Look up to the Sky, but watch where you’re stepping

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about life. Not the one that is supposedly found on the surface of the International Space Station. Nor the one that is flourishing deep down in our seemingly endless oceans. No... What I’ve been thinking about is the way we perceive and live our own life. Our daily human life.  

Have you ever been at a point of your life where you’ve asked yourself why you’re doing the things you do? Why you stress yourself out over seemingly important things like money, careers, clothes, lifestyle, luxury, … or whatever things you want or desire? Why you’re always in a hurry, running and speeding from appointment to appointment, honking on the driver in front of you because he is not driving the speed you want him to drive? Why you can’t keep that smartphone of yours buzz the hell out of itself during conversations, without you getting that itchy feeling in your fingers and nervous eye movements, telling yourself you are missing something important if you don’t take a look RIGHT NOW?  

Well, don’t blame yourself. it’s natural. Everyone does it in some way. Some more, some less.  

We can see it in your everyday life. People around us are always living on the edge. Or at least it seems so. We tell ourselves how important the things are that we do. How we need this and that to happen. How it is expected from us.  

We get stressed out. We get anxious. We get frustrated.  

During the last year, I found myself caught up in exactly this kind of sticky spider web. I was giving 110% for my job, grabbing opportunity after opportunity, telling myself how important my work is, how things need to be done RIGHT NOW or how much I needed this and that.  

When I was a teenager we used to live a few kilometers away from the next small town. It was a rural area so most of the nights were calm and silent. Our house had a flat roof that could be reached easily by stairs.  

As a teenager, whenever I felt anxious of frustrated, I would climb up to the roof in the night and just sit or lay there. I would look up to the sky and watch the stars, the moon and the milky way. Sometimes I would see a shooting star too.

I used to try to imagine the distance between me and those glowing little dots. Or between me and the moon. Thinking about how crazy all of this universe is when you think about it rationally. We are like small ants, sitting on a big ball, floating through endless space. It was fascinating!  

I felt small. Very small. And thinking about our place in the universe made me realize how small some of my problems actually were. Looking at my life on this seemingly endless scale gave me some kind of calmness and peace.   

It became a habit for me to raise my head and look up to the sky. Even during the day. As a reminder of how small and meaningless a lot of the stuff we stress ourselves about are.  

I am starting to remember this. And I am starting to realize how important it is to always see things in perspective and on a greater scale. We can follow our dreams and go our way. There is nothing wrong with that. But during our hike on the path of life, we should always find moments where we take a break and raise our heads to the sky and realize, how small we and our problems actually are. And that there is always a way to fix them!