is all we have. Every inch of our Earth is our home and very precious.

If we are lucky in life, 70 or 80 some odd trips around the basketball riding on the little pellet are all we get. This is out of billions of trips the Earth continually makes around the Sun.  Saying that life is short is not a cliché but a monumental understatement.

Maybe we could spread the season’s good cheer by realizing that we all share an incredible oneness. Every atom in our bodies and every piece of dust in our living room are composed of elements forged in the furnaces of the universe. None of us comes from a better set of elements than anyone else. Genesis is curiously very scientifically prophetic when it states, “…for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Maybe we should spend more time throughout the year helping each other enjoy as many trips around the Sun as possible.  It doesn’t matter to me if we do it because we believe in God, Santa Claus, or the man on the Moon.

Let’s just do it.