Keeping Life in Perspective

In the final years of my career as a personal financial advisor I had the good fortune to work on the seventh floor of an office tower that afforded expansive views in every direction. From my desk I could see the peak of the Peace Tower some eight kilometres away, such is the low-build nature of present-day Ottawa.

Passing by that building is the 417 Expressway connecting Orleans in the east to Kanata in the west, Ottawa proper being roughly equidistant between the two.

During my not-infrequent breaks to window-gaze, I would contemplate the mind-sets of all those thousands of commuters and truckers speeding by, each on their own little Mission Impossible.

And I would wonder to myself, do we not take our own little lives, our own little thoughts, and our own little spheres of personal life events far too seriously? Do we not tend to focus on the minutiae of life rather than taking an expansive view of its big picture?

I believe we very much do; which would be rather inconsequential were it not for the serious implications.

We appear to be making ourselves miserable and, as a direct consequence, mentally and physically ill with all the anxious rushing around we do to fulfill all those “important” items on our perpetually-refreshed to-do list.

To no surprise, two of the leading causes of lost time at work these days are stress and depression.

The message of this post is that, yes, we should take time to care for one another and contribute as best we can toward a well-functioning society.

But we should do so with an un-rushed ease of being and a deep humility born of knowing, fully and completely, that what we each do each day is, at once, both important and profoundly and singularly unimportant.

Understanding the seeming incompatibility of this duality requires but one thing: a broader perspective on life than we normally afford it.

So, in that vein, here are a few mind-and-perspective-altering thoughts to contemplate.

Our to-do list and “problems” from a universal perspective

If you could charter a spacecraft capable of traveling at the speed of light (~300,000 kilometres per second) you would be able to circumnavigate the earth at its equator (~40,000 kilometres) in about one-tenth of a second.

By way of comparison, a typical commercial jet flies at about 900 kph and so would need about 44 hours to complete that same journey.

So, wow, light is pretty darned fast! Yes, indeed it is. However, even if you were able to travel at the speed of light, in order to reach the outer edge of the observable universe you had better pack a good-sized lunch – because it’s going to take you roughly 47 BILLION YEARS.

But we’re only talking the observable universe here (i.e. the furthest light can have traveled since the time of the Big Bang, some 13.8 billion years ago).   Taking this limitation into account, scientists at Oxford University in Britain have estimated that the full scale of the universe is about 250 times larger than what we can currently observe.

So, that little trip of yours to the edge of the universe at the speed of light? Well, better get comfy because you’re in for a journey lasting, oh, about 12 TRILLION YEARS.

And then there’s our so-very-important to-do list. Hmmmmm.

And to think that blood is being tragically shed over specks of land that, from a universal perspective, aren’t even the size of sub-atomic particles.

And then, of course, there’s always that neighbour who gets upset because some of “your” fall leaves blew on to “his” side of the property line just after he had finished raking.

And on and on this silliness goes, due in large part to an utter lack of perspective.

Humbling Hubble

Here is a photograph taken by the Hubble space telescope. It shows a field of view roughly the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length.

Those dots of light? Well, they’re all galaxies – thousands of them – and each one has hundreds of billions of stars.

In the observable universe there are an estimated 100 BILLION GALAXIES.

This puts the number of stars in our known universe at roughly 1 BILLION TRILLION, also known as 1 SEXTILLION or, in scientific notation, 1 x 10 ^ 21 stars. Earth circles around exactly one of them, and a rather mundane one at that.

And then there’s us, rushing around frantically on the little speck of cosmic dust we call Earth attending to our very important issues. Hmmmmm.

“Time” to Regain Perspective

The universe is estimated to have come into existence at the time of the Big Bang, roughly 14 billion years ago.

Out of this cosmic soup, the Earth coalesced about 4.5 billion years ago.

It took about 500 million years for conditions to cool and change sufficiently to support Earth’s first life forms, this occurring about 3.5 billion years ago.

Dinosaurs appeared on the scene about 240 million years ago and stuck around for roughly 170 million years; until that unfortunate asteroid incident.

The first mammals made their appearance about 65 million years ago and eventually, out of this lineage, came us Homo Sapiens, roughly 200,000 years ago.

