A Matter of Scale

To exist is to participate in an endless cycle
of neither creation nor destruction,
but redistribution.
—Zuyva Sevilla

I form light and create darkness.
I make weal and create woe.
I the Lord do all these things.
—Isaiah 45:7

In the late 1970s, videographers Charles and Ray Eames filmed a short, 9-minute  documentary exploring what it might be like to experience reality at a variety of different scales, from the subatomic to the cosmological.  This now iconic (and apparently trademarked) video, the Powers of Ten™, would become the gold standard in many a science classroom for teaching about the concept of magnitude, and for the tiny fraction of my readers who were never exposed to it during their school years or whose memories recall it only vaguely, I recommend a brief pause here to take a short cognitive detour to watch it before continuing.

Because “scale” very much informs this posting’s essay.

It started with the article I mentioned last time about black holes and the accelerating rogue stars shooting across interstellar space at 400 times the speed of a bullet.  Reading that, I couldn’t help but wonder at the enormous dimensions of time and distance this research was hinting at, and I also couldn’t help but think about how absolutely amazing it was that we have the time and resources to know such things and how absolutely utterly irrelevant this knowledge was, is, or ever shall be to the survival of any human that has, does, or will live. 

Unless, of course, we’ve not been looking at quite the right quadrant in the night sky with our telescopes.  Then, one of these hypersonic suns may very well plow into our solar system unbeknownst to us, instantly reducing every quark of matter from Mars to the Kuiper Belt into pure plasma.

But that’s sort of the whole point: everything we experience involves a degree of scale, and the character of that scale can change in less than the wink of an eye.  Take the kind of privilege I wrote about in Unbidden Thoughts:  while differences in economic status may impact how likely one is to engage in proactive civic action (i.e. I have the wealth to fight against Trump), widen the gap of that status enough and suddenly you have the storming of the Bastille—or in our case, potentially, the new, unfinished White House ballroom.  Or—using my other example of privilege from that essay—increase the degree of illiteracy enough in this country and all the AI in the world can’t prevent the consequent financial collapse (go read economist Paul Krugman’s substack if you want the terrifying details).

The bottom line is that matters of scale are all around us, and it behooves us (I know; a very “me” verb) to identify them, pay attention to them, and—ultimately—choose how they will guide our actions.  For example, at the scale of the Big Bang, the very process of evolution that led to an organism capable of understanding its own origin as a species is irrelevant and empty of all meaning:  our mere 80-year organized structure of atoms does not last long enough in a 15-billion-year sequence to count as even a fleeting moment. 

Heck, simply from the perspective of the Voyager probe’s famous “pale blue dot,” astronomer, Carl Sagan reminds us:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

However, simply because we are an organism who can possess such a breadth of awareness does not mean that we can actually live at such scales.  At the very least, basic biological needs prohibit it—you have to eat, you have to sleep, and you have to excrete; all very immediate requirements of one’s attention.  Yet, precisely because we can possess a sense of scale well beyond these things, humans have a bad habit of forgetting the dimensions at which we truly do operate, insisting on striving for what is ultimately unattainable and making ourselves miserable in the process: like anyone, I can have a modestly meaningful life, but nothing I nor anyone else ever does will last at the scale our minds are capable of envisioning.

Acceptance, though, of this fundamental truth about our finite nature needn’t result in the anguished cry of Shelley’s Ozymandias—something my adolescent charges regularly and consistently forget as they persist in their belief that every test, every grade, every performance must somehow have life-altering consequence.  I can inform them all I want that when they are my age, they will not remember this academic moment at all, and that the brain science is clear that real learning only follows equally authentic failure.  But they possess neither the fully wired pre-frontal cortex nor the sheer quantity of dunder-headed adult moments to truly comprehend—let alone embrace!—what I am saying to them.  EVERYTHING means EVERYTHING to a teenager, and at best, I can hope that some of my offered adult outlook gets remembered at some future “Ah ha! THAT’s what he was talking about!” moment.

