I recently watched a video on Youtube.
It was the video of Felix Baumgartner skydiving from the edge of the world. He went up in a hot air balloon 25 miles above the earth: to the edge of space. From that height he could see the curve of the earth and the endlessness of space. As he was preparing to jump, he hung from the side of the balloon and said this,
“Sometimes you have to be up really high to understand how small you are.”
This got me thinking. That is so true: we are so small. And then as I’m lying in bed this morning my wife says to me that she has just felt our baby move inside her for the first time. On one hand I have been watching a video of a man staring at the whole world and in the next moment I’m talking about the tiniest life moving for the first time inside the womb. The scale of life is extraordinary and I just feel as though I have had to stop and try and get some perspective to take it all in.
What does it take to get real perspective? I mean, people all over have babies and it seems like a normal thing. Which it is in one way, but in another it’s an astounding process. The baby centre videos are mind blowing. (http://www.babycenter.com/6_your-pregnancy-16-weeks_1105.bc) To think that all that is happening, even as I’m typing. All that’s happening whilst Felix Baumgartner jumps from the edge of space and whilst several others summit the highest peaks on the planet. Or whilst people are exploring the potential expeditions to mars. All of these things are amazing, but are they as amazing as what’s happening inside my wife’s bump? Not really.
And that’s coming from a man who adores the thought of risky adventures: scaling K2 or breaking the sound barrier or going into space or joining the Special Forces or playing music to 100,000 people. (See the upcoming post about the adventurous man). Sometimes, the most amazing things are the things that happen right in front of us, yet we miss it. I miss it. I need to hold things in perspective.
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