So, let’s put our species’ experience to date into some context:

• In our total history as a species we have only been in existence for about 0.12% of the time that dinosaurs managed. Given our propensity for war and aggression, I’m thinking the dinosaurs have a lock on that record.

• At an average adult stride it would take someone 66 million steps (and a formidable aptitude for holding their breath under water) to walk around the Earth at the equator. If we take this number of steps to represent the age of the universe, then a human living for 90 years is only on this Earth for 220 steps, or about 130 metres of the 40,000 kilometres it takes to make it around the Earth.

• To put the previous point a different way, if the age of the universe were condensed down to one year, a human living for 90 years experiences their entire life passing by in roughly two-tenths of a second.

In other words, while our time on Earth may seem long from our tragically-limited perspective, on a cosmic scale it is but a blink of an eye – and then it’s over.

Given the fleeting nature of our existence, how wise is it to devote any of this precious time fussing over our oh-so-important “problems”?

Nothing New Under the Sun

Over the two-hundred millenia that humans have been around, roughly 108 billion of us have died.

This means that 108 billion of us have experienced the full suite of human sorrows – the loss of loved ones, sickness, injury, to say nothing of those sorrows brought on by human ignorance; hunger, thirst, war, physical and mental assault, forced displacement, subjugation, prejudice, injustice, intolerance, greed, and so on and so on.

As we learned in this post, such pains are simply a part of life; resist them and you will suffer. Seen from a broader perspective, it is rather clear that our personal “problems” are hardly the stuff of legend; nothing to get worked up over – simply to be dealt with, mindfully.

You – Miracle!

It may sound trite to describe life as a miracle.  Certainly on our most challenging days it feels more like a burden than a miracle.  

But it’s true – your mere existence, your coming into being, is indeed miraculous.  And here’s why.

Let’s take a look at just a small portion of the long chain of events that had to go exactly your way for you to come into being:

• Your mom and dad had to live long enough to make it to their reproductive years.

• Your mom had to meet your dad. Of all the men she could have met, what are the odds of meeting just the right guy to make you? 

• Of course, meeting is one thing, but hitting it off sufficiently well to want to date each other? What are those odds?

• Okay, your folks are dating, but now they’ve got to want to turn it into a long-term relationship. Odds?

• So, they decide to stick together and manage to do so long enough to have a child – you.

• But for you to come into existence, the exact sperm and exact egg had to meet and successfully link up. The odds of this? Given the sperm count of the average male, roughly 1 chance in ten to the power of seventeen. Let’s just say that if this were the odds of winning a door prize, you could be waiting a really long time!

• Now extend this process out to take into account your grandparents and great grandparents and great-great grandparents, on and on back through every ancestor since the first human came into existence, some 10,000 generations ago.

Only this EXACT chain of events could lead to YOU!

In the fascinating article where I first encountered this analysis, the odds are put at one chance in 10 raised to the power of 2,685,000! That’s a one followed by 2,685,000 zeroes!

To put this crazy big number into perspective, it is estimated that the total number of atoms in the known universe is roughly 10 raised to the power of 80. So your odds of coming into being are way lower than having to pick the correct card from a deck consisting of 1 x 10 ^ 80 cards!

Put another way, your existence is the equivalent of 2 million people getting together, each given a trillion-sided die, and with one roll they all turn up the exact same number, say 550,343,279,001.

In other words, the probability of YOUR existence?   Essentially NIL. 

I like the way the article’s author puts it:

“A miracle is an event so unlikely as to be almost impossible.  By definition, each of you – and all living things – are miracles.  I think this is something to be grateful for.”

Sort of puts our oh-so-important to-do lists and “problems” in a different perspective, does it not?

Oh, What a Lucky Man He Was

In its 2022 Global Wealth Report, wealth manager Credit Suisse broke down the distribution of wealth among the world’s adults. Here is what they report:

• 53% of adults have a net worth under $10,000 US dollars (USD).
• 87% have a net worth under $100,000 USD. In other words, if you have a net worth greater than $100,000 USD, you stand among the richest 13% of all adults alive today.
• If you are fortunate enough to have a net worth greater than $1 million USD, you have more personal wealth than 98.8% of all adults alive today.

