In the train, yesterday, before getting out, the man in the same cabin all of sudden spoke to me: “the world is small.” After a few seconds he continued, “all our lives we are looking for someone or something else, while we haven’t found ourselves. How can we look for someone else when we don’t know who we are?.”

A few seconds before the following paragraph had popped up on my iphone:

“At the very moment that humans discovered the scale of the universe and found that their most unconstrained fancies were in fact dwarfed by the true dimensions of even the Milky Way Galaxy, they took steps that ensured that their descendants would be unable to see the stars at all. For a million years humans had grown up with a personal daily knowledge of the vault of heaven. In the last few thousand years they began building and emigrating to the cities. In the last few decades, a major fraction of the human population had abandoned a rustic way of life. As technology developed and the cities were polluted, the nights became starless. New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and had stimulated the modern age of science and technology. Without even noticing, just as astronomy entered a golden age most people cut themselves off from the sky, a cosmic isolationism that only ended with the dawn of space exploration.” via Kottke

I remember one early morning at Audarya last year when I stopped while walking to the bathhouse and looked up. Hundreds or thousands of stars lit the sky. Very little light pollution. Years ago I was on a school excursion and we looked at the stars too and picked out a few well know stars, like the pole stars. Years later as well, I was sitting on a veranda at the Mediterranean and looked up to the stars. Magnitude. That’s what I thought. And it forced me to think and be humble.

And so I believe introspection leads to a better quality of life, and a less random one too.

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