The Rub

I got up early this morning for a quick trip to Topeka to visit a friend. Waking at about 5am, I left the house about 5:35. I was reminded at that time that the early morning is kind of a whole ‘nuther world.

The first glimpses of the morning dawn didn’t come until I was well on my way up the turnpike at about 6:20. The sun actually appeared about an hour later. Being able to watch the proceedings of the coming of the sun and the daytime was a good thing.

We seem to be far too cloistered in our homes, cars, and businesses any more to notice the things that keep our lives ordered and that are really the more important. We instead fret about the stock market and our 401k’s, the boss at work, or when we’ll be able to go shopping next.

All of these things might have an element of importance in them (at least for us), but they of themselves are all manufactured things…things that we deal with and have as a result of the human society and human interaction with nature. Things like the sunrise, however, aren’t dependent on us. In fact, the sun can rise very well with nary a human inhabiting this planet.

And maybe that’s the rub. We don’t like to admit that we aren’t needed for events like sunrise to happen, so we instead fill our lives with those things that do require our attention. Think, however, of just what we know about other bodies in space. Ice crystals on Mars, methane oceans on some of the moons of the gas giants, active volcanoes in the outer reaches of the solar system, giant storms, flying ice balls, the interaction of matter, the obedience to the laws of physics (even if we don’t understand them all), and the orderliness of the cosmos is not dependent upon us and happens all the time without as much as a speck of interference from humanity.

It kind of puts things into perspective.