Yet this adolescent preoccupation with the “drama of it all” is, itself, a matter of scale.  And a very age appropriate one, too.  In fact, while I recall being as theatrical in my magnification of the state-of-affairs as the next teenager, the only two actual formal assessments (i.e. tests) I remember from my high school years are the Anatomy final at the end of my Junior year and the AP English exam at the end of my Senior one.  What’s more, the reason I remember these specifically has nothing to do with the weight of their impact on my life but because both situations involved highly intense emotions. In the case of the Anatomy exam, my best friend at the time had convinced me to see the midnight opening of The Empire Stikes Back, where we picked up a couple of the girls standing in line, and so I didn’t start studying for a 7:30 a.m. exam until 3:30 that morning. Meanwhile, at the conclusion of the AP English exam, one of my fellow classmates marched over to me and snarled in a voice drowning in vitriol, “THAT had to be hard even for YOU!”

As for the material content of either test? Nada.

Thus, at age 62 and counting, I am left with a fun, playful memory from my youth along with a somewhat painful, searing one—both of which simply reside with all the other electronic files buzzing around my synapse from a lifetime of emotionally intense experiences.  Again, a matter of scale: is the “I” my brain creates each moment simply the sum-total of my memories? Or are my memories simply a subset of what my brain uses to create “me?” Am I my fate or is my fate my doing? Or is it, perhaps, a little of both-and?

I ponder these things right now because in addition to reading about black holes and literal shooting stars I have also been reading some more Oliver Burkeman (whose work is dedicated to encouraging people to live at realistic scales and who has to have a playfully mischievous sense of irony that it will only take 4 weeks). And I have been doing all this reading while simultaneously living with the anxieties of the college admission’s process manifesting in most of my classes, a government shut-down (thankfully over for a while) that is leaving my neighbors threatened with starvation and no health care, and ICE agents terrorizing whole populations throughout the United States.  Add in the most stunningly beautiful fall foliage seen here in the mid-Atlantic in my memory, one of the best set-building crews my former colleague and I have ever had for the fall Musical, and my gratitude for meaningful employment, a secure domicile, and financial security and…OMGg! So many different magnitudes of scale for the brain to cope with that I can practically feel the cortisol and dopamine sloshing around inside my skull in mutual antagonism!

But again, that’s the point.  We all live at different scales all the time, and while the knowledge of genocides in Darfur, the Congo, and Gaza leave me simply depressed because there is little, directly, that I can do about them, I can ease my seniors’ distress about the next chapter of their lives; I can donate to my local foodbanks and organizations that fight injustice; and I can steward my gifts and my talents to impact my immediate world constructively.  I can engage in hope.

Which leads me to one final thought related to exploring Burkeman’s efforts to do likewise.  It was interesting to read his 28 essays (one for each day in a month) because while some of them brought fresh insights into how to handle the finitude of being human, others evoked moments of “been there; done that; already know it.”  And that got me to thinking about one of the most important scales of all for the individual: aging.  It turns out— I continue to learn—that some of life’s most significant understandings just come with growing older, and the extra twelve years I have on Burkeman are just enough for me to have found some of his ideas bemusing—in the same way I look at my current students and have to shake my head sometimes with a smile on my face, thinking “You’ll get it…eventually” while simultaneously feeling blessed to have seen so many former of them into adulthood to know that they do.

It is, after all, just a matter of scale.

References

Burkeman, O. (2024) Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Plait, P. (Sept. 2025) The Black Hole Next Door.  Scientific American. Pp. 83-84.

Sagan, C. (1994) https://www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot.

Srikant, K. (Feb. 26, 2025) Fact Check: Is there a consensus that a majority of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck? Econofact.https://econofact.org/factbrief/is-there-a-consensus-that-a-majority-of-americans-are-living-paycheck-to-paycheck.