I am in awe of the Apollo program. I was born about a year after Neil Armstrong took that one small step. That means I was about 11 when the space shuttle first became operational, but that was small potatoes (in terms of both size and sheer audacity) compared to sending men to the moon. The Apollo program makes me wish I were 20 years older so I could have experienced it live, at an age old enough to comprehend the signficance of it all. I get teary-eyed sometimes just thinking about what an incredible think that was: for the first time in history (and the last time, so far) we sent human beings to another celestial body, and brought them back safely to earth.
How GOOD people can be, when it really counts.
Yup. Just the fact that in the vast, vast majority of births, a baby is perfectly formed, a couple hundred tiny little bones all in the right place and attached to the right things, nerve endings, veins, heart valves, the central nervous system all up and running, the miniscule bones of the ear canal, the pituitary gland, the eyeballs, all of the body’s systems… how it all came together from just a single sperm and egg. It just blows me away. Particularly when I was gazing in absolute amazement at my own newborn children hours after they were born.
Evolution; that this responsively and with immeasurable patience eventually came from that.
The immensity of human experience. Sometimes I will get a sudden sense of kinship with someone else, as though I “know” them but at the same time I realize that they are as alien to me as a shark in the ocean. Although we have so much in common as humans they have a whole history that is beyond my knowing. And so does everyone else.
Yeah, besides this very moment that I’m a living being, of the very stuff that float about in Universe and that I walk on, and have self-awareness of this phenomena, this reality… when people, from all walks of life, gather up and be good, do good, do beautiful things together without hidden agenda or religious cause, awes me to tears.
Love. This amazing emotion that can render us inarticulate — or incredibly, gorgeously gifted in verse or song. But mostly it’s the intensity of feeling for a fellow human being. Intense and all-consuming. Love.
Global Positioning Systems.
I love the idea that I can know exactly where I am at any point on the planet to within a couple of meters. That a £35 GPS receiver, which fits in the palm of my hand and runs off a couple of batteries, could direct me unerringly from my house to any location on earth.
I could hop in a boat at Liverpool docks and plug in the coordinates of the Statue of Liberty and (assuming no sharks, reefs, 50ft waves and giant octopi) I could paddle myself right up to the dock on Liberty Island.
Imagine how Magellan, or Colombus, or any other globetrotting sailer would have reacted if you’d shown him a GPS and Google Earth.
[The milky way on a clear night is also utterly wonderous but has been mentioned already!]
The sea. And specifically storms at sea.
Sure, I remember the bad attempts with off-camera buckets of water I saw on TV as a kid, but its nothing like the real thing. To be on deck, watching a green-brown ocean below an angry gray sky…and to have your field of vision forcibly shift by 30-40 degrees every 10 seconds or so.
Or to be cruising through the heart of a hurricane at night, where the black sky and the water are both draped in miles of white cloud whose height and depth you can only guess at.
Where dozens of balls of lightning appear and disappear each minute like electric-blue beings from some other plane of existence called to a meeting. The ocean and the weather both seemed to literally be alive and right front of me.
mountains.
sure, the universe and everything yadda yadda. But those are rarely tangible, mountains are very, very real.
My wife and I are inexpert but enthusiastic skiers. A few years ago we rode a lonely t-bar up a remote Austrian mountain to nearly 3000 meters.
At the top there was nothing…no-one around, just me, her, the gentle hum of the cable and a view across the tops of the biggest mountains in Austria. It was a stunningly beautiful moment and we flopped back into the snow and soaked it up, I almost wept at it all.
Then we had a full 1200 meters to descend, alone, in quiet, on perfect snow with Gluhwein and Kaiserschmarren waiting for us at the bottom and a sauna and hot tub at the hotel.
It does not get better than that.
I could tell you where it was, but I’d have to kill you.
Time and color. If every thing else in the entire universe ceased to exist, these two absolutes would still be there.
Add motion, and you’ve got everything that is, was, or ever will be.
Nailed it in two.
Also the apparently bottomless capacity of human depravity.
My being alive at this particular point in time awes me. 13.75 billion years after The Big Bang, after all that cooling and expanding, after all the star stuff has formed, after life found a way to emerge on this minuscule piece of rock in the cosmos, here I am. Having digested all that, I then marvel at how mathematics can be used to figure all this out. Human intellect has cracked the code on our place in the universe and how we got here. I feel so lucky and privileged to exist at this point in time and to know what we know about the universe around us. That’s beyond awesome.
Who knows? Without depravity most of us probably wouldn’t be here. The universe is obscene and depraved in many rights, why shouldn’t we be? Even the worms have to eat. Best not to think in black and white when it comes to the cosmos… it just is.
… I mean it kind of awes me to just walk in a field and realize that I am standing on thousands, perhaps millions, of years of death and decay and depravity and obscenity… millions/billions of dead animals and insects and plants, and that I wouldn’t be able to live without all that death. The battlefields of eons that we walk on and are sustained from… the very soil of the earth.
Keep 'em coming everyone. I really love everyone’s insights and descriptions. It’s very refreshing.
To lie on one’s back and gaze at the stars, contemplating the vastness of the universe and the microscopic insignificance of our galaxy, solar system, planet and lives is truly humbling, particularly when taken in the context of how important many among us think they are in their present incarnations.
That we are made of elements formed in the hearts of stars (and hydrogen formed shortly after the Big Bang).
The idea that the stuff that makes up my body was once in an ancient star that became a supernova fills me with awe and amazement.
To get less heady…the Golden Gate Bridge. I know other bridges are more impressive, etc, but the fact that it was the largest suspension bridge in the World at the time, only ten people were killed, and they finished it in Nineteen Thirty-Seven just blows me away.
The sheer enormity of the project, the balls of the people who conceived that it was even possible, the ability to get the money together, the skill of the designers for its time, the manpower, the materials involved (something like 30,000 strands of wire in each cable and 80,000 miles of cable)…just astounding.
Good:Birth and Dreams.
Bad: Oppression.