The Center of the Universe?

My daughter received a wonderful pop-up book about space for her 7th birthday recently. It has many fun fold-out maps and things that pop up when you open every page, all in bold, beautiful colors. It’s really well done and makes learning fun. It was the perfect gift for my daughter who often feels she’s the center of everyone’s universe and also happens to love space!
After my daughter was in bed last night, I sat down to rest from the day’s busy activities and picked up this new book to give it another look.

I never got past the first page. There, the enormity of space is put into perspective in 3D and it really got me thinking. The 2-page spread begins with a picture of Earth and where it fits into our solar system. Earth is actually quite small when you see how it compares with the other planets in our solar system. Remember this from second grade? Next, on the same page, the book illustrates where our solar system sits within our galaxy – the Milky Way.
Wow. Our solar system is only one of billions in our galaxy.

To give you a bit more perspective, the nearest star to the Sun is more than 25 trillion miles away – that’s 25,000,000,000,000. Our entire solar system appears as only a speck within the Milky Way. And our galaxy is one of about 30 galaxies in a family of galaxies called the “Local Group”. This entire group of galaxies takes up only a tiny corner of the overall universe.
Okay, are you beginning to have a brain meltdown? If so, I can understand why. This is all truly mind boggling. Although I had learned about the vastness of space many times before, somehow through this depiction in this children’s book, it struck me all over again. I was left with a feeling of overwhelming insignificance.

And then the questions: Why ARE we here? How did we come to be? Does this universe exist by chance, or by design? Either way, what does it mean for my life? Does my life hold any significance at all? And then I thought about all the things that just one person can achieve in this world during their “brief” lifetime. Many, many individual people just like you and I have done extraordinary things over the centuries. They’ve discovered places and developed theories; they’ve built amazing structures, traveled to the moon, developed new and better ways of doing things. Think of the advancements in health, science, technology, and mathematics. Individual people can do so many things with their lives which can have a significant impact on the lives of millions of people. So maybe we’re not so insignificant. Maybe we can choose to be significant.

I call this choice “living life on purpose”. To purposely affect the significance of your life, I propose that you must have a plan for your life. You must attempt to think beyond the tasks of everyday living and begin to see your life as a fixed amount of time during which you will do . . . WHAT? What will you do with your life? What mark will you leave on this world?
To achieve something greater than ourselves, we must have GOALS and a positive mindset that says “I can”.

We must plan for those goals by setting a course of action to achieve them. We must plan daily, weekly, monthly steps – the actions – that will lead us to achieving our goals.
In the end, we may have a lot to learn from a 7 year old. Imagine if we each believed we were Supremely Significant. What if we believed that each of our lives was critical to some universal web? What if we each believed the universe revolved around us? Would we intentionally plan to do more with our lives? Would you?

I have a coffee mug that says it this way, “What would you do if you knew you could not fail?”
Once you answer that question, go and do it. Make your life significant and plan to do something. By choosing to FOCUS on our goals, we can get there, one step at a time. “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” And your step could make all the difference for you, for your family and quite possibly, for mankind. So leap out with a positive mindset and the self-centeredness of a 7 year old, and “know” that you cannot fail.

The Universe is waiting for you.