In my home country of Canada, we are fortunate indeed; median wealth among adults comes in at $140,000 USD. In other words, more than half of Canadian adults can count themselves among the richest 13% of all adults in the entire world.

To put this into perspective, India, with some 1 billion adults, has median wealth of just $3,300 USD, while China, with some 1.1 billion adults, has median wealth of only $26,000 USD.

And the U.S. itself? Well, its median adult wealth is only about 66% of that of Canada’s, coming in at $93,000 USD.

So, if you’re a Canadian adult reading this post, it’s highly likely that you have much to be thankful for and precious little, if anything, to be fussed about.

Taking Things for Granted

If you, like me, happen to have had the great good fortune to be born into one of the Western democracies, it is all too easy to take our favored lot in life for granted. From our limited perspective it is easy for us to forget that our lives are not the norm; in fact, far from it.

Here’s a broader perspective:

• % of the world living in an autocracy: 25%

• % of the world who are malnourished: 11% (vs. 39% overweight)

• % of the world with no electricity: 13%

• % of the world with inadequate shelter: 20%

• % of the world without safe water: 33%

• % of the world without proper sanitation: 46%

• % of the world living on <$1.90 USD/day: 9%

What message do we take from these statistics? That the next time we’re inclined to complain about some discomforting aspect of our lives, perhaps we should instead take a moment to reflect on just how truly lucky we are and how much we have to be grateful for.

Nothing Really Matters

Here I present two facts that, while depressing to contemplate, nonetheless help put our often-frantic lives and “problems” into perspective.

The Cemetery Perspective

Pass by any cemetery and ponder if there are any friends or relatives still alive to remember who these people were, let alone know the details of their lives.

For most of them, much beyond grandchildren is a stretch. In many instances great-great grandparents are little more than a footnote on a genealogy list, in the rare case that one even exists.

The point here is that, in a relatively short span of time, our perceived self-importance and rushing to achieve life’s goals and tasks amounts to absolutely nothing.

No one is going to remember or care that we put in crazy long overtime in our job. No one is going to remember or care that in 2016 we arrived at our folk’s place for Christmas at 2:13pm by dangerously speeding down the highway rather than doing the speed limit and arriving at 4:02pm.

At the time these would have seemed important to us and, in the absence of mindfulness, would likely have been accompanied by needless anxiety and frustration. But with the benefit of time, distance, and wisdom, we see our folly.

Much of life, if not all of it, follows this same pattern; seemingly so important at the time but, ultimately, amounting to pretty much nothing at all.

The Red Giant Perspective

In about five billion years or so our sun will have spent much of its nuclear fuel and begun its transition into a Red Giant, the dying phase of a star of its type.

One of the main features of a Red Giant is its massive expansion, growing some 100 to 1000 times in size, sufficiently large in the case of our sun as to likely engulf the Earth, thus destroying everything in its wake.

At that point, assuming the continued existence of our species and barring the invention of mega-scale inter-planetary travel, all of human history will be forever extinguished.  

What, then, to make of our “important” earthly tasks and “problems”? 

Life in perspective

The truth of our existence is this: that most, if not all, of what we perceive to be important or to be a “problem” is, in reality, little more than a triviality.

And the alternative? To just lighten up and stop taking ourselves, and life, so darned seriously.

As the 70’s band Trooper‘s lyrics put it, “We’re here for a good time, not a long time, so have a good time, the sun can’t shine every day”.

And how do we go about having this “good time” in the face of life’s difficulties and challenges?

Here, an invaluable trait to foster is the ability to laugh at oneself, to laugh at life’s inevitable trials and tribulations, and to smile inside whenever we come face-to-face with hardship and challenge.

Remember from this post that pain is non-negotiable, just a part of life, but adding suffering to that pain, well, that’s your choice.

If you actively nurture this mentality, the ability to laugh at and take lightly whatever life presents, you will find that your life magically smooths out, an ease of being sets in, and you will find yourself responding to life with your innate wisdom rather than unthinkingly reacting to it as is our near-universal habit.

Warmest wishes,

Rob @ Living a Mindful Life

P.S. Credit to my wonderful and talented friend Julie for the beautiful rose portion of this post’s featured image! Thank you Julie!!