Day #359 Earth to Antares

Someone sent me one of those emails recently. You know the ones I mean. They’re characterized by:
      enormous fonts, usually in
            a bolded bright red, along with

a shake-your-finger-in-my-face narrative that tells me:

how little I understand,

how little I can think for myself,

how ungrateful I am for all the riches life offers,

and what horrible things will happen if I don’t forward the message immediately.

I hate those emails.

Every once in a while, though, one shows up that has something interesting in it. And I steal those ideas for my blog.

The email I have in mind had a series of pictures of various sized balls. The first showed a teeny Pluto, a slightly larger Mercury, a bigger Mars, a still larger Venus, and a great big Earth.

In the next picture, Earth was dwarfed by Neptune, and the sizes moved progressively up through Uranus and Saturn to an enormous  Jupiter.

In the 3rd picture, Jupiter was miniscule compared to the Sun.

In the 4th, the sun, Sirius, and Pollux, each in greatly increasing sizes, were nevertheless insignificant when compared to Arcturus.

And of course, Arcturus wasn't even a 100th the size of Betelgeuse, which was about half the diameter of Antares.

Antares, incidently, is more than a thousand light years away from earth, barely a hairsbreadth away when one considers the limitless span of the Universe.

The email ended by telling me that I ought to feel horribly humble in the face of all this HUGENESS (that's my word, not the email's).

On the other hand, miniscule fleas caused the Plague that devastated Europe, killing the major bulk of the population, and the great big people were powerless to do anything about it.

People may be able to grow to be six or seven feet in height, while a honey bee never reaches much more than about half an inch or so, yet the honey bee is responsible for pollinating 1/3 of our food products. Without all those teeny bees, we’d be in deep doo-doo.

Relative size has very little to do with relative importance. I think we all have our role to fill, whether we are a bee, a planet, a star, or a person who sends emails. And it is what we do with our lives here and now that gives us value -- not how little we are, or how big either.

BEEattitude for Day # 362:
       Blessed are those who take themselves with a grain of salt, for they shall enjoy a flavorful life.

_______________________________ 

The teeny details:
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