Weather, and Time

It was an amazing day in Cologne, quite untypical for this time of year, and you can see the people absorbing it in, because they know that it could be the last beautiful day for months. So when my roommate, Manuela, a geography major, invited me to go to the rhine to study, although I had nothing specific to study, I agreed to go along. At some point we stopped chatting and got working while we were sitting there in the shade near the river, and at some point broke the silence and said, "I just can't get my head around this," explaining " I know what the words say, but it's so incomprehensible." She began explaining the concept that some of the stars in our sky are thousands of light years away, so the fact that we can see them today means that they existed thousand of years ago. It is a huge concept, to imagine that something is so far away, and the travel of light which we assume as instantaneous, is slow enough that it can take thousands of years to arrive in our sight.

I think it's rather cool though, and I told her this, our sun, which on the universal scale can be taken as a representation for us, and the life on this earth. Because we live from the sun, and it feeds us. And we are (probably) the only living creatures growing from this sun. Our planet my very well end, life may end, and the planet may disintegrate. But in thousands or millions of years, there may be life living on a planet that is thousands or millions of lightyears away, they will see out star, our sun, and they may not know that it represents us, but it is still one way that we exist, essentially through these waves of light that it is sending off into the universe.

It's so huge, and hard to understand, and even explain. But that's the beauty of our life, that it is so tiny, but part of something so huge that we can't even understand it. So I told her this and I said "You know, don't feel bad that you can't understand your homework, because not being able to comprehend it is the beauty of the world. So your frustration, is actually why the world is so amazing.