No matter whether today is a three-coffee-morning or a sleep-till-noon kind of day, try this. Try finding one little minute to really notice the blue sky. (Or the cloudy sky, or the night sky. Whatever you’ve got. Weather is not the point here.)
Get outside, put your feet on the earth, and look up.
Let the sight of that distance adjust your perspective.
Let your breath and your heart and, hey, how about your soul, all recalibrate as you consider how far, how still, how wide, how deep the space above us really is — and how near, how noisy, how frantic, how shallow the things around us can get.
I think this might be one of the sky’s actual jobs, to remind us of who we are and where we are, when we lose sight of the target. It’s like a big old post-it note waiting for us to look up: “I know everything seems urgent and all, but hey, have you noticed how tiny you are down there? And how held, how safe? How you never float away off that planet of yours? Yeah, you’re covered. It’s all good.”
It doesn’t expect us to be anything other than who we are.
It just stretches over us while we run around in circles on this ball of earth. We don’t have to hold it up. It doesn’t need us to do much of anything.
Sky keeps being sky, the sun keeps shining, and the earth keeps turning, even if we do nothing but stand in the dirt and stare.
Our thoughts and plans and worries and to-do’s are so close to our noses that we can barely see past them — but held up next to the entire universe, all our busy details fall back to their rightful place.
Take a look up today. Be reminded. And rest.
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