Once Again, Perspective

“So the last shall be first, and the first last” (Matthew 20:16)

     (I wrote a large part of the following almost 7 years ago. Much has changed in my own circumstances since then. I’ve moved from the leafy suburbs of Howard County, Maryland, to the center of decidedly-urban Baltimore. I no longer have the luxury of quiet evening walks along forested pathways, and my dog now lives with my younger daughter and her husband in faraway Atlanta. But the sentiments expressed herein have not aged, nor have they become any less relevant to our still in-progress stellar pilgrimage.)

     And with that we bid farewell to the last of the red dwarfs in our vicinity. We will spend the rest of the tour amidst the bright, gaudy baubles of the world of naked eye stars.

     But before we leave this Kingdom of the Red Dwarfs for good, we really ought to pause and take stock. Why did we go through all this effort to find these so often all too unspectacular objects? Those frustrating slogs through the 12th magnitude wastelands of the sky, only to catch a glimpse (with averted vision) of some anonymous dot, which (let’s be honest) you were not always entirely sure was the anonymous dot you were actually looking for. What was the point? 

Was there ever any?

     Yes, there was.

     Every day, I take my dog Jenny out for at least one walk through some forest paths that I am lucky enough to live close to. I know it’s the high point of her day, and it often is for me, too. I do my best thinking on these walks. The woods are different, depending on the time of year. In winter, I can see hundreds of yards through the bare branches of the denuded trees. In spring, I am overwhelmed by the glory of resurrected life bursting all about me. I scarcely ever lift my eyes from each newly opened leaf, from every (let’s face it) weed that sprouts up alongside the path. In deep summer my view is inward. I can hardly see ten yards in any direction, what with all the foliage crowding around me. Fall is of course a time of magic – of brilliant colors crowding about and falling at my feet.

     At this very moment, while I am writing these words on my back porch, I am marveling at the last rays of the Sun glowing upon the topmost branches of the trees near my house. I can picture the scene from space. There’s the Earth – day and night alternating as it always has between the hemispheres, and me poised on the knife’s edge of the terminator. Look away, and it’s gone.

     There’s so much to see; so much to take in. So much, in fact, that it is so easy to miss the Main Point.

     I never (willingly) miss an opportunity to go out on a clear night and observe. On some nights it’s the Moon, or one of the planets. Sometimes it’s an evening of Old Favorites (perhaps Orion, or the Glories of the Summer Milky Way). Occasionally it’s the chance to see a once-in-a-lifetime comet that won’t be back our way until long after I am dust. But most of the time, it’s just to see… to place myself amongst the stars and to feel my place amongst them. This takes time – lots of it. You can’t just go from Messier object to Messier object, checking all the boxes and feeling smug about having bagged a particularly difficult galaxy, or whatever. You need to look. 

     So what does that have to do with dog walks through the woods? Just this. I lift my eyes from the path, and see… trees. Trees groaning under the weight of ice and snow in winter. Trees clad with leaves in summer, defining my (short) horizon in every direction. Trees in the fall, gaudily clamoring for my attention with their blaze of color. It would be so easy to mistake the trees for the forest. The old saw is so right – one can miss the forest for the trees. They are, after all, the biggest things around. Just look! What do you see, in the middle of the woods? Trees! 

     But there is so much more. And not only that – in terms of numbers at least, the trees are not even the main event. For every tree one sees, there are at least 50 bushes growing and thriving under its branches. And for every bush, there are hundreds, nay thousands, of weeds, grasses, and wildflowers covering the earth at their feet. Yes, I may catch sight of the occasional deer or fox amidst the foliage – but how much more numerous are the rodents and the insects! Indeed, biologists tell us that the overwhelming majority of life on this Earth cannot even be seen by the human eye – it is too small. The microbes and various forms of microscopic organisms make up the bulk of what we recognize as “life”.

     It is the same with stars. Look up on any random night. Get away from the city, and even from the suburbs, and look up. In a truly dark sky, such as we so seldom encounter nowadays, it is filled with stars. Filled to an extent that even a seasoned stargazer has difficulty making out the constellations amidst the lights of Heaven crowding in from all sides. And yet this picture is, in the final analysis, an illusion. It’s like looking at all the trees and missing the forest at their feet. For every star visible to your eye, there are countless more invisible. And the stars that you do see are so often nowhere near to us. Remember what Willem Luyten said (I’ll repeat it here in full): “We should always remember that of the 6,000 stars that the average human eye can see in the entire sky, probably not more than 30, or one-half of one percent, are less luminous than the Sun; whereas of the 700-odd stars nearer than ten parsecs, at least 96% are less luminous than the Sun.”

     What does that mean? It means that when we look up, we are not seeing the universe as it is. We are seeing a very skewed sampling of the biggest and brightest members, but overlooking what really makes it up. And we have overlooked what is closest to us. 19 out of the 25 closest stars to the sun are invisible to the naked eye! What else are we missing? What are we missing in our own lives? Do we spend all our time on frivolously bright trifles, and miss out on what is really important? Are we focused on the blatantly obvious, while failing to see the nuances? Do we worry too much about our careers, and too little about our families? Do we get worked up over injustice in some foreign land, all the while overlooking bigotry and prejudice in our own? Are we paying overly much attention to the celebrity, the loud mouth on the radio or TV, the politician with all the money, whilst failing to take proper note of the really important people in the world – the neighbor that offers you a hand in need, the brother or sister (or son or daughter) that in the last analysis makes all the difference between a life worth living and one not?

     Go out tonight. Set up your biggest telescope, and put in your widest field eyepiece. Don’t worry about where you aim it. Take a good look.