I was maybe twenty-three. And my life was so huge to me I couldn’t see anyone else’s. Who else was putting two people through college with two babies? Who else had a grocery budget of $15 a week and a clothes budget of $0? Who else had left all her friends two states away and was living near her husband’s family and not her own?
My life, it seemed, was separate from all others, my pain and heartbreak unprecedented in the history of the world, at least in my part of the world, at least at this time, at least among the people I knew.
No longer thirteen, I had the sense not to say any of this aloud. But not the maturity to stop feeling it, deep down in my gut, where no one else could see.
I’d been taught better. Since I’d been knee-high to a grasshopper I’d been tutored in looking, not to my own interests, but to the interests of others.
But I was a new adult, overwhelmed, and sure I had a corner on suffering. It was at this sorry juncture that I enrolled in my first astronomy class ever.
Every Tuesday and Thursday, I walked into class, carrying my load of grievances. But a sky full of stars did something, making me feel both small and part of something infinitely bigger than myself. And older, much older than myself.
The light we saw from the stars had left them thousands of years before, had traveled trillions of miles to reach earth and to shine on me.
Me, one person out of more than four billion people in the world, and holding the troubles of only one life, a good one, at that. Above all us earthlings moved the stars and planets and galaxies, the ones we could see and those we couldn’t.
Ninety minutes later, I’d walk out of class, ready to cuddle my babies, to stretch my grocery budget, to make new friends.
And I’d walk out relieved.
I was, after all, just a speck in the universe.
Apple to Apple 